Algeria unrest gives Arab govts new headache

By Nadim Ladki

AMMAN (Reuters): Years after the Islamist threat subsided, events in Algeria are once again haunting several Arab governments, diplomats and analysts said on Thursday.

But instead of the fundamentalist challenge of the past decade, the current concern is an explosion of demands for political and economic reforms in the North African country.

Despite muted official and press reaction to the spreading social unrest in Algeria, several Arab governments are worried that "the Algerian example" with a humane face could encourage local dissent for more freedom and rights, they said.

"Algeria gave a few Arab regimes a real fright in the early 1990s when Islamists took up arms," a retired Arab diplomat said. "The governments managed to contain the fallout of the insurgency in Algeria and squashed any chances of similar action at home."

But he said the recent violence was turning into a pro- democracy movement that would worry the governments.

"Neighbors can easily catch on to such movements which are much more difficult to demonise than fundamentalist Islam," the retired diplomat said.

The latest Algerian violence began in Berber-speaking Kabylie in April when dozens of protesters were killed by security forces. The protests soon spread with people from other ethnic backgrounds joining in.

At least 100,000 people have been killed since the military intervened in 1992 to scrap a general election which Islamists had been on the verge of winning.

Several subsequent attempts to give the system an elected civilian facade have failed to end violence or satisfy popular demands for democracy, jobs, homes and an end to institutionalized corruption.

Fears that the unrest could affect Algeria's neighbors were evident no more so than in Morocco and Tunisia.

"Algeria is not far from Morocco ... We should not ignore what's happening there because the crisis could expand and hit us," said Abdelkader Chaoui, a well-known Moroccan writer and political analyst.

Chaoui, also a human rights activist, said Moroccans had to closely watch the situation on their eastern border because Morocco was saddled with the same economic and social problems such as unemployment and slow economic reforms.

"The chronic crisis is Algeria is not different from our social and political crisis ... The events in Algeria will soon or later affect us," he added.

University professor Nadira Barqlil wrote in the daily al- Ahdath al-Maghribia that the current unrest in Algeria reflected different forms of protests "against poverty and power abuses" and urged Moroccan authorities to speed up economic and social reforms to avoid an "Algerian-style disaster".

Similar sentiments prevailed in Tunis, where diplomats said the 10-year-old Algerian civil strife had played into the hands of the Tunisian authorities.

Tunisian leaders often pointed to the killings in neighboring Algeria as a "counter-example" to justify in the eyes of their own people and critics abroad the continuing crackdown on opponents, including Islamists.

"The Algerian bloodshed served as a foil to their hard tactics with the opposition, including tortures and punishments of dissident relatives," one Western diplomat said.

"The image of a peaceful and stable Tunisia compared to violence-ridden Algeria helped shore up the Tunis regime in the past decade."

But now that the unrest in Algeria had become a broad-based opposition to the Algiers government, the authorities in Tunisia were worried about the "spillover of the Algerian example" into the country.

"Tunisian leaders are afraid of the 'contamination' as the foil of ruthless Islamists killing babies and women in Algerian villages is of no help to them to frighten away youth longing for more democracy, justice and a say in the country's politics," a Tunisian analyst said.

But Hussein Amin, former Egyptian ambassador to Algeria from 1987 to 1990, said it was unlikely that the unrest would spillover as the Arab world had become immune to domestic events in Algeria over the past decades.

"When I was there 12 years ago, there was so much fuss about regional elections and the Islamic party and I had more fears then than now of the effects on the region," he said.

"Why (has there been no spillover)? Algeria no longer has the prestige it once had."