Algerian vote may not stop violence

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The war in Algeria is now killing as many people a month as the struggle for independence from France that killed one million Algerians between 1956 and 1962. In fact it is now, in terms of casualties, the biggest war in the world. And the elections, held on Thursday, June 5, have absolutely no chance of ending the conflict.

"If there had been no Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)," said an Algerian politician from the non-Islamist opposition, "the regime would have had to invent one." But there was an FIS, and when it stood on the brink of winning the 1992 parliamentary election and ending 30 years of untrammeled power and boundless corruption by the ruling party, the regime used its alleged "Islamic extremism" as a pretext to cancel the election and ban the party.

That cynical act began the war between the army-backed government and the Islamist opposition that has now killed between 60,000 Algerians (Amnesty International's figure) and 100,00 (according to the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights).

Most of them died horribly. Car bombs and shootings are the mercy killings of the Algerian war. Entire villages have had their throats slit by the militants of the Armed Islamic Group. Regime henchmen routinely interrogate prisoners with blowtorches (generally to the face and the genitals). There have been chainsaw decapitations, and militants in one Algiers suburb have reportedly been driving around in a truck with a makeshift guillotine with which they behead people suspected of collaborating with the regime.

Despite all this, President (and former general) Liamine Zeroual won an election to legalize his presidency in 1995. Last November he won a referendum to ratify a new constitution that bans parties based on appeals to religion. And now he is holding elections for a new parliament in which at least some of the legal opposition parties will take part. What is going on here?

"We could vote forty times and it would change nothing," said former president Ahmed Ben Bella in April. "The army must withdraw (from power)." And he should know, for it was the army that long ago removed him from power. It has not changed its ways since.

The people who really rule Algeria are the heirs of what used to be called the "Army of the Frontiers". The guerrillas of the National Liberation Front bore the burden of the independence war and drove the French out. The "Army of the Frontiers", trained and armed by other Arab countries, waited across the frontiers in Tunisia and Morocco until 1962, scarcely firing a shot -- and then it marched in and seized power from the real heroes of the war.

Thirty-five years later its heirs still rule Algeria, and they are still robbing it blind. "They are a true mafia, secretive and perfidious -- a veritable laboratory of conspiracies," said Hocine Ait Ahmed, one of the 'historic nine' who launched the liberation war against the French. "There is nothing they will not do to hold onto power."

But the mafia is an inadequate analogy for what Algerians generally just call "le pouvoir" (the power). Divided into clans that often hate each other, the regime is riven with rivalries that often end in assassination. But in its ability to rise above these rivalries when its collective privileges are at risk, it more closely resembles the Chinese Communist Party.

It particularly resembles the Chinese Communist Party in the the level of its corruption. A former prime minister revealed a few years ago that the commissions pocketed by regime members equaled the entire Algerian national debt (which is so big that it now consumes all of the country's oil revenues).

The apparent division between "reformers" and "conservatives" in the National Liberation Front is also reminiscent of the splits in the CCP. Those who call for economic liberalization do so because, having made their pile, they now need a private sector to invest it in. Those who defend 'socialism' are mainly those who haven't yet stolen enough from the public sector. And none of them will let power pass into the hands of those who might question the origins of their wealth.

To that extent, "le pouvoir" remains united, but the rivalries between its clans and factions are often fatal. For example, Mohammed Boudiaf, another of the "historic nine", agreed to come back from exile and assume the presidency after the cancellation of the 1992 elections. The deal was that he would lend the regime some legitimacy, and they would let him carry out some reforms. But as soon as he started denouncing corruption and gaining popularity he was assassinated, almost certainly by minions of the regime.

Just last March the powerful trade union leader Abdelhaq Benhamouda, who had agreed to lead a new party designed as a vehicle for President Zeroual, was murdered, presumably by rival clans determined to prevent Zeroual from gaining too much power. The regime, as usual, blamed the Islamic terrorists, but Benhamouda's dying words were "they betrayed us, my brother".

The same doubts surround many of the crimes allegedly committed by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). While the GIA does murder "un-Islamic" Algerians like independent journalists and unveiled women, and certainly commits the occasional chainsaw massacre, the sheer scale and viciousness of the killing suggest to most Algerians that the regime is doing much of it itself to discredit the Islamist cause, or at least has infiltrated the GIA and is inciting its members to ever more monstrous atrocities.

In a normal country, you would dismiss such suspicions as paranoid fantasies. In Algeria, they are almost certainly correct: the regime needs bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists to justify its corrupt and dictatorial rule to its own population (not that they are convinced), and even more to its Western supporters.

Can this election change any of that? Of course not. For one thing, the upper house in the new parliament consists entirely of people appointed by members of the regime.

Then how will the violence ever end? In the short run, it won't. And it is entirely imaginable that it will still be going on five years from now.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 35 countries.