ALGIERS: Algeria’s Islamists are making a modest political comeback after failing to win with the bullet what they once sought with the ballot.
With an armed insurrection long in decline, most Islamists these days want to work in the political mainstream, using peaceful means to build Islamic rule in the oil exporting nation. It is an approach that is winning them powerful friends.
“The Islamist movement tried to challenge the state head on and it failed miserably,” said Azzedine Layachi, an Algerian political scientist at St. John’s University in New York.
“But Islamist sentiment has not been defeated. On the contrary, Islamists are now part and parcel of the political and cultural scene. This is the new reality of Algeria.”
The more radical Islamists return to the spotlight this week because of the expiry expected on Monday of a six-month amnesty for the few hundred Islamist fighters still battling the army.
The measure, part of a package of moves to promote national reconciliation, gave guerrillas still at-large six months to surrender and win immunity from prosecution provided they did not commit massacres, rapes and bombings of public places.
The amnesty is being watched closely around the region because the stability of the country, a key gas supplier to Europe, is seen as crucial for the wider Mediterranean.
About 300 fighters have given themselves up since February, leaving perhaps 400 or 500 still at-large in pockets of isolated terrain east of Algiers and in parts of the desert south.
Most are expected to fight on, continuing a revolt launched in 1992 after the then military-backed authorities scrapped a parliamentary election that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was set to win.
The authorities had feared an Iranian-style revolution.
But it is not these isolated groups of die-hards who are making the running in the Islamist movement these days.
It is those who have explicitly given up confrontation with the government who are making inroads into the political and cultural mainstream of Africa’s second largest country.
One such is Madani Mezrag, who negotiated the surrender of his Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the FIS armed wing, in the late 1990s.
“We will do whatever possible through democratic means to set up an Islamic state here,” Mezrag said.
“The positive aspect of this war (of the 1990s) is that it allowed the Islamists to understand their limits ... and to talk to others even if they disagree with them.”
The FIS itself remains banned and a state of emergency declared in 1992 remains in place.
But the government says all former FIS leaders, most of them in exile in the West, are welcome to return home provided they do not seek to rebuild the party.
As yet, they have not accepted the invitation. But both the former FIS chiefs and like-minded Islamists at home have been intrigued by at least three government measures this year that look like olive branches to the broader Islamist movement.
The first was a decision to broadcast the call to prayer five times a day on national state radio and TV, a high-profile recognition by the authorities of Algeria’s Islamic identity.
The second was the decision to free 2,200 former Islamist fighters from jail terms as part of the reconciliation process.
Among them were former guerrillas who led armed groups responsible for numerous atrocities against civilians.
The third was the promotion of Abdelaziz Belkhadem, an Islamist-minded politician, to the post of prime minister.
Belkhadem is a staunch supporter of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a veteran nationalist politician who has spearheaded national reconciliation, and forged an alliance with a moderate Islamist political party, since he came to power in 1999.
Belkhadem is keen to use increasing oil wealth to address social ills like unemployment, populist policies strongly supported by the country’s two legal moderate Islamist parties, one of which is in the government coalition.
“We have observed a rallying of Islamists behind his (Bouteflika’s) agenda,” Layachi said, adding secular Algerians had in effect “been crushed” by perceived Islamist gains.
So high has morale been in Islamist ranks that the more radical have drawn criticism for arrogance. Many former fighters have refused to apologise for the violence, and at least one has hinted that bloodshed will not end until there is Islamic rule.
One criticism was issued by Bouteflika himself.—Reuters
