ALGIERS: To judge from the filmed throat cuttings and bombings on its website, Algeria’s main rebel group is surely the OPEC member’s most serious political risk.
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) reinforced the impression of menace on Sept 13 by announcing it had joined Al Qaeda, alarming Algeria’s European neighbours along the Mediterranean’s wealthier northern shores.
But Algerians who have lived through 14 years of conflict between the military and Islamist groups say that these days, social unrest and growing organised crime spurred by poverty is a greater menace than armed insurrection.
Providing jobs and improving housing, health and education are key to stabilising a society of 33 million people still traumatised from a decade of violence in the 1990s.
Although a worry, the GSPC is incapable of the major attacks favoured by Al Qaeda, analysts say, and its announcement of a link to Osama bin Laden may even be a sign of weakness.
A European security source said: “For the GSPC, the idea is that if you act under the Al Qaeda name you get more drawing power.”
One of Africa’s most brutal conflicts, the struggle between military and Islamist armed groups cost up to 200,000 lives.
The major challenge for the authorities now lies in the economic field, neglected during the violent 1990s.
“The country is emerging out of an incredibly brutal civil conflict in which the government was mainly looking at the security issue,” Meyers said. “Social issues have been secondary for well over a decade now.”
Officials say unemployment is 15.5 per cent, but independent analysts say the jobless number is much higher. Ecotechnics, a private consultancy firm, puts it at 24 per cent.
Algeria is still struggling to reform after decades of central planning but graft, red-tape and lack of transparency are obstacles to luring foreign investment and know-how.
The authorities are conscious that anger at an unresponsive government, lack of work and poor provision of basic services helped boost support for militant Islamist groups in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The appointment of Abdelaziz Belkhadem, a populist and moderate Islamist, as prime minister this year sent a signal that the government would focus more on social welfare and improving pay for civil servants than economic liberalisation.
But fundamental economic reform, to wean the state off its reliance on oil and gas exports and on imports of almost everything else, remains key to generating real jobs.
“Exporter of wealth and importer of poverty: That is the sad state of the economy,” said former Prime Minister Ahmed Benbitour. “If nothing is done to invest in the productive sector, a social explosion is likely to happen.”—Reuters
