Ending Algeria’s agony

JUST as the travails of the Turkish people and their heroic war of independence under Mustafa Kemal aroused the passions of the Muslims of South Asia, the Algerian struggle for freedom burnt into the consciousness of the generation that grew up in 1950s. In fact, all over the world, it became a searing image of suffering and sacrifice for peoples of diverse faiths and beliefs united by a shared passion for liberty.

Algeria’s status as a symbol of human yearning for dignity and justice added to the poignancy with which the people of Asia and Africa have watched the horrific carnage of the civil war that began in 1991 and that has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

The just-held referendum on a national charter of amnesty and reconciliation recalls President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s Civil Harmony Act approved by the Algerian people on September 16, 1999, and points to light at the end of the tunnel. Algeria’s history of the last decade and a half is a disturbing cautionary tale that must be studied in depth, especially by the Muslims of the world. The Bouteflika era began when violence had reached its peak and he may well be remembered as the man, an original freedom fighter, who painstakingly pulled his people away from the abyss.

The Arab socialist state ruled by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the party that wrested freedom from the colonial power, France, had run out of steam by 1988. Massive demonstrations against President Chadli Benjedid in October that year brought to surface Islamist political forces ready to challenge the political ideology of the one party state. Basically, they were the disenchanted children of the Algerian revolution. Benjedid tried to head off the emerging crisis by giving up the exclusive hold of state socialism and by introducing a pluralistic multi-party system.

Foremost amongst the new parties was Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) established on March 10, 1989 as a result of a voluntary merger of several Islamic groups. Meriem Verges wrote in Political Islam that the young activists of the FIS claimed descent from the deceived heroes of 1954 and that their religious identity was defined by a desire for social justice. The tragedy of Algeria is largely a story of failure to accommodate and co-opt Islamic resurgence democratically in the body politic.

Going down memory lane, I remember the Algerian leader explaining his programme of economic and democratic liberalization to the then prime minister of Pakistan in early 1990. Outside the official meetings, there was disconcerting evidence of the effect of a steep fall in the income from oil as prices had plummeted from $30 per barrel to $10 per barrel. Algiers looked tired and run down. One wondered how much pent-up frustration there was behind the facade of stability and if Benjedid would have enough time to defuse the crisis.

An old university friend took me to an associate of the two top leaders of FIS, the British educated Abbassi Madani and the radical home-grown orator, Ali Belhadj, who were destined to suffer in the crossfire between religious extremists and hard-line army officers. When I referred to his president’s optimism, the Algerian intellectual did not repudiate it outright. However, he stretched his arm towards the Bay of Algiers, now bathed in a soft Mediterranean light, and commented wistfully that those across the waters would not allow the president to ‘harvest the crop of his belated reforms’.

The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) dominated the local elections of 1990 with 54 per cent of the votes. On December 26, 1991, it won 188 of the 232 parliamentary seats in the first round and was poised to repeat this success in the second round. There were alarm bells all over the western world and I heard them loud and clear in Paris.

Pressed by one of France’s top diplomats for a candid personal analysis, I argued that aborting the electoral process would lead to extremist Islamists supplanting the FIS leadership and thus to an uncontrollable confrontation. In the heart of heart, I knew that there would not be a second round. The fear that upon its victory, the FIS would simply seize power and abolish democracy (“one man, one vote, one time”) had already become a dogmatic determinant of western policy.

The Algerian army embraced this hypothesis and annulled the elections on January 11, 1992. President Benjedid was forced to step down and up to 30,000 members of the Islamic Front were arrested. The Front (FIS) was dissolved on March 4 creating a political vacuum that would be rapidly filled by militants, including veterans of the Afghan jihad (“Afghanis”). The bombing of Algiers airport on August 26 foreshadowed the shape of things to come. The military established a high council of state under the respected freedom fighter Mohammed Boudiaf. He returned to Algeria on January 16 to take up this office and was assassinated on June 29. On July 12, the moderates Abbasi Madani and Ali Belhadj were imprisoned for 12 years.

Once the moderate constitutionalist leadership was arrested, the Islamic backlash came under the sway of militants. A group named Tafkir wal Hijra drew upon “Afghanis” to launch an armed guerrilla struggle. Initially, the banned FIS resorted to western style strikes but Said Mekhloufi, who had fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan and was sceptical of Abbassi Madani’s electoral politics, launched the Movement for an Islamic State (MEI). Abdelkader Chebouti, a retired army officer, created the Islamic Armed Movement (MIA). Guerrilla movements are notoriously prone to fission and fragmentation.

Real terror began to stalk the land when Abdelhak Layada broke away from MIA and established the Groupe Islamique Armee (GIA) that broadened the targets from security services to include civilians supporting the state. The death toll mounted as different guerrilla forces fought the state and one another.

In 1994, the collective presidency was abolished and Lamine Zaroual became the president amidst signals that he would negotiate with the imprisoned leaders of FIS, Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj. But by now, the army itself was polarized between the dialoguiste (those favouring talks) and the eradicateur (eradicators). In Mathew Arnold’s memorable line, on the darkling plain, “where ignorant armies clashed by night”, it became difficult to tell who was committing greater atrocities, GIA extremists or the security forces. During 1996-98, the massacres became more frequent and brutal than ever before. Violence was no longer a mere urban phenomenon; entire villages were exterminated.

The Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), formed through the merger of aforementioned the MIA, the MEI and other splinter groups found itself fighting state security forces and an increasingly ruthless GIA. It tried to get out of the fray by announcing a ceasefire in October 1997. Every change of command in the GIA, however, made it more indiscriminate. A section of the GIA dissociated itself from the outrages against the civilians and set up the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), with a base in the mountains. It is probably the main militant group still outside the peace-making initiatives of the current president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Algeria held elections of a kind more than once but without much impact on the fratricidal conflict. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s victory on April 15, 1999, however, made a difference. The amnesty offered by him led to negotiations with the AIS which disbanded itself in January 2000 upon their successful conclusion. Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj were finally released in July 2003. The GIA’s sword was gradually blunted as its leaders got killed in a series of battles and many of the cadre left because of its atrocities against innocent civilians.

The just-held referendum, with a large turnout and a claimed 97 per cent affirmative vote, reflects a yearning for peace after a blood-soaked past. It will help Bouteflika win a third term and empower him to pursue amnesty and financial compensation for the victims of violence. He probably believes that it is neither possible nor desirable to pinpoint guilt in the Islamist guerrillas and the armed forces. How this policy to forget and forgive, occasionally criticized as reconciliation without justice, takes roots in the political culture is yet to be seen.

Equally important is the question if the establishment — “le pouvoir” — owns up to the catastrophic mistake of denying by force the right of Islamic parties to come to power through a free and unfettered election. Without this option, the present talk of democratizing the Arab world lacks substance and credibility.

If President Bouteflika can set his country on a genuine course of pluralistic politics in his third term, he would render a great service to the Arab-Islamic world. Turkey has been able to do it after a period of tension between its secular army and the followers of Erbakan. The extremists have not vanished altogether but are contained by the active participation of Islamic parties in elections that the military has learnt to respect.

The Algerian war of independence brought hope to the wretched of the earth in three continents. Its civil war needs to be studied and reflected upon everywhere and more so in the Islamic world. History has yet to reveal a better way than democracy to mediate differences and tensions that hover over human societies. Democracy thrives on inclusive politics; it cannot deliver if large segments of people are excluded on one pretext or the other. “An imperfect democracy”, writes Robert Dahl, “is a misfortune for its people, but an imperfect authoritarian regime is an abomination.”

All too often, Muslim states have paid a heavy price for the imperfections of regimes that were not elected by their people and did not rule by their consent. It is time to build our indigenous democratic institutions and not wait for the legions of the American empire to do so. On any given day, Malaysia is a better model than Iraq.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

How Katrina revealed racism

HURRICANE Katrina was a disaster of colossal proportions in more ways than one. It was primarily a disaster for the people of New Orleans causing massive devastation of life and property as it blew away roofs of houses and demolished the levees that protected the city against floods.

But it was also a disaster for America’s image as it blew away the fig leaf that hid America’s shame and demolished its much-vaunted claims of “values”. It exposed the prevalence of rampant racism among the whites and widespread poverty among the blacks, many of whom live below the poverty level and, that one- third of the black population of New Orleans belonged to this category.

The UN Annual Human Development Report just released, for instance, makes the following observations: “(a) Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala; (b) throughout the US black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white children; (c) child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent and rising; and (d) parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World.”

Finally, it was a disaster for George Bush. His popularity has dipped to the lowest level during the four-and-a-half years of his presidency. Says one columnist, “An emperor-has-no-clothes moment seems upon us.” Just as Katrina exposed the lurking problems of race and poverty, it also revealed the limitations of Bush’s rigid, top-down approach to the presidency.” And in Washington Post: “Evacuation plans, never practical, were scrapped entirely for New Orleans’s poorest and least able.”

In fact, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, disaster was predicted as far back as 2001. Early that year the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned that a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be one of “the deadliest catastrophes facing America.” But federal spending on flood control in the area was reduced by almost half since 2001, from $69m per year to $36.5m. The US Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the levees, requested $27m this year for hurricane protection around the lake. President Bush tried to cut this to $3.9m, though Congress eventually allowed $5.7m. All this money was diverted to pursue his war in Iraq.

Could such studied neglect have happened had the Louisiana governor been a Republican, is the question many people are asking. In Florida, where his brother is governor, they recall George Bush rushing to oversee relief work immediately after a storm of far lesser magnitude. Here he visited four days later. The political polarization is indeed so sharp that the president exchanged few words with Louisiana Governor, Kathleen Blanco, during his visit to New Orleans, obviously because she is a Democrat.

Even when Bush did visit New Orleans he avoided the city’s streets where dead bodies lay decomposing and abandoned. He did not go into the heart of the devastated city where thousands of largely poor, black refugees lived.

The city of New Orleans lies below the sea level. It is protected by levees, which is another name for “embankments” or “dykes.” When the hurricane struck, the levees that had been crumbling for want of repair, gave in. Water gushed into the low- lying areas of the city and entered homes. As water level rose, people climbed to the roofs and attics, where they were trapped.

The mayor had ordered evacuation before the approaching storm. People, mostly whites, who had the money and means to escape the storm, did so, while those who did not have the resources or a place to go were abandoned to their fate. Tens of thousands vacated their homes on the mayor’s order and repaired to the Convention Centre. A larger number of people took shelter in the superdrome.

The storm had struck on Monday (August 29). But days passed without any relief effort. No buses came to evacuate them. Three days after the storm relief workers “dropped” some military rations and water from the bridge into the car park below. They did not deliver by hand. So a victim complained: “It was as if being poor and black was a contagious disease.”

But by then the city had plunged into anarchy. When supplies fell short and desperate people broke into stores and buildings in the locality foraging for food and water for their families and milk for their babies, they were denounced as looters. The city was littered with abandoned corpses everywhere: in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks, in wheelchairs, or just floating on water.

Hurricane Katrina had been foreseen fairly in advance. Yet, inexplicably, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) took no action after it hit. It even obstructed help. As Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, in south New Orleans, told the media, “When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, Fema officials turned them away. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel.” Nor did Fema make any use of the huge assault ship, the USS Bataan that had been deployed in the Gulf of Mexico when the hurricane struck. The ship had six operating rooms and 600 hospital beds, the Chicago Tribune reported. Yet Bush hailed Fema chief, Michael D. Brown, saying, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Stark racial divide was evident at all levels and at every turn such as, when buses first arrived, 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were evacuated first, while the poor blacks were pushed to the back of the evacuation line.

The president’s mother Barbara Bush visited the facilities set up for the evacuees at the Houston astrodrome, inside which numerous cots were crammed side-by-side, with lights always on and the wails of crying children filling the air. Yet, she remarked, “Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

Even white clergy displayed racism, Michael Marcavage, director of Christianist Repent America, saying, “An Act of God destroyed a wicked city.”

Blacks and some whites, too, are blaming the administration’s callous response to the catastrophe on racial bias. For example, the Reverend Calvin Butts, president of New York City’s Council of Churches, wrote in the Observer “If this hurricane had struck a white middle-class neighbourhood in the north-east or the south-west, his (Bush’s) response would have been a lot stronger.”

Jackie Crockett said in the Vacaville Reporter, “How swift would the initial aid have been if we had been seeing white faces, white babies, on the nightly news?” Similarly, Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the New York Times: “It’s not just a lack of preparedness. 1 think the easy answer is to say that these are poor people and black people and so the government doesn’t give a damn.”

An improvement on the past

IN most civilized countries, the issuance of a passport to a citizen is regarded as a fundamental right. In Pakistan, however, it was often treated as a privilege and as a weapon in the hands of the establishment bent on wreaking vengeance on its political opponents. This is borne out by the number of times a citizen seeking redress had to appeal to the courts for justice.

Irrespective of the circumstances, one often heard the usual allegations of corruption in the passport office which one came across in other departments of government. Stories like certain passport officials going out of their way to favour individuals with whom they shared an ethnic affinity; or displaying an infinite reluctance to pass on this concession to applicants who decided they didn’t want to process their papers through what came to be known as the ‘tout conduit’, in which the tout allegedly shared his ‘ex gratia’ payment with the network of officials.

Most of the allegations were, of course, untrue. But what really irked the citizen was the fact that it never occurred to anybody in government to ask the pertinent question: why was it necessary to have touts on the premises in the first place, if the specified procedures were straightforward and easy to follow?

In fact, getting a fresh passport or renewing an old one at the passport office, often used to be a harrowing experience, shared by both the illiterate and the educated man in a hurry. Located next to the Sindh High Court building, the gimcrack structure of Stygian shadows and perpetual gloom once served as a barracks during the Second World War. Hanging wires, broken window panes and rooms with files scattered on the floor dotted the landscape and there was a general air of confusion and bureaucratic indifference. There was no instruction board or official telling a citizen what he was supposed to do. Sharing information was left to the middleman.

In fact, an applicant had barely switched off the ignition in his car when the touts descended on him like a pack of carnivores on the Serengeti plain. Conjugating the rigours of their calling, their sales talk swagged and buttressed with value-added tricks, they gave the impression that by the time the applicant had finished his elevenses all documents would have been processed and the relevant receipt would be there for the asking. Actually the tout’s role was limited to standing in the queue at the bank where the fee had to be paid, after which the citizen was informed that he could not accompany him to the assistant director’s office as it was out of bounds. The applicant was then left to his own devices.

The old system had a lot of loopholes. Not only did it enable illegal residents to acquire Pakistan nationality; foreign and local intelligence agencies came to know that quite a few citizens of the Islamic republic had more than one Pakistani passport and that some astute and creative businessmen had as many as three. These certainly came in handy for those enterprising citizens who were trying to immigrate to those western countries that still had a liberal policy.

Obviously, something had to be done and quickly. That is how the current system which uses modern technology came into being. There are no forms except the blank bank receipt and nobody is required to get a character certificate from the local station house officer who was expected to receive a fee for the service he performed, or an endorsement from an oath commissioner whom the applicant didn’t know and was not likely to meet again.

Much of the credit for the streamlining and shortening of the time taken to carry out various procedures must go to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Not only did he decide to make effective use of computers and electronic transmission, he realized that the image of the passport office was also in desperate need of physical and institutional revamping.

It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise when this writer visited the two refurbished office blocks constructed on the old premises. A few touts were still hanging about, but their number has dwindled as their utility has been severely curtailed by the new procedures. And, surprising as it may seem, the two officials manning the information desks were quite helpful, especially to senior citizens.

Inside a large hall cooled by 10 split-level air conditioners and fans clerks sat huddled behind computers and went about their duties methodically and systematically. There was one counter for issuing tokens and registering finger prints, one counter for taking photographs and a number of counters where applicants were asked to check if the computer generated forms had correctly recorded details.

The procedure took about 45 minutes and ought to have ended there. But as applicants found to their dismay, one-window operations in Pakistan are still a thing of the future. The receipt could be issued by none other than the assistant director after a check had been made that everything was in order. The A.D. was a friendly and helpful man, who sat, beleaguered, inside a cubicle at the far end of the hall, bravely holding the fort. But he looked harassed and unhappy. He was hopelessly behind in the chain of formalities due to no fault of his.

The whole process shouldn’t have taken more than two hours. Unfortunately, it took over three and a half, because the other assistant director who should have been on duty decided to absent himself on that very day and it didn’t occur to anybody that the head of the department who sat a couple of hundred yards away should have been informed that the public was being put to great inconvenience. It is high time officials learned that activities that require a high degree of coordination should have back-ups which are available at a moment’s notice. There is no point in purchasing an expensive watch and sticking a faulty battery above the fly wheel.

The earliest Pakistani passports did not betray any globe-trotting ambitions. The passport which was issued to me on January 18, 1951, and which is still in my possession was valid for only six countries — the United Kingdom, Iraq, Egypt, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland. An endorsement for West Germany was subsequently obtained. The United States, the Soviet Union and China were conspicuous by their absence. In the passport issued on April 12, 1968 the ambit had been widened quite considerably and the endorsement list stretched to 93 countries and included China, and the eight satellites of the Soviet Union. Today the Pakistani passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel. The only problem is that the denizen of the land of the pure can’t obtain visas to visit even half the places mentioned in his travel document.

No one knows when the world’s first passport was issued, but some form of pass must have existed ever since people began to travel from one country to another. Passports as we know them today did not really exist before 1915. In the United Kingdom, the origin of the passport lies in the sovereign’s grant of safe conduct.

In fact, one of the first references to a UK passport is from the reign of King Henry V where, in an Act of 1414, there is a mention of ‘safe conducts’. By these, the king warned foreign people that they should allow his subjects to travel freely. In return, no subjects of the king should injure or rob a foreigner who carried a safe conduct. One wonders how many Pakistani ambassadors and consuls general who have served the flag abroad have faithfully followed these tenets. That would certainly form the subject of an interesting article.

Caught in the crossfire

LATE last month George Bush’s popularity ratings were starting to rise slightly after being blown badly off course by Hurricane Katrina. The improvement was due to a far smarter, quicker response to the happily much less deadly Rita.

All the while, the open-ended disaster that is Iraq has been rumbling away, with near-daily American casualties, mass killings of Iraqis, political stalemate and inconclusive offensives against insurgents. Then, uncomfortably closer to home, came the indictment of Tom DeLay, majority leader in the House of Representatives, on charges of money laundering to fund legislative races in Texas, permanent residence of the man currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

That was quickly followed by the president’s decision to appoint his friend and one-time personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to fill the vacant position on the bench of the US supreme court. The most damaging in his own terms has been the charge that he missed an opportunity to set the court back on a clear rightward path under its new chief justice, John Roberts, on issues like abortion and affirmative action. He was, he insisted hotly, still a conservative.

Mr Bush’s second and final term is turning out to be pretty bleak: the long-awaited reform of the social security system, once his top domestic priority, is simply not happening. There is growing resentment on the right at the massive spending programmes — the biggest since Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s - he has embarked on. He has pledged to “spend what it takes” (certain to be hundreds of billions of dollars) to rebuild the Gulf coast after Katrina and Rita.

— The Guardian, London