This blogger built a partial index of articles dealing with the Sahel crises in the prominent Algerian military journal El Djeich for the January-September 2012 editions.
Here is a follow up index 2012 El Djeich Stories on the Sahel – January – December 2012.
One for 2013 editions and analysis are soon to follow.
[NOTE: This is a guest post and translation by author and translator Suzanne Ruta, who has contributed translations to TMND in the past. The piece was written in the context of the Amina trial in Tunisia and discussion around women's dress in Algeria.]
Kamel Daoud, Algerian novelist and journalist, (Quotidien d’Oran, Algerie-Focus) wrote this rant the day eighteen year old Amina Sboui was found guilty in Tunisian court, of carrying pepper spray at a Salafist demonstration in the Tunisian holy city of Kairouan in late May. She was still in jail as of June 5th, when she appeared in court, in handcuffs and a full body covering, to answer charges of public indecency and desecration of public property. (She had written the word FEMEN on a cemetery wall.)
The whole flap began when Amina wrote in Arabic on her bare torso, and published the photo on facebook in March ” My body belongs to me. It is not the source of anyone’s honor.” Daoud backtracks that hopeful assertion. ”To whom does a woman’s body belong? To her country, her family, her husband, her older brother, her neighborhood, the boys on her street, her father, and the State, her ancestors, her national culture and its taboos.”
This is another of Daoud’s highly original riffs, where he jumps from close up social observation, to millennial grief you could call it, but somehow with a heartening result. It’s best understood against the background of fog, obfuscation and vast lies by omission that permeate Algerian TV (the lone state run channel) and political discourse. It continues his lament, over the last year, about creeping salafism in Algeria, as its spokesmen are emboldened by recent successes in Tunisia. In Blida, Daoud noted lately with some bitterness an imam proposes that young women adopt the hijab at the age of ten! Daoud has a big following in Algeria and in France for his witty passionate succinct commentary on current events.
Daoud has been writing a column several times a week in the Quotidien d’Oran, raina raikoum – meaning your opinion, my opinion, for the last ten years. He is also a prize winning novelist and short story writer. His facebook link is
https://www.facebook.com/kamel.daoud.7
If left unaddressed, the social, economic, and political grievances festering beneath the surface in Algeria could rapidly escalate into popular revolts that threaten the regime’s stability. The government must begin enacting managed political reform or face the possibility of collapse.
[. . .]
Several factors have allowed the Algerian regime to avoid an uprising, including a cash surplus from oil and gas resources that funds direct handouts to the population; the protesters’ failure to unite around common grievances; the security forces’ success in managing protests without greatly inflaming tempers; and searing memories of the country’s civil war that make most Algerians shy away from potentially violent situations.
Lahcen Achy, ‘The Price of Stability in Algeria,’ 25 April 2013.
post-Arab uprisings one has to wonder: is “managed reform” ever a possibility, and if so what is its aim? Managed reform was what was being advocated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and elsewhere before 2011. It invariably was carried out only superficially — but was nonetheless part of the rhetoric of these regimes. They were always on the road to reform, and often did implement some sort of changes, especially in economic policy, but never democratized. If anything, appearing to be engaged in a process of reform considerably increased the political risk for these regimes, creating a gap between the rhetoric of reform and the reality of autocratic rule. Autocratic regimes that never claimed to reform, like Saudi Arabia (indeed most monarchies) or Sudan, turned out to be safer.
The lesson for autocrats from the Arab Spring, indeed, may be “whatever you do, don’t reform.” Do not initiate a process that promises more than you can deliver. If, like me, you believe the central cause of the uprisings was not strictly political or economic, but moral — that the regimes had exhausted their capital of legitimacy and were proving unable to renew it — it’s not clear that Algeria has reached that point of collapse. The regime continues to have legitimacy, after all.
Isn’t the story elsewhere, at the heart of how power and legitimacy is constituted and understood in Algeria, and what will happen to the real power structures of Le Pouvoir once dominant personalities leave the scene?
Issandr El Amrani, ‘Stability in Algeria, or is reform even possible?’, 28 April 2013. Continue reading
This post provides a graphic overview of some of the internal bodies and features of the 2012-2017 Algerian National Assembly (Assemblée Populaire Nationale/al-Majlis al-Sha’abi al-Watani; APN) — the lower house of the Algerian parliament. The graphics included below include the members of the APN Bureau and Standing/Permanent Committees and Commissions in charts and graphs. The information here is taken from the APN website, which has a good amount of information about the delegates and their activities, but not enough. Information on membership of the APN ‘Friendship Committees’ for various countries is not yet available there as it is for past APN classes (see the Charts & Graphics page for the membership of the 2007-2012 friendship committees).
PDF.
SUMMARY: This post is several posts originally written in January and February merged together. These posts were put off from being posted for reasons of time, attention deficits, satisfaction. They were all originally experiments in ways of thinking about recent events to do with Algeria’s defensive posture (which has been the subject of some much writing lately). It is concerned with some of the public writing and analysis on Algerian foreign policy, especially with respect to Mali immediately before and during France’s intervention there. The main gist is related to Algeria’s strong attachment to national sovereignty in its foreign policy, its defensive (also called ‘paranoid’) posture overall, and the country’s self-image. It is not concerned with evaluating or making a case for how Algeria or other ought to do one or the other such thing in foreign affairs. It is however interested in considering adjusting some assumptions about Algerian foreign policy in general.
It also includes some thoughts on issues such as the assumptions and expectations seen in some public writing about Algeria’s military capabilities, its ‘success’ in fighting terrorism, the extent and scope of its ambition as a regional ‘hegemon’ mainly in the post-Qadhafi period, opacity in Algerian decision-making and its origins; it also includes some remarks related to the complications of Algeria’s ongoing generational transformation. It is not meant to be definitive or authoritative, just one grain of sand on a long beach. Continue reading
Since the beginning of France’s intervention in northern Mali (Operation SERVAL), users of the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum have posted continuous news updates on the situation in northern Mali. During much of 2012, forum users have seen Mali as an unqualified success for Salafi-jihadism in Africa, posting long essays and poems praising and theorising the potentials that an Islamist emirate in Azawad would offer their cause. Mali’s jihadist groups allayed suspicions over their legitimacy and authenticity by posting increasingly voluminous threads featuring videos, photographs and newsletters with news from the region showing the implementation of shari’ah in Timbuktu and Gao, and documenting the Islamist coalition’s battles against the MNLA and the Malian Army at various points. Previous analysis of jihadi posts on Mali on this blog focused on user produced content – poems, essays and so on. This post focused on the same in light of Operational SERVAL. Generally speaking, these user contributions focus on depicting France within the narrative of a ‘Crusader’ state seeking to oppress Muslims and stunt the practice of Islam in a Muslim country. the proliferation of posts by a number of different users points to a general expansion of interest since the onset of the French intervention; previously there was limited interest compared to Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia; threads discussing Mali have dominated the front three pages of the Ansar al-Mujahideen forum since last week. Some posts feature links to articles or essays or announcements from groups based in Mali (AQIM, Ansar Ed-Dine especially)[1] or jihadist clerics (for example, Abu Mundhir al-Shinqiti’s new essay on Mali – interestingly titled ‘The Battle for Shari’ah in Mali’[2]). These occasionally produce interesting discussions but are beyond the interest of this post. Continue reading
SUMMARY: Thus far Algerian press coverage of France’s military intervention in northern Mali (Operation SERVAL), in reaction to additional thrusts south by Mali’s jihadist coalition, is divided. Scepticism that has been prevalent in Algerian media coverage of calls for the internationalisation of the Malian crisis remains a strong thread in opinion and editorial writing nonetheless. While significant strands of elite opinion (especially at the political level) appear to have somewhat rallied to support military intervention in northern Mali. At the same time, the Algerian government’s longstanding position in favour of ‘dialogue’ and a ‘political solution’ to the crisis remain evident in press reports, government statements and scepticism over the prospects the intervention will successfully resolve Mali’s troubles persists. Comments from Algerian intellectuals (depicting the campaign as a ‘proxy war’ of the United States or as destined for failure) and highlights given to the opinions of certain French voices suggest some level of discomfort over France’s intentions and the Algerian government’s role in the crisis; this is to be expected to some extent given the background of distrust between Paris and Algiers over Mali as well as the nature of Franco-Algerian relations in general. Outside of the major dailies, some confusion does appear to exist over Algiers’s position in the ongoing struggle – a result of the government’s stinginess with public comments.
The Algerian government’s decision to allow over flight rights to the French Air Force, along with troop and helicopter movements in southern Algeria suggest Algiers will likely play an enabling role by opening airspace, attempting to block off escape routes, and intelligence sharing (the targets and locations hit by the French suggest Algeria and other countries may be assisting in this manner). The Algerians may also seek to assist in negotiating post-war planning, despite the [apparent] failure of its diplomatic efforts vis-à-vis Ansar Ed-Dine and Bamako; the timing of Malian Prime Minister Diango Cissoko’s two-day visit to Algiers speaks to Algiers’s continuing desire to impact political conditions in Mali. France’s aggressive (speaking descriptively, not legally) moves in Mali appear to have given momentum to international and regional efforts to push forward an intervention in Mali and may be bringing along Algeria at the same time. The messages coming out in certain (especially French-language) Algerian press accounts, via anonymous security officials, is that Algeria decided to abandon dialogue with Ansar Ed-Dine and others in northern Mali in favour of an immediate armed campaign when its leaders renounced non-aggression pacts they signed at Algiers’s egging and participated in attacks in Konna and elsewhere with AQIM. This post only reviews French-language media, Arabic-language media will be covered in a separate post. It looks at perspectives through the beginning of the week of 13 January. Continue reading
