Guest Translation: ‘Suicide may often be a crime of the group against the individual.’

Readers are likely familiar with the self-immolations among Algerians (and others in the region) this year. The following is a translation of Algerian journalist and author Kamel Daoud’s 9 October, 2011 column. Translator and TMND reader Suzanne Ruta provides the introduction and translation from French below.

- Kal

Kamel Daoud is an award winning Algerian author and journalist. He writes a popular column in the daily Le Quotidien d’Oran raina raikoum (my opinion, your opinion). His retelling of  Camus’ The Stranger from the point of view of the surviving brother of the unnamed Arab shot at midday on an Oran beach, will be published next year in France and Algeria, under the title Le Contre-Meursault.

In early October, in Oran, a thirty year old single mother of two set herself on fire when she faced eviction from her apartment. The policeman who tried to save her and the woman herself died of injuries sustained. Her three year old son was badly burned.  The same week, also in Oran, a  nineteen year old set himself on fire in the courtyard of the lycee where he was denied the right to enroll for makeup classes.

There have been dozens of suicides and attempted suicides by fire in Algeria in the last year. In Tunisia, one man’s desperate act sparked a revolution. In Algeria the situation is decidedly different, for reasons Daoud analyzes in his daily column with tragic clarity, concluding, ‘Suicide may often be a crime of the group against the individual.’

Qadhafi: Not Funny?

Your blogger is usually irritated by efforts to make humor out of Mu’amar al-Qadhafi’s clothes or speeches or whatever other superficialities he used to play the fool with foreigners (some of the ‘Zenga Zenga‘ videos were amusing in a brainless way). Such things are usually more vulgar than amusing, more profane than insightful. Saturday Night Live‘s effort at lampooninging his General Assembly speech, for instance, played into the distraction and offered virtually no satire or humor at all. An even more recent one, where Qadhafi appears on SNL’s fake news program and satirizes the rationale for the American intervention in Libya, manages to get lose its satire in a series 80s jokes and references to Qadhafi’s wardrobe (the jokes about the American domestic debate over the no-fly-zone and Hillary Clinton are so full of pained effort the viewer laughs in pity). These are objections both to the messaging (or absence of messaging) in a great deal of North American humor (supposedly) at Qadhafi’s expense and to its quality as political humor.

Political satire, like much art, is a kind of propaganda. It is best if its authors can recognize that much. When they attempt to do otherwise it damages their craft and the audience’s experience. But many of these attempts, especially SNL’s, are not merely poor pieces of political satire in their constitution; they are also unfunny and not clever as television comedy on their own, which is not a controversial thing to say about Saturday Night Live. ’The Official Visit,’ an episode of Yes, Minister (ancient, sure), offers a fictionalized satire of western politicians hungry for African business and domestic plaudits bringing wrangling with an ideologically objectionable (though in the end pragmatic) dictator in a way that somewhat closely resembles the rehabilitation of Qadhafi. Characteristic of the series, ‘The Official Visit’ is direct in its invective and offers many laughs (some of them ethnocentric for sure) without losing sight of its political message. Too much contemporary late night political humor is aimless (or tries too hard to say a lot while communicating nothing) and pointless. In any case, unlike recent Qadhafi-humor, the clip above manages to be somewhat funny.

Thoughts on a Whig Approach to Qadhafi’s Death

Well meaning human rights groups and writers watched the humiliation of Mu’amar al-Qadhafi with horror. He faced no charges, stood at no trial and was dumped in a shipping container with a bullet in his head. Pity he could not have faced a trial before the Libyan people or some international authority rather than being ripped up and executed in the street. Your blogger feels this was fitting enough: Qadhafi allowed his own enemies nothing much better. It is reasonable to worry that this might set a precedent for more such revenge killings for his supporters, that this might inspire (or validate) a tendency toward arbitrary mob ‘justice’ in the new Libya. It also the case that in the course of the war there was much of this sort of revenge killing on the fly. Those and the ones which may happen now and in the future are quite significant. Qadhafi’s death itself is emotionally satisfying but politically somewhat beside the point. The ‘tide’ had turned in Libya no later than the capture of Tripoli; building institutions (which it is now commonplace to say Qadhafi left none) and monopolising the use of force is paramount now. As Paul Pillar notes, Qadhafi was not Napoleon and his elimination does not alter things for the new authorities in Libya any more than the capture of Saddam Hussein did for Americans in Iraq.

A Rant in Exasperation

On 20 October Tyler Roylance took issue with a piece by Ross Douthat on the effects of ‘democracy’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ on Copts in Egypt in the wake of the Maspero events. Roylance’s rebuttal is worth reading as it tackles Mr. Douthat’s contradictions and errors very clearly. As readers may know, this blogger has taken issue with Mr. Douthat’s writing about Islam and Muslims and the Middle East before — especially his indulgence and promotion of Eurabian conspiracy theories. This blogger would like to write a diatribe against Mr. Douthat; and he intends to at some point in the near future, though this will likely prove a waste of time. This post is a rant on his column from last week, which demonstrates his inability to comprehend problems facing minorities in any nuanced or clear way, or his tendency to force-fit complex issues into a sectarian and partisan narrative built on a questionable understanding of the facts involved.

Names and Strange Descriptions

[In reading this post the reader will find that it has no exact 'point' per se.]

Mu’amar al-Qadhafi called his fourth son Hannibal after the Carthaginian commander Hannibal Barca who shocked Rome by marching with his men and war elephants across the Pyrenees and the Alps in the Second Punic War. Hannibal’s father Hamilcar commanded Carthaginian forces in the First Punic War and Hannibal grew up under the shadow of the harsh treaty Carthage was forced to sign after being defeated by Rome in that conflict; Hamilcar had a nasty reputation, perhaps exaggerated by Roman historians, for brutality against his enemies, Polybius called his war against the mercenary uprising in 240 BCE a ‘truceless war’ without comparison in terms of brutality and ruthlessness (the mercenaries, he wrote, castrated 700 Carthaginian prisoners, breaking their legs and chopping off their hands before dumping them in a mass grave; the Carthaginians tortured their Libyan prisoners to death). But his performance in the First Punic War and the Mercenary War, despite their complications (losing the first war and losing control of Sardinia to Rome without a fight in the second) won him and his line prestige in Carthage. He groomed Hannibal as his successor and passed to his son a burning hatred for the Roman enemy. Hannibal prepared his whole life for an epic confrontation with Rome. Hannibal was of course defeated by Scipio Africanus in battle at Zamma in 202 BCE. Hannibal remains a fixture in military and world history partly because the (three) wars fight between Rome and Carthage, and their political fallout, were so important in Roman identity and history that they wrote extensively on them we have many narratives about Hannibal as a menace in the face and psyche of a European imperial power (little is left of the Carthaginian side of the story) and (perhaps more so) because they cemented Rome’s mastery of the Mediterranean.

One might assume that Mu’amar al-Qadhafi might name one of his sons after a character out of Carthage, given his anti-colonial mindset and obsession with defiant figures in North African military history, like the ‘Umar al-Mukhtar who led the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial occupation till his capture in 1932. Having named one of his sons Hannibal one wonders how closely Qadhafi identifies with Hamilcar; one considers this especially given his past treatment of Berbers and other non-Arabs in Libya (whom he treated with utterly aggressive contempt; note also that Hannibal and Hamilcar were Punics, from what is now Tunisia who conquered and ruled Libya from the outside). Certainly Mu’amar al-Qadhafi saw himself as an African Arab although one can easily see him admiring Hannibal’s siege of Rome, the ancient ancestor of Libya’s old brutal colonial occupiers in Italy. Looking at it this way an observer might find a theme of wrath and revenge in his sons’ names (one of them is called Seif al-Arab and another Seif al-Islam; the other sons’ names lend less support this assertion) and that this may reveal something to the layered complexes (they used to say he suffered from a hubris-nemesis complex) that help make up the psyche of a man like Qadhafi. A tragic figure like Hannibal fits well into an antagonistic nationalist myth, especially ones held by paranoid, ambitious and shameless men. Carthage had far greater geopolitical significance in its time than Qadhafi’s Jamahiriyyah ever did; Qadhafi’s death and the fall of his experimental regime is the end of a cruel invective against the human spirit running in a stream of consciousness over forty two years. 

Mu’amar al-Qadhafi: Dead.

The ‘Brother Leader’ is dead. Let us not say ‘Long live the Brother Leader.’

At The Economist (the greatest magazine there is):

He ruled unsparingly. In his Libya, dissent was punishable by death. A private press was forbidden, and political parties banned. Several dozen deaths a year of political opponents were attributed to his secret police, acting on tip-offs from the surveillance committees to which around 10% of Libyans belonged. In Abu Salim prison, on one night in 1996, 1,200 political prisoners died. If his enemies fled abroad, his hired assassins found these “scum” and killed them. The colonel’s writ, as recorded in his “Green Book” of rambling political philosophy, replaced the rule of law.

[. . .]

Around this figure the West, for four decades, prevaricated. The young colonel’s “Third Mystery of Socialism”, a middle way between capitalism and communism which, in his words, solved all the contradictions of either system, seemed unthreatening enough. His people’s communes were blatantly powerless, his own “brotherly” power absolute, but then absolutism was common enough in oil-producing states. He was not a Marxist, at least: Egypt’s nationalist hero, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was his model, rather than Lenin. And he had oil.

Eventually tolerance snapped. In the 1980s, as Colonel Qaddafi shopped round the Far East for nuclear bombs, sponsored terror groups, invaded Chad in the cause of a “Greater Libya” and sent agents to blow up a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland, he became a pariah: Ronald Reagan’s “mad dog”, to be bombed until he whimpered. But by the new century he was ingratiating himself. He said the right things about al-Qaeda; offered his nuclear programme for inspection, and in 2003 abandoned it; paid compensation for Lockerbie; and, apparently chastened by his own military incompetence, seemed to have forgotten his windy pan-Arab and pan-Islamist dreams. In a world suddenly teeming with dangerous Islamists, he was now far from the worst. At the G8 in 2009 he shook hands with Barack Obama. The same year he was allowed to speak for more than an hour at the UN, repaying its tolerance by tearing from the UN Charter the pages that talked about democracy.

[. . .]

Almost to the last, too, he tried to pose as one of his people. When protesters first erupted on the streets of Tripoli this year, he offered to protest along with them. Surely, after years of venomous pabulum from his “Green Book”, they would have learned to think as he did. But they were beginning to dare to think differently—about Libya, and about him.

‘Libya is in Africa’

After Michele Bachmann implied Libya was on some continent other than Africa during the Republican primary debate tonight, ‘Libya is in Africa’ has been trending on Twitter. Congresswoman Bachmann probably knows that Libya is in Africa; or at least one hopes she does. The live audience seemed not to notice the comment and as a marginal candidate one can doubt the general relevance of a comment such as this. Congresswoman Bachmann is a legislator with many defects (she also polls badly and can thus get away with saying Iraq should pay reparations to the United States for its ‘liberation’; how someone like her sits on the House Select Committee on Intelligence is beyond your blogger). But Americans are not famous for their geographic intelligence; this blogger would not be surprised if a sizable number of Americans are unsure of which continent Libya sits on. Samia Ben Charqui dug up a screen capture of a CNN broadcast where Tripoli, Lebanon and a map of the Middle East stood in for Tripoli, Libya and a map of North Africa. Congresswoman Bachmann is not the only elite American who cannot place Libya.

Link: ‘A Guide to the Tunisian Elections’

POMED has an excellent primer on the upcoming Tunisian election by Daphne McCurdy with a guide to key players that will update readers on developments over the summer and early fall, especially as related to the left and far left parties mentioned on this blog. View A Guide to the Tunisian Elections here (PDF).

‘Ominous’ Anxiety – Tunisia

Westerners and Tunisians alike are all fired up over who might come out well in the country’s 23 October election.

The Washington Post has an article on the anxiety of the PDP and other secular parties over the ban on campaign ads in Tunisia and how the ban has hindered their ability to reach beyond their core urban and semi-elite demographic, and how they have tried to cope. The big fear is that an-Nahdah, Tunisia’s dominant Islamist party, having launched an able grassroots campaign and has used religious institutions and infrastructure to spread its message, will be the main (if not only) beneficiary the ban. In short, the can be read as an anticipation of a strong showing by an-Nahdah (as most of observers have for some time) and the ongoing relative weakness of ‘secular’ parties of the center left, left all the way through to the right wing. Around half of Tunisians remain ‘undecided’ as to how they plan to vote in the country’s upcoming election for a constituent assembly. The article suggests the ban on campaign ads might have something to do with this and it probably does. It is a good illustration of the mutual suspicion between the parties in the new Tunisia and likely to bigger systemic challenges the country is facing in reorganizing itself.

[Against] Essentializing North Africa

This blogger is sympathetic to efforts to preserve and promote Berber languages and empower marginalized Berber-speaking people. He is against all forms of essentialising and careless generalization about Berber ethnicities, languages and other North African cultures and peoples. There have long been efforts by writers with various agendas to promote essentialist narratives about North African identity using Arab or Islamic or Berber identity, usually by simplifying them and ripping appart their contexts and nuances. It is recently fashionable to write about Berber (Amazigh) identity in this way and one sees among Berber political activists, foreign writers and politicians.

A functioning Libyan state will not, of course, be easy to build but Tunisia deserves all the help it can get from the west. One success story would act as a catalyst for the region as a whole. If the broader regional initiative is to have any hope of success, north Africa will have to acknowledge its common Berber heritage. The Berber language is the anthropological bedrock of Maghrebi identity: Arab nationalism has failed, as has the radical Islamic project in Algeria. Algerian leaders behave as if their country was still training PLO commandos as it did in the 1960s: they need to be urged and nudged to hand over to a younger generation, the sooner the better.

“Dreaming of a united north Africa,” Francis Ghiles, FT, 13 September, 2011.

This is quite simplistic and frustrating. All three of the dominant strands of identity politics in North Africa — Arabism, Islamism, Berberism — tend to have that quality. Virtually all the North African states do recognize Berber or Amazigh culture and language in some official capacity, and in Algeria and Morocco, the two countries where Berbers are a large minority (and the ones really holding up economic integration in the Maghreb), this is done constitutionally (and in so far as it is done institutionally it is done with as little competence as most other things). One can expect the new Libya to do the same. This issue has been discussed on this blog before. Any effort to marginalize or delegitimize Arab identity in North Africa will be fruitless despite the opinions of intellectuals and identity politicians. Most Algerians do not regard Arab identity as a ‘failure’ and hold to it strongly, which is a large part of why many Algerian politicians attempt to appeal to Algerian identity using Arab nationalist tropes. Their sympathy and attachment to Arab causes is not imagined or put on by the regime. A substantial minority of Algerians have Berber heritage and speak Berber languages, which also explains why there are politicians who attempt to exploit Berber identity toward similar ends. Kabyle yearning for recognition and more responsive government is not dreamed up in Geneva. Morocco has a far larger Berber population with its own dynamics along with a very large part of the population of Arab heritage whose identity as such as just as valid and legitimate as that of anybody else; it is not ‘artificial’. Arab and Berber identities are equally valid and legitimate and should not be treated as if one must negate or dominate or be in conflict with the Other, or be placed into such narratives arbitrarily. There is no one single ‘bedrock’ to Maghrebi identity — though Qadhafi, Mhenni and others would like to pretend to have special claim to such a Truth. Maghreb unity hinges on resolving the domestic economic foundations of resistance to and disinterest in regionalization; namely the statist rentier tendency in Algeria and the nationalistic issues attached to the Western Sahara problem in Algeria and Morocco. There is no simple solution to division in the Maghreb but something the region does not need is more essentialist identity politics.

UPDATE: Some readers may take issue with this post. DZCalling, took this blogger to task on Twitter over this post shortly after it went up. It was an edifying exchange and readers should note the substantial range of opinions on identity and the role of identity politics in resolving internal political questions among North Africans.

Thoughts on Sameness

The Libyan intervention was considerably more controversial than media coverage often let on. The positions of countries aside from the United States and NATO countries were often caricatured or ignored from March through August. Opposition or skepticism of the NATO intervention was often interpreted as ‘support’ for the Qadhafi regime or a cynical attempt to avoid precedent-setting as it might relate to small states with ‘internal issues’ relative to big ones. It is often along these lines that the response of many medium-sized countries to the Libyan crisis (if not the Arab uprisings in general) has been a subject of curiosity for some commentators and observers in Europe and America. Much of this reflects the preconceptions and expectations of liberal writers as far as specific countries are concerned (here one can immediately point to patronizing and moralizing complaints about South Africa’s ‘dithering’ over Libya and the lack of a moral dimension to its foreign policy more generally; or, references to Algeria’s ‘revolutionary credentials’ when wondering about why it was so cool toward the rebel faction during the Libyan crisis). Other times it reflects ideological and political biases — efforts to tar or shame others for their behavior. One ought to step out of the picture and ask, as Imad Mansour does in MERIP:

Cowely on Hitchens

It’s always unwise to make predictions, as any horseracing tipster or macro-economic forecaster must know, but Hitchens was wrong about the Taliban, with whom the western allies are now being forced to negotiate from a position of weakness, and the whole Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures. His general knowledge of the Middle East is superficial, he speaks no Islamic languages and, unlike, say, the politician-writer Rory Stewart or the Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, he has made no serious, long-lasting attempt to immerse himself in the politics and cultures of this extraordinarily diverse and heterogeneous region, ravaged for so long by civil war and despotism, and destabilised by repeated foreign interventions.

In a long review of Koba the Dread, Hitchens writes that: “History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.” Too often, when discussing the 10 years of war since 9/11, and in his chosen role of defender of “secularism and democracy”, Hitchens seems to have exchanged his tragic sense of history for the rhetoric of the western triumphalist.

“The war on error,” Jason Cowley, FT, 23 September, 2011.

This is a terrific appraisal of Christopher Hitchens. It should be noted, as this blogger has done repeatedly, that Hitchens used his column in Vanity Fair to write a noisome cheer piece on the Tunisia of Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali (so much for Hitchens as a freedom struggler). Much of his writing on the Arab region or predominantly Muslim countries consists of impressionistic reports on tourism trips and puerile (though cleverly worded) generalizations. His columns and essays on Arabs and Islam (and things related to them) tend to leave the reader with much to be desired in the way of insight and knowledge. One hopes for a rigorous breakdown of Hitchens’s writings on the Middle East and on Islam/Islamism soon.

Thurston on Census Unrest

Alex Thurston has a sharp and short post on the census unrest in Mauritania. He makes two points: (1) that unease with government censuses has become a flashpoint elsewhere in west Africa and the world (including the United States) and; (2) that ethnic relations in Mauritania have evolved significantly over time and are continuing to do so, pointing to the way Haratine have moved increasingly into public roles unthinkable just a few years ago. The second point is especially interesting when one considers the politics of black identity in Mauritania among Afro-Mauritanians and among Haratines in particular. The government has said it will go ahead with the census, despite the controversy. Part of this is because the census needs to be completed in order to distribute new identity cards which will be needed to come up with voter rolls. Mauritania’s national assembly and municipal elections were postponed at the end of August partly because of this and partly for fear of opposition threats to boycott the election. It is probable that the current parliament will have its term extended through April 2012 (through various technicalities) to allow time for the government to complete the census and for sessions of national dialogue between the opposition and the ruling party and president. A point to watch on this point is (assuming this goes through) whether the opposition declares the government unconstitutional; even if the COD parties do not take that line recent events and fumbling of the elections will put the government’s legitimacy ever more on the line. In any case, Arabic readers will benefit from Abbas Braham’s Taqadoumy column on some historical aspects of the disturbances in Kaedi and what they say about ethnic politics in Mauritania. Last week saw unrest related to the census in Nouakchott, Kaedi, Gorgol and other towns in the south. Among the protesters are partisans of the 25 February youth movement (which recent issued this communique); protesters have told the media that they do not intend for their movement to be interpreted as an “Arab/Moor versus black” issue while the National Commission for Human Rights has demanded an inquiry into the events of the last week.

An Algeria Reading List

Below is a list of what this blogger considers important or particularly relevant and worthwhile books and articles on Algeria. It is not exhaustive. Some readers and comrades have received an earlier, shorter version of this list in the last two or three months because they asked for it; previous “reading lists” on this blog included some of the books here but as these were focused on alternative topics or other countries in the Arab region or the Maghreb many of the books on this list did not appear on earlier ones. A PDF version is here while the text is below. This is not an academic bibliography, just an alphabetized list of useful and enlightening books and articles about Algeria read over time.