Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
मनोहर पर्रिकर रक्षा अध्ययन एवं विश्लेषण संस्थान

Mali’s War and Algeria’s Struggle for Peace

Commentary

In the summer 1995 issue of Foreign Policy, Andrew J. Pierre and William B. Quandt wrote:

The conflict in Algeria seems distant … but what happens in Algeria in this struggle over power, ideas, and revenge will have repercussions beyond Algeria’s borders. Algeria’s fate will influence the future of its immediate neighbors … as well as democratization and development efforts in the Arab world …

Their view of Algeria’s future at the time still holds, close to two decades later, in an Arab world infused with revolutionary fervour. The one-year old crisis in northern Mali is as much a spillover of the Libyan revolution as it is the result of other long neglected regional issues. And Algeria has a central role to play in the intricate web of actors and events that are shaping the western Sahel today.

Algeria’s history is one of harsh excesses – in the political, economic, social and cultural spheres – and the struggle to be liberated from them. Following independence, the country’s Islamist movement along with the newly emerged political elite, continued the excesses of the French colonial era, by waging war against their own people. The fallout of that decade of war has imprinted themselves on the developments in Algeria and its neighbourhood even today. The multiple socio-cultural1 and economic crises gradually evolved into a political crisis by the late 1980s. When a degree of political relaxation took place under President Chadli Benjedid, following a period of authoritarian rule by the sole legitimate political party, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), one opposition grouping quickly gained a following. The Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) rallied against governmental corruption and ineptitude under the slogan “Islam is the solution”. Like other Islamist organisations before it, the FIS dominated the country’s social fabric by organising the delivery of essential goods and services around mosques, and assuming the responsibilities of the state. When the Benjedid government acceded to calls for greater democracy and allowed local elections in June 1990, the FIS won control over a majority of the country’s municipalities. In parliamentary elections held in December 1991, the FIS won enough votes to take it to victory in the second round.

Governance in Algeria was dominated by those who had played key roles in the national liberation struggle. This gradually led to a system of government in which the party and the military not only shared power, but also continually competed for it. Following the FIS’ stunning showing in the first round of the elections, hard-line members of the military, suspecting a deal between the president and the Islamists, forced Benjedid to resign, banned the FIS, imposed a state of emergency, and set up an interim government. The political crackdown on the FIS in 1992 led to a more radicalised Islamist movement, with internal splits separating the hard-liners from the moderates. Most of the FIS’ leaders were jailed or in exile while others along with their followers defected to more radical Islamist groups. Political violence now became an everyday affair. Successive transitional governments struggled against the growing challenge of an armed Islamist opposition, and attempts to secure a political resolution to the crisis failed. By 1994, the increasingly brutal contest for the state led to the formation of the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA) or the Armed Islamic Groups – a loose umbrella group of consisting of various disparate movements that were fighting against the Algerian government. The GIA is believed to have been beyond the control of the FIS leadership and was responsible for routine violence against the harsh government offensive on the Islamist movement, killing not only security forces but also civilians, including intellectuals, doctors, journalists, foreigners, and citizens who were seen to be cooperating with the state. An impasse was reached – the government could not be toppled, and the armed Islamists could not be rid of. By 2001, an estimated 200,000 people had lost their lives.2

Although the Islamist movement, as it was during the civil war, lost popular support in the succeeding elections because of the blunt violence it perpetrated against civilians, it inevitably led to the rise of an unwelcome Islamist extremism in Algeria. The Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) or the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, emerged as a key actor in this narrative. It grew out of the GIA in the late 1990s and gained support, largely in Algeria’s rural areas, by pledging to avoid the excesses that the GIA had become notorious for, and refrain from attacks on civilians. It is a promise the GSPC did not entirely fulfil. The group shot on to the international scene in 2003 with the kidnapping of 32 European tourists in Algeria’s southern desert region. It was suspected to have had extensive links in Europe, the US, and the Middle East, but is also known to have raised money for its operations through the successful smuggling and trafficking networks in the vast, ungoverned deserts of the western Sahel. The GSPC included a large number of young Muslims who had returned from fighting the war in Afghanistan, among them the ‘one-eyed’, Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Its stated aims in its early years were to topple the Algerian government and create an Islamic state in Algeria. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the apparent success of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) may have served as a catalyst for the expansion of the GSPC’s goal to embrace al-Qaeda’s ideology of global jihad. In January 2007, the GSPC announced its new avatar – Qa’idat al-Jihad fil-Maghrib al-Islami, or al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Just as it had emerged from its own ‘La Sale Guerre’ – the dirty war, as the civil war came to be called, Algeria found itself swept into the midst of a duel between the ‘global jihad’ and the ‘global war on terror’. AQIM quickly adopted al-Qaeda’s signature tactics: refusing national reconciliation with the Algerian government; targeting foreign or foreign-linked organisations and individuals; and moving its operations beyond Algeria’s borders into the SaharaSahel region, particularly neighbouring Mali and Mauritania. Apart from having provided favourable conditions in its domestic political and social conditions, Algeria itself did not particularly witness an escalation in violence as a result of the evolution of the GSPC.3

A key turning point in the war between the Algerian government and the Islamists came in February 2006 when after a national referendum, the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, came into effect. The charter invited armed Islamists to surrender in return for immunity from prosecution (with some exceptions) for crimes committed during the conflict in the 1990s. It also offered protection from prosecution for state agents and members of the country’s security forces, in addition to restricting, and making punishable, any continued debate or scrutiny of atrocities committed during the war. Many Algerians who were victims of the war saw the charter as the coming together of the state and the Islamists, both of which were seen as having perpetrated much violence against innocent civilians. The war itself was the subject of much speculation and theories relating to links between the country’s security services and the GSPC (and the GIA before it); the charter may have reinforced this belief.

AQIM’s most dramatic works came soon after the announcement of its formation. Borrowing from the tactics of Iraqi insurgent groups, AQIM launched suicide attacks in March and December 2007 inside Algeria, a form of violence that was new to the country. Apart from attacks on Algerian military and police targets, AQIM replenished its coffers by kidnapping foreign nationals mainly in Mali, Mauritania, and southern Tunisia, for ransom, and contraband trafficking. The next time AQIM presented itself in the international limelight would be following a dramatic military coup in Mali in March 2012.

Among the many groups that emerged from the chaos in northern Mali, some are worth examining in the context of the tangled web of relationships that seems to bind Algeria with actors in the Sahara-Sahel. One is Ansar Dine, a key militant group that was part of the loose alliance that was holding northern Mali hostage. The group was formed sometime between 2011 and 2012 by Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg and former Malian diplomat. After failing the bid to lead his tribe in its quest for autonomy, Ag Ghaly formed Ansar Dine as a more religiously conservative alternative to the secular Tuareg movement. Despite its history of intolerance for radical Islamist militants, the Algerian government is known to have nurtured Ag Ghaly, possibly hoping to gain inside knowledge of his group’s operations in northern Mali and also as a counterweight to the possibility of an independent Tuareg state that could inspire its own minorities. (Algeria has also played a key role as a mediator in negotiations between Mali’s government and Tuaregs, most recently as part of the Algiers Accord signed in 2006). The strategy however backfired. The Algerians are said to have been taken by surprise by the chain of events in northern Mali. Reports referred to during the writing of this piece provide disputing evidence that Ansar Dine is linked to AQIM – a ‘sworn enemy’ of Algeria. A link however might explain Algeria’s decision to open its airspace for use by France at the start of the military intervention in Mali, after its initial hesitation to back a foreign intervention force.

Ansar Dine is not the only reason for Algeria to stay on its toes. The Movement for Oneness and Jihad for West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group of AQIM, formed in early 2012, was responsible for the April 2012 kidnapping of seven Algerian diplomats from the Algerian consulate in Gao, Mali. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the former member of the GSPC, reappeared under the new banner of the Signed-in-Blood Battalion earlier this year and claimed responsibility for the deadly raid on an internationally operated natural gas facility in In Amenas in south-eastern Algeria in midJanuary.4 The incident was eerily familiar – the GSPC was responsible for a 2006 attack near Algiers on a bus carrying foreign employees of an engineering and construction firm jointly owned by the US-based Halliburton, and the Algerian national oil company, Sonatrach. A bigger concern for the Algerian strategy to suppress any aspirations for autonomy within its own minority communities might be another new group that split from Ansar Dine in late January this year. The Islamic Movement for the Azawad (MIA) is led by a prominent Tuareg leader and is believed to have been formed in order to participate in negotiations to settle the northern Malian crisis.5 For the secular Tuareg nationalist movement, however, the evolving conflict and the consequent proliferation of armed Islamist groups may have hijacked their decades-old cause. Many Malians also view claims by groups such as the MIA who support independence for the Tuaregs as a ploy for spreading a more extreme form of Islam – one that is alien to a country that has practiced a relatively moderate form of the religion for more than a millennium.6

For Algeria, the crisis in northern Mali may have marked the beginning of another phase in its long struggle to contain the influences of extremist Islamist groups within its borders and in its neighbourhood. The Malian conflict has been shaped by many more factors than just the Tuareg issue. As a recent New York Times report notes, the web of “personal ambitions, old rivalries, tribal politics, the relationship between militants and states, and even the fight for control of the lucrative drug trade” lies at the centre of stabilising the Sahara-Sahel.7 An alliance of the newly formed groups in the Sahel could prove a major threat to regional and global security; the splintering of existing groups might thus work in favour of broader security in the region, at least for the short-term.

The lack of a clear strategy to resolve the Tuareg issue, not just in Mali, but also in Algeria and Niger that are home to restive Tuareg communities, is a major obstacle to the establishment of long-term security in the region. Following the start of the Malian conflict, Algeria has sought to distinguish between the Tuareg groups who have legitimate demands, and other armed groups, as well as the need to establish a dialogue between the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and the government in Bamako.8 How these negotiations evolve will be significant for the stability of Mali and its neighbours. A glaring aspect of the recent crisis has been lack of interstate security cooperation in the western Sahel. The 2009 Tamanrasset Plan provided a platform for officials from Algeria, Mali, Libya, Niger, and Mauritania to share intelligence and conduct joint military patrols to tackle terrorism, and other organised crime in the region. This is also the vehicle for coordination that Algeria prefers. Although Algeria has maintained security cooperation with the United States in the region, its emphasis on its sovereignty and its desire for taking a leadership role in the region has often conflicted with direct intervention by the US in counterterrorism operations.9 The Tamanrasset Plan in addition to strengthening security in ungoverned Sahelian spaces could also help counter criticism that the US-Algerian security cooperation has exaggerated the threat of al-Qaeda linked groups in the Sahara-Sahel to establish greater security control over the region. Further, Algerian reactions to the French-led military intervention in northern Mali indicate “some level of discomfort” regarding France’s motives in the region, and its own role in the crisis, particularly, in view of Franco-Algerian relations.10 In addition, the key challenge in any approach involving the ECOWAS is ensuring the integration of neighbouring Algeria and Mauritania – both non-member states of the ECOWAS – into a regional strategy for conflict resolution.11

Keywords: Mali
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