The Algerian State and the Challenge of Democracy

Hugh Roberts

The Algerian State and the Challenge of Democracy

No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintuin itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates. One nekhbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbours ’ madness and wickedness. Nietzsche‘

THE PUBLIC REACTION OF WESTERN GOVERNMENTS AND commentators to the suspension of the electoral process in Algeria following President Chadli’s resignation on 1 1 January was profoundly mixed. Relief at the fact that Algeria was not about to become ‘a second Iran’ very quickly gave way to disapproval of the manner in which this prospect had been conjured away at the last moment, as numerous leader writers in London and Paris and no doubt elsewhere indulged themselves in vigorous criticism of what they had not hesitated to call a ‘military coup’.2

Since then, the view has been canvassed that the radical Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, FIS), which had clearly been heading for a massive majority in the National Assembly following the first round of voting on 26 December, should have been allowed to take power after all; that it was not at all as fearsome as its detractors had suggested; that the cause of democracy would have been furthered, not subverted, by the proper election of a FIS government; that the eventual advent of an Islamist government had in any case been only delayed, not precluded, by the army’s action; and that the latter was therefore to be seen as a catastrophic blunder in terms of sheer realpolitik as well as a deplorable violation of democratic principles.

’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathuctra, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 84. ’ This article is a revised version of a talk given to the Royal Institute of International

AKairs, London on 25 February 1992.

434 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

In short, up to 11 January, the Algerian people were going mad. Since 11 January, Algerian politicians have been demon- strating their wickedness. Either way, the West has had a lot of pulpit-thumping to do. The idea, which - like the Algerian Revolution itself - would probably have made perfect sense to Nietzsche, that it was not unreasonable for 3.26 million Algerians to vote for the FIS and wholly reasonable for the army to prevent it from taking power, appears not to have occurred to anyone.

This is undoubtedly connected with the fact that the West’s reactions have been based on the most superficial analysis of Algerian political developments imaginable and have evinced not the slightest understanding of what has actually been happening in Algeria over the last three or four years. This article argues that Western assessments of recent events in Algeria have been profoundly mistaken, and that a revaluation of these developments is urgently needed. It is therefore the purpose of this article to put these developments in their true perspective, and thereby enable this revaluation to be undertaken.

The perspective in question is a historical perspective, and as such is completely at odds with the conventional wisdom of Western commentary on Algeria since the riots of October 1988. An informed historical perspective has been conspicuous for its absence and, in its absence, Western commentary has been an affair of false assumptions and misleading analogies.

ECONOMIC DETERMINISM - OR DETERMINED ECONOMISM

The first false assumption has been that of economic determinism. Marxism-Leninism is dead as a political force and discredited as a system of ideas, but one of its most useless features, the dogma that political developments are merely the reflections of underlying economic developments, is alive and well in the West.

Over the last five or six years, commentators on Algerian politics have endlessly discussed the effects of the 1986 oil price slump, unemployment, the housing shortage, the demographic explosion and the generation gap, as if the invocation of such factors amounted to a serious analysis of political developments properly so called. And so it came naturally to the newscaster on the BBC World Service, on the evening of 9 October 1988, to inform the world as a matter of thoroughly ascertained fact that the riots which were then reaching their paroxysm across the

THE ALGERIAN STATE AND THE CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRACY 435

country were over ‘price increases’. And when a second thesis, that ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ were behind them, was put into circulation, it was immediately qualified by the economistic explanation that the influence of the ‘fundamentalists’ was itself primarily a function of economic distress, as if political ideas and values have no role to play in Algerian politics or Arab politics in general.

The thesis of ‘another Arab bread riot’ in respect of the events of October 1988 in Algeria rapidly attained the status of an article of faith where media commentary was concerned. This status owed nothing to any attempt to take account of what had actually happened during or immediately after the riots themselves. In particular, it determinedly ignored two very significant facts, the fact that the rioters were not expressing specifically economic grievances at all, and the fact that the riots ended without the slightest concession being made to the people in the sphere of economic policy. On the contrary, in his speech to the nation broadcast on the evening of 10 October, President Chadli insisted that the economic reform programme - with all that it already palpably entailed by way of rising prices and unemployment - would go ahead as planned. Nonetheless the riots ended everywhere that same evening.

By arbitrarily attributing mere economic motivation to the rioters, Western coverage contrived to obscure the fact that the riots were, above all, a generalized disavowal of the regime of President Chadli and expressed a bitter exasperation with and contempt for Chadli himself. As the rioters themselves put it, ‘Ma bghina la zabaiz w a la felfeel, lakin bghina ~ a i m j h e l ’ ~ (‘We don’t want butter or pepper, we want a leader we can respect’). In particular, Western coverage systematically obscured the extent to which the rioters’ contempt for Chadli was informed by nostalgia for the Boumedisne era: ‘Roumedien, ardja ‘ lina. Hl im wellet t ehko~mfina!’~ (‘BoumediSne, come back to us. Halima [Chadli’s wife] has come to dominate us!’). And, in subsequently presenting Chadli as the disinterested apostle of ‘reforms’ and, in particular, as the scourge of a corrupt elite, Western coverage determinedly overlooked the fact that, for the rioters of 1988, who knew far

Naget Khadda and Monique Gaddant, ‘Mots et Gestes de la Revolte’, Al&ie: Vns L ’Efut Islamiqu?, Peuples Mddiferranc’ins, 52 - 53, July - December 1990, pp. 19 - 24, p. 20. Zaiimfil literally means ‘a leader with bal1s’;fhel means the male of a large animal, such as a stallion or a hull. ’ Khadda and Gaddant, ibid.


more about these things than Western reporters (let alone editors), Chadli had been the apex of a system of generalized nepotism and corruption for years, and in various ways, such as promoting and ‘covering’ members of his own family - something Boumedihe had never done - had set an example which his subordinates had merely followed with alacrity: ‘ ChudLi, barkana min el vis! QouL Li weldek ired el devis!” (‘Chadli, that’s enough vice! Tell your son to return the money!’).

More generally, the exaggerated importance attributed to economic motivations and considerations by Western commentary entailed a massive neglect of one of the central matters which has been at issue in Algeria since the mid-1980s if not earlier, the question of public exasperation with arbitrary government, and the concomitant demand for a form of government based on the rule of law.6

The economistic assumption has led observers to rely on analogies with familiar cases when confronted with the difficulty of making sense of the Algerian case, which is unfamiliar because both different and shrouded in mystery in the absence of a serious history of Algerian politics since 1962. The analogies in question have been those with the Soviet Union and Iran. Both of these analogies have relied on the existence of superficial parallels in the Algerian case and have ignored the enormous and politically significant differences.

THE SOVIET ANALOGY

The Soviet analogy - that, is, the systematic reference to the model of the ideologically exhausted, political decadent and economically bankrupt single-party socialist state, the Locus classicus of which has naturally been Gorbachev’s USSR - is still in vogue in French circle^,^ despite the fact that it has singularly

Khadda and Gaddant, ibid. El dcvis is a characteristic Algerian colloquial Arabic borrowing of the French word dcviscs - foreign exchange, that is hard currency, as opposed to Algerian dinars.

For a fuller discussion of this point, see my article, ‘Radical Islamism and the Dilemma of Algerian Nationalism’, Third World Quarter&, Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1988, pp. 556-89.

See French press coverage since October 1988, passim, but also, for an academic exposition of the analogy, Patricia Pic, ‘Essai de comparaison: perestroika soviCtique et inlitah alg&ienne’, Lcs Cahicrs dc I’Orient, No. 23, third quarter 1991, pp. 103 - 14.


failed to orient French and other commentators in making sense of all the disconcerting twists and turns of the Algerian drama since October 1988. Its palpable failure to do so is connected with the fact that this analogy is fatally flawed. In particular, it ignores the fact that the National Liberation Front (Front de Liberation Nationale, FLN - in Arabic: Jebha el Tahrir el Wutan;Uru) is not and has never been a counterpart of the CPSU, in two fundamental respects.

First, the FLN is not and has never been a party. The FLN which was founded in 1954 and conducted the victorious war of national liberation against France was a revolutionary national movement which comprised numerous different apparatuses: the National Liberation Army (ArmCe de Liberation Nationale, ALN), which comprised both guerrilla and regular units as well as an intelligence service, or rather several such services, and a munitions industry, based in factories in Morocco; a legislature (the National Council of the Algerian Revolution, Counseil Nationale de la RCvolution AlgCrienne, CNRA); an executive (from September 1958, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, Gouvernement Provisoire de la RCpublique AlgCrienne, GPRA); a judiciary, that is the network of revolutionary tribunals supervised by the ministry of the interior of the GPRA; a police force; a network of prison camps in Morocco and Tunisia; an extensive and dynamic diplomatic corps, directed by the ministry of foreign affairs of the GPRA; extensive apparatuses organizing Algerians at work, in business, in higher education etc. (the Union GCnCrale des Travailleurs AlgCriens, UGTA, the Union GCnCrale des Commercants AlgCriens, UGCA, the Union GCnCrale des Etudiants Musulmans Algkriens, UGEMA, etc.); extensive apparatuses organizing Algerian expatriates in France, Morocco and Tunisia (the FCdCration de France, du Maroc, de Tunisie du FLN - FFFLN, FMFLN, FTFLN); and a press and broadcasting apparatus, publishing El Moudjahid and other literature as well as radio bulletins.

One could go on, but the point should be clear. The FLN, which started as a coalition of guerrilla bands in 1954, had become a state machine by 1962, and on 5 July of that year it was officially recognized as the machine of the sovereign state of Algeria by France and the rest of the international community. And the historic FLN has been the state machine ever since. It was only after Independence that this state machine set up one more apparatus, called ‘the Party’.


The Party was never identified in official discourse with the FLN as a whole. On the contrary, it was carefully identified as the Party of the FLN, Hizb efJebha el Tuhrir el Watanljya, the FLN’s party. The FLN was the state, and the state, in addition to possessing numerous other bits and pieces, possessed its own Party

The Party of the FLN never ruled Algeria. Between 1965 and 1978 it did not possess any of the instances which would have equipped it to exercise any real authority over the government at all, such as a Central Committee or a Political Bureau, and when it was finally endowed with such instances in 1979, these were quickly brought under the control of the presidency, such that the party was still little more than an instrument of the state, rather than vice versa.8 Within the FLN’s state since 1962, it has always been the army, not the party, which has been the principal locus of power, the task of the party being to explain decisions taken elsewhere, not to reason why. And this primacy of the army within the state has reflected the very important fact that the distinction between the political sphere and the military sphere, which is taken for granted in modern Western democracies (and which was also important in the Leninist political tradition), is yet to be fully established in Algeria and has been conspicuous for its absence in Algerian political history since 1954.

The second major way in which the FLN has differed fundamentally from the CPSU (and all other CPs) has been that the FLN has never beert ideologically committed to socialism. Talk of ‘the secular socialist ideology of the FLN’ - let alone of the FLN’s state as a ‘Marxist state’ - has been very wide of the mark. The FLN of 1954-62 was a revolutionary nationalist movement, which mobilized all elements and tendencies in Algerian Muslim politics, left and right, jiancisunts and arabzsants, people with a broadly secular and ‘modernist’ outlook and people of a vigorously Islamic world-view, etc.

Within this self-consciously heterogeneous movement there were, and could be, only two points of doctrine: the imperative of achieving - FLN rhetoric spoke of ‘restoring’ - and thereafter safeguarding the sovereignty of the Algerian state, and the imperative of achieving and thereafter preserving the unity of the

’ For a detailed account of the conflicts over the role of the Party following the death of Boumedihe, see my article ‘ThePolitics of Algerian Socialism’ in R. 1. Lawless and Allan Findlay (eds), North Afnca: ContenPoray Politics and Economic Development, London, Croom Helm, 1984, pp. 5-49, pp. 26-41.


Algerian nation. Everything else was open to debate and negotiable, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement to differ over these other matters was in operation throughout the war. If a kind of socialism was unanimously adopted by the FLN at its congress in Tripoli in June 1962 as its programme for government, this was precisely because this was not an ideological choice, and everyone understood this at the time. And because the original choice of a socialist programme and strategy had not involved an ideological commitment, the abandonment of this programme and strategy between 1979 and 1981 did not provoke a split within the FLN at all, or even any serious soul searching - merely the adoption of a new programme and the replacement, in the departments of the state, of the architects of the socialist approach by their critics within the FLN political and administrative elite.

The Soviet analogy also ignores the fundamental fact that, whereas the disintegration of the Soviet Union and other communist states has followed directly from the political collapse of their ruling communist parties which in turn can be traced to the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as the doctrine which has legitimized them and the world-view which has oriented them, there has been no collapse of the substantive ideology of Algerian nationalism and no collapse of the FLN’s state. While presenting itself as the intransigent adversary of the Party of the FLN, the FIS has simultaneously presented itself as the legitimate heir of the historic FLN of the war years. As such, it has unquestionably been recycling and remobilizing, for its own ends and within the particular framework of the Islamist vision, the main themes of the original FLN - Algerian nationalism, Arabic culture, Islamic puritanism and populist radicalism.

When Shaikh Ali Ben Hadj, the FIS’s No. 2 leader, exclaimed on the morrow of his party’s massive victory in the local and regional elections in June 1990 that ‘Le FLN nous a trahi!’ (‘The FLN has betrayed us!’), he meant, as all his hearers unquestionably understood, that the FLN (by which he meant those factions of the original FLN which had actually been exercising power since Independence), had deviated from and ceased to incarnate the original ideals of the Revolution, not that those ideals were to be repudiated. And, throughout its dizzy political career, the FIS has successfully traded on the fact that its principal leader, Dr Abassi Madani, was one of the founder members of the original FLN and actually went into action on the celebrated night of 31 October- 1 November 1954.


As an Algerian colleague informed me during the Islamist agitation of the early 1980s, which brought Abassi to prominence long before the FIS was dreamed of, ‘il est h r caution morale’. That is, Abassi’s impeccable credentials as ‘a nationalist of the first hour’ were invaluable to the Islamist movement, a fact which suggested that nationalism actually took precedence over Islamic devotion or orthodoxy in the Algerian people’s table of values, however scathing the people might be of the FLN factions in power and their attempts to monopolize nationalist legitimacy.

Imagine Lech Walesa or Vaclav Have1 making political capital out of the claim that they had been founder members of the Polish or Czech Communist Parties! Imagine Boris Yeltsin trading on the fact (were either of these things true, which, of course, and very significantly, they are not) that he had taken part in the storming of the Winter Palace, or at least the founding of the Komsomol in its Bolshevik heyday!

A moment’s reflection, if informed by an elementary acquaintance with Algeria’s political history, leads ineluctably to the conclusion that the disarray in Algerian politics cannot have been caused by a collapse of the ideology which had informed the national revolution and the construction of the state, for the very good reason that this ideology is as vigorous as ever. It follows that the disarray in question has had other causes, which cannot be identified if Algeria is thought about within the parameters of the Soviet analogy.

T H E IRANIAN ANALOGY

The analogy with the Islamic revolution in Iran has posited a profound and irreconcilable antagonism between the Algerian state and the radical Islamist movement, and has correspondingly failed to take due account of the extent to which the state and the Islamist movement have been able and willing to negotiate their relationship during the presidency of Chadli Bendjedid. This is because arguments from the Iranian analogy have necessarily ignored the fact that the historical relationship of the Algerian state to Algerian Islamism has been very different from the relationship between the Pahlavi monarchy and the Iranian Islamist movement, in two major respects.

First, the Algerian state, as the product of an authentic national revolution and the vehicle of the Algerian national idea, has possessed enormous nationalist legitimacy in the eyes of the


Algerian people, whereas the Pahlavi monarchy, having been restored with Western assistance at the expense of the nationalist Mossadegh government, and being an imperial regime ruling a pre-national society, was entirely lacking in nationalist legitimacy. Because of this, the whole force of nascent nationalism in Iran could be mobilized against the monarchy in 1978, whereas Algerian nationalism has been a force susceptible to mobilization as much in defence of the Algerian nation-state as in support of its Islamist critics.

Secondly, the Algerian state, while not an Islamic Republic in the sense given this term by the Ayatollahs in Teheran or by the Islamist movement in Algeria, is nonetheless a Muslim state in major respects, as the heir to the modernist movement of Islamic reform (islah) led by Shaikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis and the Association of the Reformist ‘Ulama in the inter-war period and to a revolution which defined its purpose, in the Proclamation of November 1, 1954, as ‘the restoration of the sovereign, democratic and social, Algerian state within the framework of Islamic principles ’. As a result, the Algerian state has had a substantial Islamic dimension and a substantial measure of religious legitimacy, and arguments with which to defend itself against the Islamist critique.

This state of affairs has ensured that a very high degree of ambiguity has characterized the relationship between the Algerian state and the radical Islamist movement. Each party to this relationship has been inclined to acknowledge the elements of legitimacy in the other. The Islamist movement has been unable to stigmatize the state in the same no-holds-barred way in which Khomeini and his followers were free to stigmatize the Shah’s state. And the state, for its part, has always had two alternative lines of action to choose from: it could negotiate a modus uiuendi with the Islamists, deploying (and developing) its own Islamic credentials to good effect in this context to consummate a rapprochement between the two, or it could opt for the second course, which was to suppress the Islamists in the name of a specifically national tradition of Islam, tolerant and reasonable, in contrast to which the Islamist movement could be portrayed as the vector of the unreasonable, intolerant and utopian trends in Middle Eastern Islam, and as such alien to the Algerian people. Neither of these options was available to the Shah.

Under Chadli Bendjedid, the Algerian state gave priority to the first option, while keeping the second option open. Since 11 January, the second option has been taken up with a vengeance.


MISCONCEIVING THE ALGERIAN STATE AND ITS PROBLEMS

What the Soviet and Iranian analogies have in common is the assumption that the -FLN-state, whether misconceived as a socialist state or a secular state, has been in terminal decline, irretrievably decadent. This is another of the false assumptions to which I referred above. In particular, the expectation that the advent of an FIS government would imply the more or less revolutionary transformation of the state into a fully-fledged Islamic Republic d fa iranimne has been based on this assumption of irremediable decadence, and has been totally wide of the mark.

What has been terminally decadent is the particular regime of President Chadli. It is understandable that President Chadli and his spokesmen should have wished to deny the decadence of their own regime and should have preferred to identify its difficulties with the putative decadence of the FLN-state as a whole. But in encouraging the Western media to see and to present matters in this light, they have unequivocally misled the outside world.

These analogies have also had in common their failure to take account of the extremely significant fact that the present Algerian state is thejrst euer Algerian state. Unlike both Russia and Iran, but also Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and, for that matter, France, Algeria has no indigenous state tradition. The state tradition in Algeria is a tradition of alien states being established by external powers (the Turks, the French) and imposed by force on the Algerian population. The main indigenous political tradition in Algeria is one of eternal resistance of these alien states by a fragmented population of self-governing tribes.

It follows that there is no basis in Algerian politics for the kind of powerful presidential regime the existence of which is now taken for granted in France. It is perfectly true that this regime dates only from de Gaulle’s constitutional revolution between 1958 and 1962, and that it was conspicuous for its absence during the Fourth Republic. But the analogies which are sometimes drawn between the Fourth Republic and the politics of contemporary Algeriag are flawed by the fact that there is no prospect of a Fifth Republic in Algeria. The French presidential regime is the heir not only to de Gaulle’s political vision and resourcefulness but also, and above all, to the long-established e‘tatiste tradition in France, a tradition which dates from the era of

’ Rimy Leveau, ‘L’Alg6rie en Ctat de siege, Maghreb-Machrek, No. 133, July-September 1991, pp. 92-99, p. 92.


the absolutist monarchy and was reinvigorated in turn by the Jacobins and the Bonapartes. But there is no datiste tradition whatever in Algerian politics. The strength of the Algerian presidency in Boumeditne’s day was due to particular factors - the force of Boumeditne’s own personality and the solidity of the political alliance he constructed, and above all his own, historically unique and unrepeatable, relationship to the Algerian army. Chadli’s vision of a powerful presidency d la Mitterrand has turned out to be that characteristically Algerian phenomenon, a mirage.

The tradition of resistance to the state, which is centuries old, has bequeathed to the Algerian people a highly developed reflex of suspicion of their rulers and a capacity second-to-none to resist their rulers in all sorts of ways. Clandestinity comes naturally to Algerians. This reflex of clandestine resistance is at the heart of the problem of bureaucracy in Algeria, where directions and decisions from on high are, as often as not, no more than a basis for discussion, if taken note of at all, while pressures from below or from the side, transmitted through informal networks and mobilizing occult solidarities and sentiments of obligation, more often than not elicit prompt and energetic responses. But it also means that Algerians are extremely liable to oppose their governments and question their legitimacy.

The unifying character of the national revolution only very partially modified this popular state of mind. A positive Algerian national sentiment exists, but needs to develop very much further before the state-society relationship ceases to be one of mutual suspicion and friction. It also needs to develop much further if sub-national loyalties and identities, especially regional ones, are to be definitively transcended. This is bound to take time; realistically, it is an affair of generations.

In criticizing these misconceptions and fallacies, I have, I hope, furnished elements of a more realistic understanding of the character of the Algerian state. It is a state which is the product of a revolutionary nationalist movement which mobilized all the main elements and points of view within Algerian politics in order to realize its purposes in respect of national sovereignty and national unity. While the state has been in severe difficulties in recent years, this is not because of the decadence of the movement which constituted it or the ideology which has animated it, both of which retain their raison d’ttre and therefore their vigour.

The decadence of the Party of the FLN is not an index of the decadence either of the FLN’s state or of the national political


elite which the FLN had formed by 1962. The decadence of the Party is rather an index of the difficulty which a secondary apparatus of state, conceived for the particular purposes of a dictatorial regime, has had in transforming itself into an organization capable of performing the - completely different - represerztutiue functions of an independent political party in a pluralist democracy. That is an entirely different matter. This difficulty is closely connected with the central problem which the Algerian state faces in attempting to democratize itself. This problem is not a product of decadence but of something else altogether, and can now be stated directly.

THE PROBLEM OF PARTY POLITICS

The problem of democracy in contemporary Algeria is a product of Algeria’s political history. There are numerous aspects of this problem, but the one which I wish to draw attention to is that furnished by the history of the FLN since 1962.

From the point of view of democracy, the problem is that the FLN has never split. Instead, what it has done is to splinter. With each successive splintering, the FLN’s state has found its capital of historical legitimacy diminished. But, while the splinters have given rise to opposition movements, these movements have tended to combine or confuse opposition to the government with opposition to the stuk. They have no more constituted the nuclei of political parties capable of functioning as alternative governments, or constitutional oppositions, than the increasingly contested and demoralized Party of the FLN has done.

A functional system of democracy, in which the diversity of interest and point of view within the society is properly articulated and represented within the constitutional political system in such a way that the good government of the state is facilitated instead of being made . impossible,’ requires the development of the appropriate kind of political parties. The difficulty of Algerian democracy is precisely the difficulty of developing the political parties appropriate to a functional system of liberal-democratic, representative, government.

It is in part because this difficulty is such a very palpable and intractable one that it has been comparatively easy for the Islamist argument, that Western conceptions of democracy are inappropriate to Algeria, to make sense to many Algerians who might otherwise have proved resistant to the Islamists’ appeal.


This difficulty has its origin in the very character and achievement of the historic FLN.

Because the FLN was constituted on the basis of a purely nationalist agenda consisting of two, and only two, issues of principle, and because its heterogeneous membership learned early on to operate a kind of gentlemen’s agreement to differ on all other matters of principle (that is, social philosophy, economic interest and cultural orientation), the factional groupings which developed inside the FLN did not reflect these other differences of principle, but rather differences over immediate revolutionary strategy or tactics or organization. For this reason, the actual factional divisions which developed inside the FLN between 1954 and 1962, and which have continued to determine the development of Algerian politics until now, have not been of a kind which could form the basis of competing political parties. If a given faction’s point of view is largely an affair of a group’s vested interest on the one hand and circumstances and tactical manoeuvring on the other (no matter what ideological debating points it employs at this moment or that), it has no stable and constant position of principle which it can proclaim and elaborate in order to win the support of the public at large.

Given that only the two items on the FLN’s revolutionary nationalist agenda were ever addressed directly in the policy debates within the FLN in its crucial formative period between 1954 and 1962, the only basis on which a definitive split might have occurred within the FLN was precisely over one or other of these items. Such a split has never occurred, and its failure to occur when it might have occurred was an event in itself.

THE IRISH CONTRAST

The significance of this non-event can be better appreciated by reference to a case which is at least as much analogous to Algeria as the Soviet or Iranian cases - the Irish case.

Ireland’s independence was the fruit of a revolutionary nationalist struggle which resembled Algeria’s independence struggle in several fundamental respects, including the popular character of the nationalist movement and its correspondingly religious colouration, as well as the revolution’s origin in the take- over of an agitational nationalist politics by a conspiratorial physical force tradition, and the resulting primacy of the military within Sinn Fein by 1921. But the Irish Republic today is a


democracy, in which the army has no political role, and the Irish state became a democracy long before it chose to describe itself as a republic. It became a democracy because a party political division developed within Irish society. This division arose out of the civil war of 1922-24.

(In parentheses, we may note that most modem democracies are the beneficiaries of past civil wars - the United Kingdom, France, the USA, Spain, Greece, etc.)

The two parties which matter in Ireland, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, trace their origins back to the opposing sides in the civil war. Fianna Fail is the evolution of the unsuccessful Republican rebellion against the Free State, and Fine Gael is the evolution of Cumann na nGaedheal, founded by William Cosgrave, the third president of the Free State (after Arthur Grifiths and Michael Collins), in 1922.

The civil war occurred because of the split which developed within Sinn Fein in 1921 - 22. Sinn Fein contrived to split, and to have a vigorous civil war which established an entirely new line of political division within the society, because of a bitter disagreement over fundamentals. At issue in the debate over the Treaty in 1921 was the question - ‘Have we achieved our purpose or not? Have we or have we not won our independence?’. Because this question was fundamental to Sinn Fein’s saison d’dre, it could not be evaded or relegated to the background or the sidelines. And because there could be only two points of view on the question, and these could not be reconciled, a war had to be fought over the matter. And so an entirely new political cleavage, transcending and thereby &-politicizing all earlier lines of division within Catholic Irish society, was established, and the foundations for party political pluralism were laid in a manner which consolidated the nation instead of subverting it.

Algeria ’s problem arises out of the fact that the Algerians have not had the luck of the Irish.

The only issue which could have given rise to a comparable split in the FLN by 1962 was the terms of the Evian Agreements which ended the war in March 1962. There was a vigorous debate over these terms within the FLN. But the FLN contrived not to split over the matter. And because it contrived not to split over a major issue of principle, it was incapable of having a civil war in the summer of 1962 over secondary matters. There were bitter rivalries and disagreements and scores to settle, much hostile manoeuvring, and some shedding of blood in a couple of confrontations between the rival camps, but in the absence of a


disagreement over fundamentals a proper civil war could not be contrived.

And so the FLN’s state today is confronted with the consequences of the FLN’s success exactly thirty years go, the inconvenient legacy of its remarkable achievement in 1962, in virtue of which a new line of political cleavage, transcending and depoliticizing earlier divisions and so permitting the development of functional party politics, has never been established.

In the absence of such a new line of cleavage, the attempt to effect a transition from dictatorial to democratic government in Algeria has been vitiated by the characteristics of the splinter movements which developed in lieu of a proper split in the FLN. These splinter movements have developed in two quite different historical contexts and have embodied two quite different kinds of opposition.

THE PROBLEM OF OPPOSITION

The splinter movements which developed between Independence in 1962 and 1968 were formed by leading figures within the historic FLN whofell out with either Ben Bella or Boumeditne. For the most part, these movements did not contest the form of the regime so much as the legitimacy of the faction which held power. They represented the thwarted ambitions of losers in the power struggles inside the FLN - Hocine Ait Ahmed, Colonel Mohamed Chaabani, Colonel Tahar Zbiri, Belkacem Krim - rather than the interest and points of view of a substantial element of the society, and were correspondingly inclined to resort to military conspiracies of one kind or another as their preferred modus operandi: the armed rising led by Ait Ahmed’s Socialist Forces Front (Front des Forces Socialistes, FFS) in 1963 - 1965, Chaabani’s rebellion in southern Algeria in 1964, the abortive military coup led by Zbiri and his supporters within the army in 1967, the assassination attempts on Boumedikne sponsored by Krim’s ironically named Democratic Movement for Algerian Renewal (Mouvement DCmocratique du Renouveau AlgCrien, MDRA) in 1968.

The splinter movements which developed after Boumeditne’s death in December 1978 have been quite different. Instead of representing merely the thwarted ambitions or dissident opinions of old revolutionaries, they have represented the main ideological


currents within Algerian society. These ideological movements have developed because of the nature of the Chadli regime.

The Boumeditne regime had an ambitious social project. Whatever one thinks of this project, and numerous Algerians disliked important aspects of it at the time, it existed, and it both oriented the state’s activities and provided some notional rationale for the state’s dictatorial character. Above all, by furnishing the state with ambitious economic and social development objectives for the attainment of which it needed to mobilize popular energies, it created a centripetal dynamic in Algerian politics which enabled the state to keep a grip on all the various currents in the society.

The Chadli regime abandoned Boumeditne’s project but did not replace it with an alternative project capable of mobilizing popular energies or enthusiasm. On the contrary, the project of economic liberalization embarked on in 1981 - 82 (and not, as Western media coverage has relentlessly suggested, only after the riots of 1988) required the determined demobilization of popular energies, since these were bound to be alienated by and hostile to this project. As a result, a centrifugal dynamic set in in place of the previous centripetal dynamic, and the state lost the capacity to capture and canalize the various ideological tendencies and currents in the society.

Since, in the eyes of the active members of these tendencies, the lack of an avowable social project deprived the state of any rationale for its dictatorial character, these tendencies came increasingly to challenge the state on ideological grounds. There accordingly developed a vigorous Islamist movement, but also a Berberist movement, a variety of socialist groupings, a fledgling liberal-democratic/human rights movement, a feminist movement, and so forth.

All of these movements were ideological in character, and essentially single-issue movements of protest articulating particular grievances and demands. They contested the legitimacy of the regime, and tended strongly to identify the regime with the state tout court. But they were none of them capable of offering an alternative formula for governing the state, and only the Islamist movement tended seriously to suppose itself to be so capable.

This is what existed in the way of identifiable movements of Algerian public opinion when the Chadli regime decided to introduce a pluralist constitution in February 1989.

As a great British Foreign Secretary, the late Ernest Bevin,

TIIE ALGERIAN STATE AND THE CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRACY 449

once remarked B propos of the Council of Europe, ‘once you open that Pandora’s box, you never know what Trojan ’orses will jump out’. And Trojan horses are precisely what jumped out of Pandora’s box in Algeria when Chadli opened it three years ago.

CHADLI’S FUZTE EN AVANT

The decision to recognize the right to form ‘political associations’ (associations d caractire politique, in the gingerly phrased formula of the new constitution’s Article 40) was, of course, entirely unobjectionable in itself, and was welcomed by a delighted (and very surprised) Algerian public opinion as vigorously as it was, very understandably, approved in the West. But by September 1989 it had become clear that the Chadli regime was deliberately encouraging the formation of political parties which, instead of canvassing alternative programmes for government, were canvassing alternative, indeed diametrically opposed and totally irreconcilable, conceptions of the state.

The FIS stood for an Islamic constitution of the state, based on the principle of shuru, consultation, instead of the Western democratic principle of pluralist representation, and the shariu, Quranic law - a constitutional transformation of the Algerian state in which the Islamist regimes of Iran and Sudan clearly - and Saudi Arabia more equivocally - had an interest. The Berberist Rally for Culture and Democracy (Rassemblement pour la Culture et la DCmocratie, RCD) and its chief rival, Ait Ahmed’s FFS, both stood for a secularist constitution of the state, and as such for a model of democracy which was bound to be unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of Algerians while supported by the Berbers of the Kabylia region and the francophile middle class, and agreeable to French interests. From the point of view of the Algerian nation, all three of these parties, which were the main alternatives to the Party of the FLN in the electoral arena, were bound to be viewed, if by different sections of the society, as Trojan horses operating - whatever the subjective outlook of their leaders - to the advantage of one foreign power or another.

As for the Party of the FLN, which obediently if unenthu- siastically supported the new constitutional status quo, it was systematically prevented by the interference of the presidency from choosing a credible leadership team or formulating a plausible programme for government. Far from permitting, let


alone encouraging, the Party of the FLN to broaden its appeal in order to withstand the Islamist challenge, Chadli foisted his own supporters, led by his prime minister Mouloud Hamrouche, on the Party's leadership and thereby identified the Party with little or nothing other than an extremely unpopular economic policy and an equally unpopular president.

The effect of Chadli's behaviour was to sabotage the Party of the FLN's attempt to convert itself into a plausible political party, while simultaneously politicizing to an unprecedented degree the most dangerously septic of the fault lines in the Algerian body politic. By facilitating the development of the FIS, in defiance of the law on political associations of July 1989," the presidency was encouraging a movement which, because it threatened the pluralist constitution, was bound to arouse the irreconcilable antagonism of a great part of public opinion and, as such, irrespective of the items in its programme, was bound to be incapable of forming a government to which all Algerians might consent. And by facilitating the development of the RCD and the FFS, the presidency was encouraging the Kabyles to constitute themselves into a bloc outside the mainstream of Algerian political life as this was being restructured by the electoral duel between the FIS and the Party of the FLN.

Chadli's enterprise - which can more and more clearly be seen to have been afiite en avant, a headlong dash to regain the initiative at all costs and at any price after his position was so profoundly weakened by the riots of October 1988 - thus politicized and bitterly envenomed the fault lines in the Algerian body politic between adherents of an Islamic constitution of the state and adherents of a modern democratic constitution, and the fault line between the Kabyles and the rest of the Algerian nation. He thereby created a scenario which would either lead, at best, to a hung parliament precluding coherent government in a context of chronic social and economic crisis, or to unbearable strains on the body politic culminating in the disintegration of the nation-state.

"' This law defined the modalities of the application of Article 40 of the new constitution, and sought to rule out the formation of political parties based on religion, linguistic differences or regional identity. Its spirit was comprehensively ignored in the subsequent months when the authorities, on instructions from the presidency, recognized the FIS (a party based on religion) and the RCD and the FFS (both parties based on the Kabylia region and expressing in particular the aspirations of the Berberist movement).


THE DENOUEMENT

The significance of the results of the national assembly elections of 26 December 1991 was that they meant that Chadli was going to be denied a hung parliament. With 188 seats won outright on the first ballot, the FIS was heading for a massive majority - very probably of the order of 75 per cent of the seats - in the new assembly on the second ballot, scheduled for 16 January. If Algeria had had a firmly established system of strong presidential government based on a time-honoured dutiste tradition, it might have been possible for Chadli to ‘cohabit’ with a FIS majority and function successfully as the defender of the pluralist constitution against the pressure that was bound to emanate from the FIS for rapid constitutional change towards an Islamic Republic. But in the absence of an i’tatiste tradition, Chadli’s power as president had always depended on his ability to act as the arbiter of the political system, and this ability had in turn presupposed the existence of a balance of forces. There would have been no balance whatever in the new assembly which was in prospect.

The Party of the FLN which had contested the elections on the basis of support for Chadli’s person and policies had won only 16 seats and mobilized only 12 per cent of the electorate on 26 December. And with the support of only 12 per cent of the electorate Chadli had no hope whatever of being able to withstand the pressure from a FIS which, having won so handsomely, would have found itself - irrespective of the subjective intentions of its leaders - pushing against an open door and so unable to restrain its own radical impulses and ambitions. The indulgence of these impulses and ambitions by a FIS government in Algiers would have provoked a massive popular movement demanding autonomy for Kabylia, and so subverting the unitary constitution of the state, as surely as night follows day. And this meant that either a split in the army, or war between Algiers and Kabylia, or both, were very real possibilities in the medium term. And even if the advent of a FIS government did not have such dire internal consequences, the reaction of the Western media to the prospect of an Islamist government made it clear that Islamist Algeria would find itself in quarantine in the New World Order, as well as at odds with its Tunisian and Moroccan neighbours, and so dangerously isolated internationally at a time when it needed desperately to enlist the good will of its international partners in order to find a way out of its economic difficulties.


These were the considerations which motivated the officer corps of the Algerian army when, in the fortnight following 26 December, it put it to Chadli that he was leading the country to disaster and should resign.

Since Chadli’s replacement by a he-man collective presidency known as the High Committee of State (Haut ComitC d’Etat, HCE) chaired by Mohamed Boudiaf,!’ the Western media have routinely referred to the new leadership as ‘the military-backed High Committee of State’, and have thereby tacitly signalled their refusal to endorse the legitimacy of the new authorities. What this overlooks is that every leadership of independent Algeria has been ‘military-backed’, and that Chadli’s dependence on the Algerian military actually exceeded that of both his predecessors as well as his successor.

To speak of the downfall of Chadli as a ‘military coup’ is to devalue the term very seriously. Ben Bella was overthrown by what could arguably be described as a military coup in June 1965; his palace was surrounded by troops and he was arrested and led away in handcuffs and not seen again for the next fourteen years. Chadli resigned, briefly explained himself to the nation in a televised address, and then went home.

One of the most striking aspects of Western commentary on Chadli’s ill-starred venture in ‘democratization’ is that it never once drew attention to the fact that Chadli had made sure to get himself re-elected under the old, dictatorial, one-party, one- candidate, rules in December 1988 before introducing the democratic constitution two months later, and that the last election he was prepared to hold under the new constitution was that for the presidency. His personal position was therefore fundamentally untenable, because entirely lacking in democratic

” Boudiaf is one of the so-called ‘nine historic chiefs’ traditionally credited with founding the FLN in 1954. In fact, he more than any of the others was the moving spirit in organizing the breakaway from the nationalist Parti du Peuple Al&rien of the nuc!eus of revolutionary activists which developed into the FLN. From November 1954 onwards he handled the liaisons between the internal guerrilla forces and the FLN’s external delegation in Cairo, until he was arrested and imprisoned with Ahmed Ben Bella, Rabah Bitat, Hocine Ait Ahmed and Mostefa Lacheraf in October 1956. At Independence, he argued that the FLN had served its purpose and should be dissolved, in order that the Algerian people should be free to choose their government in democratic elections. At odds with the rest of the FLN, he lived very modestly in exile in Morocco from 1964 to 1992. His credentials as a revolutionary nationalist, a democrat and a man of integrity are therefore second to none. The idea that he is a mere puppet of the army betrays ignorance of the man and of Algerian politics in equal measure.


legitimacy. The only mandate he had was the mandate given him by the Algerian army (as rubber-stamped by the Party of the FLN in the first instance and a plebiscitary ‘election’ in the second instance), and all that happened on 11 January was that this mandate was cancelled by those who had furnished it.

In cancelling Chadli’s mandate and thereby precipitating the suspension of the electoral process, the Algerian officer corps was not flouting the democratic will of the people, it was arguably reflecting it. With only 3.26 million votes, that is a mere 25 per cent of the electorate, the FIS was badly placed to claim that the massive legislative majority it was heading for represented the will of the people as a whole, let alone that it constituted a genuine mandate for an Islamic Republic. And with only 12 per cent of the electorate behind him, how could Chadli pretend to represent the general interest?

In his fuite en auant after October 1988, Chadli did the exact opposite of what needed to be done if a stable system of democratic representative government was to be established in Algeria, and the development of democracy in Algeria was not advanced by his experiment, but has been greatly complicated and hindered by it. Far from enabling Algerian society to emancipate itself from the constrictive aspects of the state which the historic FLN created, he ensured that it would be unable to emancipate itself except by destroying the nation-state in the process. And he thereby obliged what was left of the old revolutionary generation of the historic FLN, personified most notably by Mohammed Boudiaf, Ali Kafi’* and Ali Haroun,13 to return from retirement and take control of the ship of state rather than allow it to be smashed on the reefs onto which he had driven it.

‘ I Ali Kafi was a member of the leadership of Wilaya I1 (the FLN’s military region in north eastern Algeria) from 1955 to 1957 and commander of the Wilaya from 1957 to 1959. Thereafter he represented the FLN in various Middle Eastern capitals, a role he continued to play as ambassador of the independent state after 1962. Since 1989 he has been Secretary of the National Organization of War Veterans, the single most influential political lobby in Algeria.

” Ali Haroun was a member of the leadership of the FCdCration de France du FLN from 1957 to 1962 and of the CNRA from 1959 onwards. He refused all offers of ministerial portfolios after Independence, and in his legal practice gained a reputation as a defender of political detainees and a champion of human rights. He became the first ever Minister for Human Rights in the Arab world in the government of Sid Ahmed Ghozali in the summer of 1991.


As a result, the business of developing functional party politics remains to be addressed, and if it is addressed at all in the near future this will be in conditions which are enormously more difficult than those which obtained three years ago.

POSTSCRIPT

Since the above was written, the Algerian crisis has developed dramatically. On 29 June, President Boudiaf was assassinated. On 1 July, crowds following his cort6ge across Algiers chanted ‘Chadli, assassin!’, expressing their conviction that it was not the FIS which was behind the assassination, but the tangled web of political, military and commercial interests associated with the Chadli regime and popularly referred to as ‘the mafia’. Since then, the HCE has named its leading civilian member, Ali Kafi, as Boudiaf s successor, and a leading figure of the Boumedihe era, Belaid Abdesselam, has been appointed prime minister and has named his government.

Meanwhile the security position has worsened, with spectacular assassinations of state personnel (including an intelligence officer leading a major investigation into corruption, five police officers near Algiers on 4 July, and the Chief of Police of the city of Constantine on 20 July) and the development of small-scale guerrilla movements in various parts of the country.

The fact that it is generally conceded that the FIS was not behind Boudiaf‘s killing, that the ‘Chadli mafia’ has been popularly indicted, that the new government is identified with the ‘anti-Chadlist ’ or ‘Boumedienist’ tendency within the old FLN elite, and that the increasingly sophisticated character of the terrorist attacks, both in the weapons employed and the inside information they have presupposed, make them hard to impute to embittered FIS supporters on the run, all suggest that the conflict between the state and the Islamist movement is being superseded by the conflict between factions of the old FLN.

If this is the case, and the conflict develops over the coming months, it may have the long-term consequence of establishing at last the deep, explicit and abiding line of political cleavage across the country which, as I have argued, is the probable precondition of a stable party division. But whether it can do so without developing into a fully-fledged civil war may be doubted. The price for laying the long-term basis for party politics in Algeria, as elsewhere, could prove a very high one.

Documents

The Algerian State and the Challenge of Democracy