History Repeating?
by DAVID PORTER
Quite tragically, Egypt now seems to be following the same bloody path
as Algeria in the 1990s. As I forewarned in an article almost two years
ago,
Egypt’s military, like Algeria’s in 1992, has now succeeded in
splitting the opposition to the old authoritarian regime, maneuvering the
ambitious, self-confident, and most important component of the mass
Islamist movement into direct armed confrontation with the police and
military and forcing most secular opponents to choose between fleeting
hopes for a sustained republican regime or military protection against a
potential Islamist theocracy. Among others, longtime Middle East
observers Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn recently noted this
repeated dynamic between the two countriesand Algerian commentators have done the same.
While details obviously differ, the broad patterns are strikingly similar.
In Algeria, a brief liberalization of the press, electoral openings for new
political parties and space for newly independent organizations
(especially trade unions) from 1989 to 1991 followed important labor
strikes, huge street demonstrations and bloody repression in late 1988
Algiers, just as in Cairo in early 2011. In both countries, the period of
political liberalization was only a façade to hide temporarily the reality of
continuing military control.
In Algeria, an Islamist populist party, the FIS, gained substantial
victories in 1990 municipal elections and a first-round landslide in
legislative polls in December 1991. At this point, the military stepped in,
cancelling the second round and setting up an openly military-dominated
regime. Secular competitors with the Islamists then split between those
insisting that elections proceed, no matter what, in order to save the
young experiment in liberal democracy versus those who opposed that
experiment in principle allied with those fearing a triumphalist Islamism
that would move toward an authoritarian regime of its own. This division
caused bitter recriminations within the Algerian liberal and radical left,
just as it does today in Egypt.
Meanwhile, a growing momentum of armed confrontations and state
repression, beginning even before the 1991 balloting, escalated
dramatically into nearly a decade of full-scale urban and rural guerrilla
civil war between the military and Islamist groups, with civilians caught
in the crossfire. Up to 200,000 Algerians died in the conflict, with
thousands more wounded and disappeared. In addition to village
massacres, Islamists assassinated secular women, teachers, professionals
and journalists and kidnapped women of various ages for sexual
enslavement in rural guerrilla camps. The military, in turn, fearful of
strong and persistent Islamist resistance, carried out massacres and
widespread prisoner tortures of its own.
While the regime eventually offered truces and amnesty to Islamist
guerrillas, providing reintegration into civilian society, a small Islamist
minority, now known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamist Maghreb (AQIM),
continued hostilities to the present from its remote mountain and desert
bases. The military, in turn, has assured its own choice for successive
presidential terms as well as its own continued looting of huge
petrodollar state income and other sources of lucrative corruption.
Though incumbent Abdelaziz Bouteflika seemed likely to be advanced
again for a fourth term in 2014, his massive stroke a few months ago no
doubt precludes that scenario. Nevertheless, rival factions within the
military regime, as before, will surely find a new compromise figure to
impose on an increasingly-alienated Algerian electorate, without concern
for continually deteriorating conditions of daily life for most or for longtime
grassroots demands for political accountability.
Whether Egyptian Islamists can now produce and sustain a strong
guerrilla resistance movement in a terrain quite different from that in
Algeria is still to be seen. Algerian Islamists had the benefit of remote
mountain bases and often local villagers’ support for their actions.
Despite great frustrations over the past year, Egypt’s Islamists still no
doubt have substantial support among millions of impoverished
Egyptians, now radicalized by the military coup. As well, armed Islamist
resistance and aggression in other parts of the Arab world, including
Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, demonstrate the potential for sustained
Islamist guerrilla effectiveness in urban and rural contexts both.
As the military vs. Islamist conflict develops its tragic trajectory in
Egypt, secular liberals and radicals who despise both sides will be caught
in the middle, as in Algeria, and will surely be left on the sidelines for a
long time once the likely guerrilla war has ended.
What began as a “leaderless revolution” in 2011 to depose Mubarak and,
as some hoped, the whole ancien régime as the culmination of popular
grassroots activism in diverse social contexts was coopted by far better
organized Islamists and now the Egyptian military. Hopefully, the once-
experienced exhilaration of successful direct action and temporarily freer
space will sustain the hopes and now more sophisticated organizing
energies of large numbers of the younger generation whose courageous
determination in 2011 provided such inspiration in the Middle East and
North Africa especially, but also throughout the world. In the meantime,
it is up to us to work against oppression in our own countries and toward
the demise of the terrorizing capitalist world system that encourages
both military regimes and authoritarian populisms, theocratic or
otherwise, that are seen as a last chance by desperately poor and
powerless billions.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their
Fellow Men!
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