ShareThisBy MARK MACKINNON
Toronto Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 17, 2007
The Algerian army is engaged in fierce battles with Islamic militants. A triple suicide-bombing in Algiers last month killed 33 people, damaging the prime minister's office.
You can forgive Zakia Chaoati for thinking the bad old days have returned. "Of course we're afraid. We remember the times when we couldn't go outside, when we couldn't live normally," the 39-year-old employee of a pharmaceutical company said between bites of her panini in one of Algiers's many French-style cafes. "We can't go through that again. That would be folly."
Algerians voted Thursday to choose a new parliament, with anxiety and apathy fighting for places in their hearts. Sixteen years ago, it was legislative elections with early results showing that the Islamic Salvation Front was about to win a sweeping majority that prompted military intervention and a decade-long civil war that left more than 150,000 people dead.
A repeat is almost impossible this time around since the Islamic Salvation Front, known here by its French acronym FIS, is now banned. The parties that are expected to do well are all closely aligned with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is widely credited with bringing a modicum of peace and stability to the country over his eight years in power, an achievement that now seems in some jeopardy.
The feeling of deja vu that nags painfully at many Algerians stems not from nervousness over the election results, but from the cat-and-mouse battles being fought in the east and south of the country. Government troops and helicopter gunships are engaged in combat with the descendants of the 1990s struggle, who ominously rebranded themselves last year as the al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb.
The country's Islamists have warned that the precarious situation in the country could swiftly devolve into another Iraq.
More than 200 people have already died this year in the renewed round of political violence.
The triple-suicide bombings of April 11 followed a pair of attacks on buses carrying foreign workers that left five people dead and more than a dozen others, injured. The U.S. embassy in Algiers has since contributed to the rising panic by warning on its Web site that the central post office and the headquarters of the state television station might also be targeted.
Al Qaeda's new offensive is believed to be fueled by a stream of Algerians who are returning from the war in Iraq to pass on skills and tactics to local fighters.
For all its successes in restoring order, Bouteflika's regime is also seen as autocratic and deeply corrupt.
"We're indifferent to the elections, because there are no real elections.
The winner is already known, and the seats have been divided up in advance according to quotas," said Ali Yehi, a 48-year-old retired banker who was among a group of men playing dominoes on a tree-shaded main square.
The other players grunted in agreement.
But officials with the National Liberation Front, the party that dominates Algerian politics, say they're confident that they have the people's trust no matter what the voter participation level.
Mourad Lamoudi, a member of the party's executive committee, said that voters understood that the country was still stabilizing itself, and that unemployment and homelessness would be tackled as investors return to the country and the economy continues to recover from the lost decade of the 1990s.
While the government has made a show of allowing several moderately Islamist parties to take part in the elections, its most bitter opponents remain outside the electoral process.
Those who led the struggle against the government 16 years ago say they have no connections to the recent attacks, though they won't go so far as to condemn them. Kamel Guemazi, a former mayor of Algiers who helped found the FIS 19 years ago, says the government is to blame for the repression and widespread poverty that have driven so many young Muslims to take up arms against the regime.
"We condemn the authorities for putting us in this situation," Guemazi said in an interview at an apartment in an Algiers neighbourhood that was known as an FIS stronghold before the civil war. "It's not a problem of Islam or Islamists. It is a problem of a dictator and a people who are violently oppressed."
Mr. Guemazi said the elections were a fraud since the FIS was not allowed to participate. "They bar us because they know we are still powerful."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
