World View: Suicide bombings in Algeria and Morocco this week claimed by radical groups linked to al-Qaeda raised the question of how these two states have handled Islamic terrorism and whether they now face a prolonged threat from it, writes Paul Gillespie.
There are fears in Algeria that the horrendous violence between the military-led regime and Islamic extremists, in which 200,000 people died during the 1990s, will return. Moroccan leaders pride themselves on having handled this issue more skilfully, allowing Islamist parties gradual access to its political system, still dominated by the monarchy, in such a way as to form a wall against radicals. Parliamentary elections next month in Algeria and in Morocco next September will test the ability of these contrasting authoritarian regimes to offer a credible political course for Islamic reformers.
The two Algiers bombings, in which 33 people died and more than 200 were wounded, were the first suicide attacks to have occurred there, since the 1990s violence involved guerrilla warfare and savage state reprisals rather than this type of car bombing. They were claimed by "al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb", renamed earlier this year from a group with deep roots in the 1990s violence, the extremist Groupes Islamiques Armés, which was involved in the US-organised Afghan resistance in the 1980s. Intelligence reports say there has been a reorganisation on a regional basis, raising the possibility of co-ordinated action throughout the Maghreb region, stretching from Mauritania to Libya and linked to the Islamic resistance in Somalia as well.
Three people blew themselves up with explosive belts in Morocco on Tuesday, killing a police officer and injuring 21 in Casablanca. Police, acting on a tip, had cornered four suspects in a sweep linked to an investigation of a suicide attack at a Casablanca cybercafe last month that killed the bomber and injured four others. Since five suicide bombings killed 45 people in Morocco in May 2003, police have pursued an unprecedented crackdown on suspected militants, arresting thousands of people, including some accused of working with al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
Ominously, in view of the 1990s experience, it was announced this week in Algeria that the Islamic party most likely to gain a plurality in next month's elections will not be allowed to stand because it has not held a party congress. The El Islah party, led by Sheikh Abdallah Djaballah, has had a dispute about its leadership, which the interior minister has sought to exploit. In response, Djaballah said: "You are sending a signal that there is no hope in changing things through peaceful political activity and that the regime concentrates all power in its hands," he said. "You can easily imagine the consequences of such behaviour on the people. We are far from a democratic system."
It was the mishandling of a previous political opening that ushered in the 1990s civil war in Algeria. After a build-up of protest in 1988-89, the regime allowed opposition parties to organise over the next three years in a freer legal and political setting. The newly-formed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) performed extraordinarily well in local and regional elections in 1990 and emerged ahead of all others in the first round of legislative elections in December 1991. The army cancelled the second round in the following month and then banned the party, triggering the revolt which led to civil war.
Since then, the Algerian military and political regime and much of the left there has been crudely split (under French ideological influence) between those who want to exterminate the Islamists as a backward and irrational force threatening secular modernity and conciliators who believe moderate sections of them can be incorporated in a reforming political system. The armed forces continue to dominate Algeria's power system. This is based on extensive informal networking through the government and civil society and majority holdings of the country's rich gas and oil resources, respectively the fifth and 14th largest in the world, which supply much of the EU's energy needs.
Great swathes of Algerian society feel excluded from this system and do not trust it. They call it el hogra and say it treats them with contempt. They find representation from Islamic parties, or from more secular and left-wing ones based on the disadvantaged Berber section of the population, which staged its own revolt in 2001. President Bouteflika has introduced some political, legal and administrative reforms over his two terms in office, but they have not fundamentally altered the existing power structure. There are fears now that those still unwilling to accept conciliation will gain the upper hand by demonising all Islamist movements in the name of an extremism linked to a small minority and that this could reopen the previous violent conflict.
Much has changed in the meantime, however. Since the 9/11 bombings in the US and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, there is much more sympathy for the Algerian regime among powerful western states. The Moroccan, Tunisian and Egyptian governments, too, draw external legitimacy from their opposition to Islamic movements within the "war on terror", using it variously to bolster themselves against internal political and media critics and to restrict human rights. New relationships with Nato and the EU reflect this.
But they also expose the political dilemma involved: how to undermine the Islamic extremists without empowering more radicals or undercutting moderate Islamic parties and movements which are ready to become involved politically if given the chance. Morocco has made considerably more progress in this direction than Algeria, Tunisia or Egypt. A genuine Islamic revival is under way there, reflecting diverse social and political trends, and not simply those based on puritanical rejection of all modernity.
In these north African countries, and elsewhere in the Middle East, an important political experiment is going on in which the major beneficiaries of democratisation are parties unacceptable to those who advocate such political change - most especially the Bush administration. US policy has been suitably adapted to take account of this contradiction by tacking sharply back towards the existing power structures and away from regime change - Iran excepted.