Radical Islam in the Maghreb by Carlos Echeverría Jesús [From: Orbis [Foreign Policy Research Institute, USA), Spring 2004] Carlos Echeverría Jesús is professor of International Relations at Open University in Madrid, professor on Mediterranean security at the Escuela Superior de las Fuerzas Armada, lecturer at the NATO Defence College in Rome on North Africa and Mediterranean issues, and an analyst on Islamist terrorism at the Centre for Analysis and Prospective of the Guardia Civil in Madrid. The Maghreb (from the Arabic word for "West") region is made up fives states: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. Their main common characteristics are the Arabic language, Islam, and historical ties with the Arab world, subsaharan Africa, and Mediterranean Europe. They are also all members of the Arab League and of the Islamic Conference Organization (OIC). Radical Islam and terrorism have spread throughout the region and acquired a high level of militancy. All the states suffer from potential or real Islamist opposition. Radical Islamists believe that the Maghrebi regimes, which have traditionally collaborated with the Christians and the Jews, must be subverted. They gained strength from the bitterness engendered by the 1991 Gulf War; the Bosnian, Chechen, and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts beginning later in the decade; and, more recently, the U.S.-led coalition's defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Algeria's experience after it permitted multiparty elections in 1989, which brought Islamists into power, caused fear in other Maghreb countries and in the West that their democratization could lead to similar takeovers or internal strife. Since 1989, more than 120,000 civilians, military and police personnel, and radical Islamists have been killed in Algeria. Though the circumstances of the Algerian crisis have been uniquely Algerian, the problem is not. Radical Islam in the Maghreb has long been a problem in the region. While no government in North Africa is likely to be overthrown by radical Islamists in the coming years, all will have to deal with the challenges to their rule from moderate Islamist political components and, in a number of countries, also from Islamist terrorists. The region not only faces direct terrorist threats, but also poses a problem to the rest of the world, due to Al Qaeda and the other transnational terrorism groups who have origins there. Secretary of State Colin Powell's November 2003 visit to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia reflects the importance of the region to the United States. In the 1990s, moderate Islamists in Algeria and Morocco, the two countries that initially tolerated the movement, focused on penetrating the civil society and occupying the maximum ground in social sectors. They now publish newspapers and have a significant presence in Moroccan universities. In Algeria, natural disasters such as the 2001 floods in Algiers' Bab-el-Oued borough and the 2003 earthquake in the great Algiers region, together with widespread unemployment or underemployment produced by economic restructuring, have been exploited by both the legal and illegal Islamist groups to gain support. But unlike the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example, the Islamist groups in Algeria and Morocco have not yet been able to use their presence and activism in trade associations to gain control of those groups. Algeria The development of a radical Islamist movement has been a major feature of Algerian political life since the mid-1970s, especially after the death of President Houari Boumediène, the Republic's first president, in December 1978. [1] Boumediène had adopted a policy of Arabization that included phasing out the French language. French professors were replaced by Arabic speakers from Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, many of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The troubles began in 1985, when the Mouvement islamique algérien (MIA), founded to protest the single-party socialist regime, began attacking police stations. Escalating tensions amid declining oil prices culminated in the Semoule revolt in October 1988. More than 500 people were killed in the streets of Algiers in that revolt, and the government was finally forced to undertake reforms. In 1989 it legalized political parties, including the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and over the next two years the Islamists were able to impose their will in many parts of the country, targeting symbols of Western "corruption" such as satellite TV dishes that brought in European channels, alcohol, and women who didn't wear the hiyab (the Islam veil). FIS victories in the June 1990 municipal elections and in the first round of the parliamentary elections held in December 1991 generated fears of an impending Islamist dictatorship and led to a preemptive interruption of the electoral process in January 1992. The next year saw an increase in the violence that had begun in 1991 with the FIS's rhetoric in support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, the growing presence of Algerian "Afghans"—Algerian volunteer fighters returning from the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan—and the November 1991 massacre of border guards at Guemmar, on the border between Algeria and Tunisia. [2] Until mid-1993, victims of MIA, Islamic Salvation Army–AIS (the FIS's armed wing), and Islamic Armed Group (GIA) violence were mostly policemen, soldiers, and terrorists. Later that year the violence expanded to claim both foreign and Algerian civilians. In September 1993, the bodies of seven foreigners were found in various locations around the country.[3] Dozens of judges, doctors, intellectuals, and journalists were also murdered that year. In October 1993 Islamists vowed to kill any foreigner remaining in Algeria after December 1; more than 4,000 foreigners left in November 1993. As writer Tahar Djaout, assassinated some years later by the GIA, put it, "two visions of society separated by ten centuries" were at war. The GIA, which released its first communiqué in late 1993, believes that the best government is a universal caliphate based on the model of the four Rashidin, successors of the Prophet. The government's main priorities in these years were combating terrorism and cleansing the mosques so that it could become the sole purveyor of the Islamic religion. In 1995, its sustained pressure on the terrorist groups' supply lines made it increasingly difficult for them to procure weaponry. At the time, the army was launching major offensives aimed at confining the terrorist groups and generally putting them on the defensive. The movement's operations seemed to indicate that it was gaining organizational efficiency, and its terrorist attacks in France in 1995 suggested it was seeking public-relations successes to compensate for defeats within Algeria and to increase its credibility with outside supporters. Rivalries within the movement increased that year, with the AIS and GIA fragmented by the army's pressures and internal strife. In January 1996 the GIA, which wanted to oust the government militarily, declared war on the AIS, which did not rule out finding a political solution to the crisis. In 1996, there were 14 armed Islamist groups acting in Algeria, six of whom enjoyed some kind of organized support in Europe. Each group had its own arms depots and militants, and all of them were trying to "inherit" the European support networks. The AIS, led by the Emir Madani Merzag, a veteran of Qaddafi's Islamic Legion, enjoyed the support of clandestine networks in France. The GIA, led then by the new emir Antar Zouabri, comprised 600–650 armed men and enjoyed the support of intellectuals and religious leaders such as Abu Qutada and Abu Hamza in Northern Europe, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Completing the picture of Algerian radical Islam are marginal groups such as the GIA led by Emir Kada Benchiha, composed of Algerian Afghans and Bosnians, and the GIA led by Emir Mohamed Mossab, both of which rejected Zouabri's leadership. (The Mossab GIA's Italian support network, the Djamel Lounici's group, was dismantled by Italian police early in 1996.). Between 1995 and 1999 the Algerian government applied an antiterrorist strategy based on three pillars: a military offensive by the army, security forces, and the intelligence services; a political offensive; and a more subtle propaganda war. Military Offensive. Military and civilian assets working together proved highly efficient in arming village guards and other paramilitary units for self defense. Over the course of 1995 the authorities distributed weapons among villagers in the countryside, and in small towns the people were guarded against Islamist activists by self-defense groups who called themselves Patriots (which were legalized in January 1997). By the beginning of 1996 the army had significantly increased the percentage of territory it controlled and turned the tide against the rebels. The AIS and GIA came to depend less on classic guerrilla warfare and more on a strategy of destabilization, including using explosives for bomb attacks on crowded markets. Booby-trapped cars, assassinations, and roadblocks were proof that the terrorists could no longer launch major military attacks. They were taking the battle away from the mountains and plains and into the cities and the desert areas of southern Algeria, where the country's vital hydrocarbon wealth is located. The extension of violence to the south, following a GIA threat to oil workers when the government signed contracts with foreign oil companies BP, Total, Repsol, and Arco, was a significant new security development. In February 1996, the international Arabic-language press published the GIA's threat to kill any employees of Algerian companies such as Sonatrach and Naftal or any of their foreign partners who did not abandon their work immediately, as well as army reservists who left their home areas. In September 1996, GIA's Emir Zouabri pronounced a death sentence on anyone who participated in the privatization of state enterprises or worked in the hydrocarbons sector, on the grounds that the revenue from foreign oil companies was bolstering the regime. The increase in civilian casualties entailed by the new terrorist strategy fueled divisions within the ranks of the Islamist movement that helped the army negotiate a cease-fire with the AIS. Political Offensive. After President Liamine Zeroual, the former Defense Minister who had been appointed president by the High Council of State in 1994, decided to hold elections in November 1995, the Algerian establishment agreed to a clear division of labor. While the president's main task was to campaign for the elections, the army and security services would intensify their operations to ensure maximum security for them. Moderate Islamist candidates steered a careful path between their Islamist identity and respect for the constitution and electoral laws, which forbid parties based on religion and the use of mosques for political activities. Zeroual won the election, in which 75 percent of the Algerian electorate reportedly participated, with a comfortable majority of 61 percent, and even the FIS accepted the results. A clemency law was passed that allowed members of armed groups to give themselves up to the security forces. Given the election results, Washington concluded that Algeria's regime had won the war against Islamists, a conclusion that belied the Clinton administration's earlier prediction that the Algerian regime would be toppled by a bloody insurrection. The visit of high-level U.S. officials to Algiers in the first quarter of 1996 signaled new U.S. cooperation. In December 1996, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detained Anwar Haddam, head of the banned FIS parliamentary mission abroad, in Washington pending deportation hearings.[4] Counterterrorism. Meanwhile, on the border with Niger, which was thought to be a potential source of weapons for the terrorist groups, the government arranged for the Agadez and Tahoua areas to be policed by joint patrols made up of the Army, the Gendarmerie, the Tassara vigilante committees, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the North, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and the Front for the Liberation of Tamoust. Other former rebel organizations were invited to join the patrols, which seemed likely to help restore authority over the northern regions. The Algerian-Malian border has also been important in counterterrorism strategies. In the mid-1990s Algeria played an important role as mediator in Bamako's struggle with Twareg and Arab rebels in the north of the country. But the situation remained tense and unstable in the west, around the Moroccan border, where disparate armed groups appeared to be coordinating their activities and seemingly finding routes to safe haven in Morocco. Political Institutions. In 1997 the government completed forming all the various elected institutions required under its new constitution. In a November 1996 referendum considered to be the cornerstone of true democracy in Algeria, Algerians had voted to amend the constitution to concentrate power in the presidency and to prevent political parties from exploiting religion. In June 1997 Algerians went to the polls for the first parliamentary elections in six years and elected the first multi-party government. In municipal and provincial polls held in October 1997, the National Democratic Union, a government-sponsored party, won over half of the vote; the former ruling party, the National Liberation Front–FLN, came in second, with one-fifth of the vote. The elections were the final part of an institutional process aimed at increasing the regime's legitimacy and consolidating its powers. It provided roles for moderate Islamist parties, including leadership of several ministries. As an additional concession, it reenacted the law generalizing the use of the Arabic language, which had been frozen in 1996. The law called for completing the process of generalizing the use of Arabic by July 1998. The election campaigns provoked an increase in both GIA massacres of civilians and in disputes among the former FIS's leadership. The side led by Rabah Kébir and the exiled leadership favored making the FIS respectable and seeking its legalization. In parallel, the AIS negotiated a cease-fire that opened the door to its reinsertion in the political arena. The cease-fire was implemented after Abdelaziz Bouteflika became president in 1999. Meanwhile, brutal GIA attacks on vulnerable settlements alienated its potential supporters and led to the formation in 1998 of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which owed its existence directly to Osama bin Laden. Led by Hassan Hattab, the GSPC is active in the forests and mountains of Kabylia, which provide a refuge for terrorist cells despite the profusion of self-defense groups there. The group specializes in attacks against the armed forces and security services. In 2003, it was involved in the kidnapping of 32 Western tourists in the south of Algeria. Propaganda War. In February 1996, the Interior Ministry issued a strongly worded warning to the Algerian press not to publish reports of security-related matters deriving from non-official sources. A few days later, the Ministry revived at the offices of Algeria's newspapers the censorship committees first established in 1994. The government also took control of the flow of security-related information to the Arabic media abroad. But it faced an additional problem: out of the 10,000 mosques in the country, 2,600 were not under the control of an employee of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was trying to find practical means of clarifying the role of imams and provincial religious affairs directors in teaching Islam. In January 1997, Minister of Religious Affairs Ahmed Merani pointed out that his Ministry was doing its best to protect mosques from corruption and keep them solely places of worship, not venues for politicking. Radical Islamist attacks against popular Islam also remained a threat. An October 1996 attack on a Tijania Sufi mosque at Kardan underlined the growing dichotomy between the radical Islamists' quest for extreme Islamic orthodoxy and more traditional, local forms of belief and worship. When he was elected president in 1999 (in an uncontested election), President Bouteflika inherited a flagging peace process. He paid special attention not only to the fight against terrorism but also to national reconciliation, through the Civilian Concord Law that had been approved by referendum. In 2000, more than 6,000 members of the AIS and other groups returned to their homes, the president asserts. In February 2000, at Marrakesh, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen announced that Washington planned to expand and enhance its contacts with Algeria. Washington has supported normalization of Algeria's relations, including Algeria's adherence to NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue and enhanced U.S.-Algerian cooperation on security and defense matters, which began even before the 9/11 attacks.[5] Libya During the 1990s, Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi staged a fierce campaign against radical Islamists in Libya, especially the armed groups in the eastern part of the country, which has witnessed clashes between these groups and government security forces. In June 1996 eight Libyan policemen were killed in an attack carried out by Islamists in Darnah, in the east. In 1996–97 Libya negotiated with several Gulf capitals and Sudan for extradition of Libyan Islamists trained in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.[6] Some 70 out of 300 Arab veterans of that war residing in Sudan were Libyans, and Tripoli believed that there was a connection between these Libyan "Afghans" and the Sudanese government. At the same time, Qaddafi continued to support some radical Islamist groups abroad through Dawaa al-Islamiya, which was an active Libyan instrument for external propaganda. The regime has curtailed this practice with the normalization of its international relations in recent years, and in 1994 Qaddafi promised President Zeroual to cease providing support for Algerian Islamists. This pledge came after Libya had been accused of helping those groups cross into Algeria through the Libyan desert after receiving training in camps in Sudan. In September 1995 Egypt claimed to have evidence of the existence in neighboring Sudan of twenty camps for training terrorists to operate in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and Libya. The next year, Algerian Islamists claimed that hundreds of FIS activists who had taken refuge in Libya had disappeared in mysterious circumstances after Algiers and Tripoli signed a security cooperation agreement. In 1998, there were reports of armed confrontations between Islamists and security forces in Benghazi, in the core of eastern Libya, and the Libyan government released through Interpol the first international alert against Osama bin Laden. Since 9/11, Libya has played an active role in the international war on terror, through its full participation at the Ministerial Conference of Interior Ministers of the Western Mediterranean, as an observer in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership's Barcelona Process, at the UN, and in bilateral cooperation with former enemies such as the UK and the United States. After the U.S.-led war on Iraq, it also agreed to dismantle its WMD. Morocco In the early 1990s, its European proponents claimed that the Kingdom of Morocco was on a new liberal path, politically and economically, that deserved Europe's support to stem the tide of radical Islam in the Maghreb. Rabat often pointed to the danger of Islamism in Algeria or Egypt as a way of demonstrating the advantages of its own regime. King Hassan's decision to send 1,200 troops to join the forces of the anti-Saddam coalition on the Saudi-Kuwait border in the 1991 Gulf War, even if they were not be used for the liberation of Kuwait, was less than popular and sent a frisson of resentment around the country.[7] Morocco's Islamists are barred from setting up parties, denied legal status as associations, and kept under a close watch. But they have been allowed to gather, arrange social events, publish newspapers, and preach a stricter adherence to Islamic values. None of the groups advocates violence, but certain violent factions do exist in Morocco, as was evident in 1994, when a cell of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Movement (MIC) assassinated two Spanish tourists at the Atlas Asni Hotel in Marrakesh. Morocco accused the Algerian Secret Service of being behind the attack and imposed a visa requirement for Algerians wishing to enter the country, leading the Algeria to close the border. In fact, the radical Islamist groups had been operating in Morocco since the early '90s, led by Moroccan "Afghans" who led attacks such as those against a McDonald's in Casablanca and the Société Marocaine de Dêpot Bank in Oudja in 1993 and against the Makro department store in Casablanca in 1994. After their arrest in France, in 1997 a Paris court sentenced members of the MIC network involved in the Atlas Asni Hotel attack. Moroccan police arrested a group of arms smugglers made up of 12 Moroccan members of the Jamaat al-Adl wal-Ihsan (Justice and Charity) and five Algerian GIA members in 1995, seizing a number of Kalashnikovs and pistols, homemade explosives, radio transmitter-receivers, and night-vision equipment. Two months later Morocco sentenced eight people for smuggling weapons to Algerian armed groups. Clashes broke out in Casablanca in January 1997 between security forces and hundreds of students, most of whom were Islamists who had been attending the trial of three of their comrades. Several people were injured. The Islamists had imposed strikes and sit-ins, much as the General Union of Moroccan Students had done in the 1960s, and stirred up tension on the campuses. They continue to engage in grassroots activism in trade unions, especially the Democratic Confederation of Labour. For the time being, they have not created a specific Islamist trade union, as the FIS did with its Workers Islamic Trade Union. However, they are attaining positions in several professional sections of existing trade unions and have demonstrated their intention to foment strikes and obstruct any agreements' being reached between the unions and the government. At the end of the 1990s, the social and political conditions in Morocco were favorable for radical Islam. These conditions included a concentration of wealth, corruption at various levels of the administration, and high unemployment (especially among those of age 15–25). The political class in Morocco and in Europe feared that demanding social justice and freer political expression would produce popular explosions in the absence of King Hassan's agile exercise of power. However, since Hassan II's death in August 1999, his son, Mohammed VI, has embarked on a careful process of transition and modernization. Moderate Islamists are becoming relevant in politics through the Hizb al-Adala wal-Tanmiyya (Justice and Development Party–PJD), and radical Islamists are also getting some protagonism. The PJD has been effective in its frontal opposition against the steps taken in 1999 by socialist then-prime minister Abderrahmane Yussufi to reform the Mudawwana, the code of personal status. In March 2000 it staged a "One Million March" in Casablanca to protest the reforms. Legislative and local elections held in 2002 and 2003 evidence the wide support they enjoy. By March 2002, Libération warned of the presence of "fundamentalist gangs organized as private militia groups spreading a reign of terror among the suburbs." In Fez, terrorists had set up roadblocks to identify drivers and hunt down alcohol users, something that carries an ugly ring of events in Algeria in the 1990s. Along with the rise of political Islam came a new terror threat. Since 9/11, the international activities of Islamist terrorism and the presence of Moroccans in its midst—17 Moroccans are imprisoned in Guantanamo—has been an issue of growing concern to the security forces, the intelligence service, and the armed forces. A combined operation led by the head of the internal information service, Gen. Amidou Laanigri, thwarted May 2002 attacks against Western warships in the Straits of Gibraltar. These would-be attacks demonstrated the presence of an increasingly globalized Islamist terrorist network extending throughout North Africa and Europe. The 17 Moroccans held in Guantanamo Bay provided the information that permitted the arrest of three Saudis apparently acting as liaisons for Al Qaeda and four Moroccan accomplices. They had apparently received instructions on carrying out terrorist attacks in Morocco from Mullah Bilal, who was responsible for Al Qaeda operations in North Africa and the Middle East. They appeared in court in Casablanca in June 2002, and it seemed clear that since the start of 2001 the suspects had been recruiting prospective terrorists from the Moroccan wing of the Islamic Combatant Group–GIC, which has links to the Algerian GSPC. Fear of infiltration by Islamist extremism within the state's own ranks is another danger. In January 2003, the Royal Gendarmerie arrested an army sergeant, Yusef Amani, who had stolen Kalashnikov rifles from the Guercif barracks, intending to provide them to an Islamist cell in Meknes. All these trends were dramatically confirmed by the May 2003 synchronized suicide attacks in Casablanca, which left 45 dead and dozens wounded.Since then, hundreds of militants in the Salafiya Djihadia Moroccan network and alleged Al Qaeda members have reportedly been arrested. For the time being, Morocco has approved rigid counterterrorism legislation and reinforced its links with international partners such as France, Spain, and the United States to combat the globalized radical Islamist terrorism threat. In this context, the king, who has this prerogative as the supreme religious authority in the country, instructed the parliament in December 2003 to pass a new personal code modernizing the Mudawwana. Tunisia Since November 1987, when he took over from former Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali has fought against radical Islamists in the Republic and tried to undercut the Islamist Harkat Nahida party's support by creating jobs and development. During the 1990s, the regime appropriated the slogans of Islamists and made itself the champion of youth, providing job opportunities for the poor and unemployed. President Ben Ali has developed a system of social assistance for disadvantaged communities through a solidarity fund run by the presidency, a program that has won UN support as a model for other countries and regions. But since becoming the first Mediterranean country to sign an EU Association Agreement in 1995 toward establishing a free-trade zone with the EU by 2010, Tunisia is in a delicate transition period. Liberalization of the economy and privatization have brought tensions. The number of new job seekers will rise over the next few years, and unemployment levels are already reaching about 15 percent. With a small domestic market (the total population is about 10 million), Tunisia has to compete for foreign direct investment with countries of the Mediterranean as well as Eastern Europe and Asia.The government's fears of radical Islam and its obsession with security threaten to further undermine its political position.[8] Islamism in Tunisia has traditionally been a reaction to the secularization programs of presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali and to President Ben Ali's growing personality cult, but it has also been activated from abroad. In the 1989 general elections, the last attended by the Islamists, even the government's unpublished polls showed Harkat Nahida candidates polling over 50 percent in some constituencies. The next year Islamists applied formally, as Ennahda (Renaissance), for registration as a political party, which was refused on the grounds that it was a religious organization, not a political party. Shortly thereafter Ennahda was implicated in bombing a building in Tunis belonging to the government party. One hundred leading members of the party were detained and its newspaper banned.[9] The terrorism threat from neighboring Algeria has aroused concern in Tunisia since the early 1990s, especially after an attack in Guemmar, on the Algerian border, in November 1991 and the appearance of clear signs of links between Algerian terrorist groups and Tunisian Islamists. In summer 1992 a large trial in Tunis confirmed the extent of Islamism in the armed forces and the real threat of coup d'état: 50 of 171 Ennahda members, and many of its so-called Commandos of Sacrifice, came from the military/security apparatus.[10] A major diplomatic incident between Tunisia and the UK was provoked in 1993 when Ennahda's leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, who had been sentenced to death in absentia for alleged involvement in terrorism in Tunis, was granted asylum by the British Home Office. The affair illustrates the differences in perception between the Maghreb countries and the Western countries on questions of political rights, as Algerian and Tunisian officials were prompt to point out in September 2001. The veteran Foreign Affairs minister, Habib Ben Yahia, initiated discussion of terrorism in the Arab League in 1993, and Tunis has been in regular consultation with allies such as Algeria, Egypt, and Tunis, exchanging information and coordinating activities, for a decade. More recently, Tunisia's economic growth, improved education and living standards for the rising middle class, and coercive security measures against real and suspected terrorists have kept Islamist politics quiescent. To Tunis, Algeria's problems only showed the folly of allowing elections that include Islamists. Many Tunisians are reluctant to support a cause that seems to threaten economic growth. Ennahda has been silenced at home and the activities of its exiled leader curtailed.[11] The involvement of Tunisian terrorists in Al Qaeda's assassination of Commandant Ahmed Shah Massoud in Tajikistan on September 9, 2001, and, above all, the April 2002 suicide car bombing in Djerba's La Ghriba Synagogue, which left 19 dead and dozens wounded, only intensified Tunis' counterterrorism efforts.[12] Mauritania The Islamic Republic of Mauritania's recognition of the State of Israel in 1995, its perpetual ethnic problems, its weakness, and its chronic security deficit have led to an upsurge of radical Islamist activism over the past decade. In 1995, Mauritanian authorities launched the first massive police operation against radical Islamist networks, and the next year they began a major crackdown on arms smuggling into Algeria, focusing on the triangle of arid territory defined by it, Western Sahara, and Mali.[13] More than 40 suspects were arrested in connection with contraband arms formerly belonging to the Azawad's Malian Touareg rebels, one among many rebel movements that are the real actors in the volatile Sahelian region. While Mauritania undoubtedly had its own reasons for cracking down on illicit arms dealings, Algiers presumably encouraged these moves. Algiers' influence is strong in Nouakchott. Also, the Algerian oil industry, which controls 55 percent of production and distribution of oil-based products in Mauritania, was reportedly considering the possibility of prospecting for oil and gas along the Mauritanian coast, a region that is becoming of more and more interest after exploration there by Australian and British oil companies in 2003. In summer 2003, a coup attempt against President Ould Taya highlighted the need for the West to support this country, which, because of its location in the extremely sensitive region connecting the Maghreb with subsaharan Africa, must not become a failed state. The West and the Maghreb: Lessons Learned Fear that the FIS triumph in Algeria could lead to Islamist takeovers throughout North Africa left most Western governments secretly siding, although weakly, with the Algerian government in the early 1990s. The Europeans additionally feared that turmoil in the Maghreb might mean waves of immigrants and/or refugees to Europe. At the same time, the Islamists' free-market economic programs, promoting an "Islamic" economy in which the state would disengage from most economic activities, made it seem that removing the economic, social, and political causes for these movements was the best option.[14] The Maghreb states had in fact all been vulnerable to the advance of radical Islam since the end of the 1980s, as impoverished masses sought refuge in Islam during the turbulent process of modernization and globalization. The most important security concern for the Maghreb in the mid-1990s was that Europe might play the role of home base for the Islamists, as was true for some European countries. At that time, European governments were reluctant to speak of an "Islamist International," but it was clear to a number of North African governments that radical Islam had external sources—arms trade and funding through Europe, connected with smuggling and drugs. It was also clear that Islamist terrorism had begun to affect European interests, with acts including the assassination of Europeans in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco or Tunisia; the hijacking of the Air France Airbus in Algiers in December 1994 and of two Air Algeria aircrafts over Spain in 1994; the series of bombings in France in 1995-96; and arms trafficking in Belgium, France, Germany, and Spain. Western governments, mainly in Europe, finally asked whether the political agendas of radical Islamists in the Maghreb were strictly focused on confrontation with their own governments or if elements of a substantial transnational agenda against the West could be identified. The Maghreb regimes hoped their European counterparts would begin to crack down on the GIA and other groups in the terrorists' support networks, but it took years for their hopes to be fulfilled. Finally in 1995 a number of European nations began to reinforce bilateral and multilateral links with North Africa. In Algeria, the government's counter-insurrectionist strategy, begun in 1992, eventually reduced the number of active radical Islamists. Both Algeria and Morocco have explored how to coopt Islamist opposition forces within the system, as with the Society for Peace Movement (formerly Hamas) and Islah (formerly Ennahda) in Algeria and the PJD in Morocco, isolating only the violent factions. At the same time, for the radical Islamists, the West—even if it is seen as apathetic to the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine, Afghanistan, or Iraq—is an attractive refuge. The Islamist networks have exploited disputes between European and Maghreb states, such as that between Paris and Algiers after the interruption of elections in 1992, and among the European states themselves, such as the one between the northern and southern European countries on the nature of these networks in Europe. The reluctance of a number of Western countries to do their part in combating terrorism in the Maghreb only strengthened the Islamists. The Europeans' belief that conflicts in the Maghreb did not significantly affect their national interests, along with the fact that the greater impact of this terrorism was on France, the former colonial power and the European country with the largest Maghrebi population, increased other Western countries' reticence to coordinate their counterterrorism efforts. That Rashid Ghannouchi found asylum in the UK, Anwar Haddam in the United States, and Rabah Kébir in Germany, all engaging in activism until the authorities finally decided to control their activities, was only the visible part of the iceberg. Radical Islamists from the Maghreb enjoyed Western liberties during the 1990s on European, American, and also Canadian soil, attaining the rights of "political activists" while actually feeding clandestine terror networks. Fortunately, increased government networking began in the Mediterranean as globalization called for coordinated approaches to transnational issues. The Algerian government finally started to benefit from overt or covert European initiatives to dismantle the Islamists' European networks and to cut supplies and money. Members of Djamal Lounici's terrorist group were arrested in summer 1995 in Italy and tried there in April 1997. Lounici had been sentenced to death in Algiers in a separate trial for his involvement in the attack at Houari Boumediène International Airport in 1992. In December 1996, Italy and Morocco signed an additional protocol to their 1987 Cooperation Agreement concerning terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking. Maghreb states and the West must continue to work together on terrorism, which is increasingly involving citizens from both areas, some holding dual nationalities.[15] At the level of inter-Arab relations, Tunisia's and Egypt's counterterrorism efforts at the Arab League and the OIC have had more rhetorical than operational results. In December 1993, Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia claimed that Sudan was home to the Islamist International, as reflected in the meeting of Hassan el Turabi's Arab and Islamic Popular Congress in Khartoum and another, larger conference in 1995. Washington accused members of the Sudanese Delegation to the UN of being involved in the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The firm U.S. policy towards the Sudanese regime in 1995–96 was instrumental in stopping this Sudanese support to radical Islamist groups in the Maghreb. Algerian terrorist groups found their main sources of weapons supply in the Maghreb and other African countries (Morocco, Libya, Chad, or Mali) in the mid-nineties. They benefited from the lack of either border control or cooperation among states in the region. The improvement of Algerian-Libyan and Algerian-Malian cooperation made it possible to crack down on these sources of weapons. Since 9/11, the Arab Maghreb Union, which held its first meeting since 1994 in January 2002, has been working to develop common criteria for joint analysis of terrorism. For the time being, the increasingly motivated radical Islamist groups in the Maghreb and abroad are proving that they can function with minimal resources. Despite the shutdown of funding sources, weapons and explosives remain easy to obtain. The most important lesson learned by the Maghreb and the West is that radical Islamist terrorism must no longer be able to benefit from the lack of a common international consensus on what constitutes terrorism and the absence of coordinated counterterrorism initiatives. Footnotes: (1) Hugh Roberts, "Radical Islamism and the Dilemma of Algerian Nationalism: The Embattled Arians of Algiers" Third World Quarterly, April 1988, p. 556. (2) Mohamed Issami, Le FIS et le terrorisme. Au coeur de l'enfer Algiers, Le Matin Éditions, 2001, pp. 255–73. (3) Lara Marlowe, "Algeria: Macabre Arithmetic," Time, Dec. 13, 1993. (4) Haddam was freed in 2000 and remains in the United States; he faces a death sentence in Algeria. (5) "Boutef Rides his Luck" Africa Confidential, Feb. 18, 2000. (6) Ray Takeyh, "Qadhafi and the Challenge of Militant Islam," Washington Quarterly, Summer 1998. (7) Jonathan Farley, "The Maghreb's Islamic Challenge" World Today, Aug.-Sept. 1991, pp. 149–50. (8) Nicolas Demezieres, "La Tunisie, ou le triumphe du `tout-sécuritaire'," Relations Internationales et Stratégiques, Winter 1994, pp. 128–30. (9) Farley, "The Maghreb's Islamic Challenge," p. 151. (10) In this trial of 279 Islamists, 265 were found guilty of offenses against the state and 46 received life sentences. (11) Maha Azzam, "Recent Developments Among Islamist Groups" in Volker Perthes, ed., Political Islam and Civil Society in Northern Africa. Four Approaches, Ebenhausen/Isartal, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, May 1998, p. 19. (12) Élise Colette, "Comment Massoud a été piégé," Jeune Afrique/l'Intelligent, Feb. 11–17, 2002. (13) The need to bring this area under control is evidenced by the build-up in 2003 of a facility in the southern Algerian city of Tammanrasset for the U.S. National Security Agency. (14) Pedro Moya, "The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism and the Future of Democracy in North Africa," Interim Report of the Subcommittee on the Mediterranean Basin International Secretariat of the North Atlantic Assembly, Nov. 1994. (15) François Soudan, "Maghreb-États-Unis: L'ami algérien," Jeune Afrique/l'Intelligent, Jan. 5–11, 2003, p. 39. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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