Foreign Policy In Focus

The Algerian hostage crisis was not only both a human and political fiasco, but its regional implications are still evolving.

Read Part 1. 

"There are two kinds of history – the official kind, full of lies, which is taught in schools –  history ad usum delphini; and there is secret history – in which we learn the real causes of events  – a shameful chronicle."
-- Les Illusions Perdues, Balzac

Mali: New Front of the War on Terrorism

No doubt the attack on the In-Amenas oil and gas facility in the Algerian Sahara is related to the events in Mali, where France has just landed troops in an effort to dislarge the Islamic militants who have taken over Mali's  northern regions.  What are the pretexts, the deeper logic of the French Malian intervention? One would think that people wouldn't fall for it yet again: 'We're just sending the troops to protect innocent lives and support democracy' – humanitarian interventionalism. Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.

Now add Mali to the list.

But once again, it works like a charm, long enough at least to get French troops on the ground in Mali from whence it will difficult to extract them for some time. It helps to have a weak UN Security Council resolution a la Libya which doesn't condone sending troops  but is vague enough to give a thin veil of legitimacy – the suggestion of international law at work – to cover war crimes. Combine that with some wacko Salafist radicals, a vital element in the mix, who destroy Sufi shrines and rough up women, forcing them, veiled, back in the kitchen without music on the radio and the combustible mix is complete.

Enter French President Francois Hollande, his popularity sagging at home as the French socio-economic crisis deepens. Lying with a straight face, Hollande told his nation and the world that by sending French troops to Mali with jet fighter cover that "France has no other purpose than to fight terrorism."  France only wants to help Mali 'recover its territorial integrity' and make sure there are "legitimate authorities and an electoral process."

Touching.

It plays well in Paris where the Mali diversion works to make a weak and confused French president look strong and determined. The call for a French-led, secular jihad to counter an exaggerated Islamic jihad gets the French public singing La Marseillaise! in unison. If the United States led the charge in opening the first front on the War on Terrorism, France, where Islamophobia has a long and esteemed history, can provide the shock troops for the second front, the Sahara. French military intervention plays well in Washington too.

The Obama Administration has been unable, until now, to pressure its choice strategic ally, Algeria, to enter the Malian fray. With its eye on an Asian-Pacific military buildup, Washington itself is unwilling to send U.S. troops (other than some Special Forces types we have to assume are involved) to Mali. Hollande's willingness to act as the Sahara's Netanyahu suits the Obama Administration and its likely new Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel.

Hollande's Song

Missing from Hollande's 'We-only-want-to- help-out-the-poor-Malian-people' scenario is France's sorry history in post-colonial history of shamelessly supporting  some of the worst African dictators in exchange for economic access, its complicity in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its specific historic interest going back to the 1890s to control the Sahara and its extraordinary wealth in oil, natural gas, uranium, gold and other natural resources.

The French even have a term for it: 'Francafrique'. Some French commentators speak of the French military incursion into Mali as the 'return of Francafrique', a bit misleading, as, since the independence wave of the 1960s, France never left Africa. Its neo-colonial relationship with its former colonies is an unbroken chain of cynical economic deals lubricated by massive corruption of its African client elites.

To understand the French intervention in Mali, it helps to take Hollande's words and rework them a bit to 'France is intervening in Mali to protect the extensive French economic interests in the region – oil, natural gas, uranium and gold'. These interests, both those in full operation and those yet to come extend across the Sahara in Chad, Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. For example. although uranium is not yet mined in Mali, it is mined in nearby northern Niger by Areva, one of the world's largest uranium mining companies, French owned. The French get most of the profits and benefits thereof. The Sahara locals wind up with little more than polluted water tables and piles of radioactive tailings.

Pre-empting the Spectre of Chinese Influence

Under the surface, beneath the French song about promoting liberté, égalité, and fraternité in Mali with French Special Forces troops and Mirage jet fighters, one notices  'un certain nervosite'. Yep, the French power circles are getting the shakes over the instability in Mali. The fear, like most paranoia, is vague, and while not totally imaginary, it is grossly exaggerated.

No, it is not the Algerian-trained (by the DRS) Saharan Islamicists that strike fear into the heart of the French elite…small potatoes. It's China! Of course. Uncertainty over how the situation might play out throughout the Sahara region  is at the source of French concern. Political changes in the region could jeopardize France's sizeable uranium, petro-chemical and other strategic raw material access. For a country in which 70% of electrical power comes from nuclear power, and most of the uranium to run it comes from the Sahara, this is serious.

If this part of the scenario is accurate then there is another way to consider French military actions in Mali: little more than a pre-emptive, defensive military maneuver meant to keep China out of Mali (and Niger and Chad among other places) and for France to retain its access to the Saharan wealth on which it depends.

While uranium has not been mined yet in Mali (or in Chad), surveys done by the French in the 1950s located significant potential sources of the stuff there. Geologists also claim there could be yet more Saharan oil and natural gas throughout the Sahara region from Mauritania to the Sudan, much of which – including Mauretania, Mali, Niger and Chad – has yet to be unearthed. 

But  for the people of the Sahara, the French-created Saharan national boundaries mean little. Where Mali ends and Niger begins is not found on the Tuareg mental map of the region they have lived in for several thousand years. The French fear that the instability in Mali could spill over into Niger, where France has several major uranium mine, with another one about to open for business. Perhaps this gives some insights as to why France has concentrated virtually all of its African military bases in Africa, either in, or within striking distance of the Sahara. One should expect that one outcome of the current French military campaign in Mali is another permanent base somewhere, perhaps between Timbuctou and Gao, north of the Niger River.

Some Historical Considerations

Hollande's 'solidarity' with Mali, his eagerness to send French troops there, is merely the latest episode in France's 125-year effort to gain control the Sahara belt countries from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, an effort in which they were only partially successful. 

French conquest of the Sahara began badly. The first mission, the so-called Flatters Mission, taken in 1881 from Algeria, was entirely wiped out by Tuareg bands. Others would proceed only with difficulty. It would take the French nearly twenty years to recover and reconvene its Sahara thrust eastward. The French march to the Red Sea was again stopped at Fashoda in 1898 when the French offensive ran into British troops which it wisely decided not to confront militarily. 

The decisive military confrontation that gave France control of the rest of the Sahara took place shortly after, in 1902. A French military contingent under Lieutenant Cottenest wiped out a band of 300 Tuareg fighters in the Ahaggar region (in the Sahara by the current Algerian-Libyan border) .

There were other setbacks. Early 20th-century attempts to dominate the Fezzan (Western Libya) were checked first by the Italians and later after World War II by combined U.S. and British pressure which expelled their military missions from Libya. France had hoped to annex this region to Algeria. Shortly thereafter, in the early 1950s, oil was discovered there. 

French military activity in Mali, as part of a larger plan to dominate the region and its resources, is nothing new. Twice in the 20th century, France considered creating something of an independent Saharan political unit, under French control of course first during World War One, and later, a more serious attempt in the 1950s.

The first campaign to create a 'French Sahara' was led by a French priest, one Father Charles de Foucauld, assassinated in Tamanrasset (in the Algerian Sahara)  in December, 1916. Foucauld's vision, which had some support in French circles of power, was to create an ethnic state, what he referred to as a 'pan-Tuareg' political entity in the Sahara that would cut the Algerian Sahara off from the northern part of the country, isolating the Arab North from sub-Saharan Black Africa.

Following the racist logic of French colonialism, Foucauld believed that the Tuaregs, an offshot of the Berbers, were racially close to Europeans, superior to the Arabs who represented a kind of second rung of humanity. Black Africans, whom Foucauld considered virtually ineducable, were at the bottom of his racial pyramid. According to his thinking Foucauld hoped to create an ethnically pure Tuareg Sahara that would be closely linked to France culturally and economically.

These ideas were clearly expressed in one of Foucauld's many letters to members of the French parliament:

"How can we civilize our African empire?" he asks, the 'burning question' of the pre-WW I years. "Doubtless it consists of variable elements: Berbers (the Tuareg) capable of rapid progress, Arabs slow to progress. The diverse Black populations, by themselves, cannot achieve civilized status, but all should advance to the degree capable."¹

How generous and liberal a spirit!

Although Foucauld's ideas never materialized into an all-Saharan entity that would rip off the Algerian Sahara and combine it with French colonized Saharan areas of Chad, Niger and Mali, his program resonated among certain pro-colonial and mining circles in the French Parliament, and like a phoenix these ideas would rise from oblivion in the early 1950s.

At that time the French government proposed what is referred to as "l'Organisation commune des regions sahariennes" (the Common – or Combined – Organization of Sahara Regions), its acronym – OCSR. The OCSR created a series of bureaucracies to research the region's mineral wealth, to administer the region, to set up a communications network. It was a serious endeavor that went much further than Foucauld's less practical colonial vision.

The Sahara and the Algerian War for Independence: 1954-1962

Not much has been written about the fact that the French had started secretly negotiating with the Algerian rebels – the FLN (Front de la liberations nationale) – as early as 1956 and that even at this early date, the French offered the Algerians a modicum of independence; but it was a truncated independence that Paris was willing to concede, one which granted independence to Algeria essentially north of the Atlas Mountains with France retaining control of the Algerian Sahara.

What figured large into the French plan was the fact that oil, oil in very large quantities, was discovered in 1956 in the Sahara. France thought of that oil as its own and was unwilling to part with it. The Algerians, for their part, were unwilling to accept a truncated independence. One probable reason for the utter ferocity of the independence war both by the French and Algerians was that oil-related economic stakes were so high.

France hoped to sever the Algerian Sahara from the north and connect it in a vast industrial, communication network zone that it would control that would be spread out over much of the region, which during the colonial period was known as French Sudan. At independence in 1960, that region would become four independent countries – from west to east: Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad. The economic integration of the Sahara itself was a part of a larger plan to link the former French colonies by roads, railway from the Congo Brazzaville further south with metropolitan France.²

In the postwar decade from 1945-1955, the region had been heavily surveyed by French geologists and geographers whose reports – still valid today – gave indications and hints of vast as yet untapped mineral and petro-chemical wealth that France was anxious to dominate. While the OCSR would formally recognize the independence of these countries, the program, a classic neo-colonial venture, was based on effective French economic, political and military control of this vast region.

Financial backing for such a large undertaking, considered essential for France's future energy and economic security, were undertaken. There was considerable support for the idea in the French parliament and in the ruling circles in general.  Much organizational infrastructure for the project, the political reorganization of the region, some infrastructural development was already underway even before 1960.

1. My translation from Andre Bourgeot. "Sahara: espace geostrategique et enjeux politiques (Niger)" Autrepart (16) 2000L 21-48. I am indebted to this author for many of the insights cited in this last section of this entry

2. Ibid

Links:

Immanuel Wallerstein. The Very Risky Bet of Hollande in Mali: The Probable Long Term Disaster.

John Pilger. The Real Invasion of Africa and Other Not-Made-For-Hollywood-Holy-Wars.

Rob Prince is a Lecturer of International Studies at the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies and publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

The Algerian hostage crisis was both a human and political fiasco and its regional implications are still evolving.

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley."
(The best laid plans of mice and men go often awry.)
-- Robert Burns "To A Mouse On Turning Her Up in her Nest With A Plow. November, 1785"

One of the largest hostage seizures ever ended with the death of 80 people, many of them foreign workers at Algeria's natural gas complex at In Amenas, located nearly 1,000 miles from the capital, Algiers, and less than 70 miles from the Libyan border deep in the Sahara. In the end it was both a human and political fiasco, the regional implications of which are still evolving.

It was supposed to be an impressive show of force, 'a message' of how efficiently the Algerian government could deal with terrorism within its own borders. Had it worked out according to plan, Algerian special forces of its fourth military district that includes large slices of the Sahara, would have saved the day. The message to the world in general, but to the United States and France in particular, would have been, should have been: Algeria can handle domestic terrorism; there is no need for Algeria to get embroiled in Mali by sending troops that would be coordinating with the French and American militaries.

But in ways to be discussed  in later sections of the series, something went afoul, the whole thing backfired terribly, and continues to.

Keep in mind that although Algeria had a bloody civil war in the 1990s, called, appropriately enough 'The Dirty War' by former Algerian security officer and author Habib Souaidia, never during that decade was an Algeria oil or natural gas facility ever attacked by guerrillas – a rather odd fact given the intensity of the warfare. It makes one wonder about the kind of radicals that would spare the petro chemical sector from their attacks. The attack on In Amenas, was thus, 'a first', for Algeria at least, that must send chills down the spines of oil producers and consumers everywhere.

To understand what was being played out in In Amenas, one has to dig deep, into Algerian history, the role of France, the emerging U.S. strategic-military role in Africa and first and foremost, the fate of the peoples of the region – Algerian Arab Moslems, Kabylie Berbers, Tuaregs of the Sahara, the people of Libya, Mali, Niger and Mauretania, among others. That is what I hope to do in this series of articles, the different threads of which will lead us to  back to In Amenas and the slaughter of innocents there.

The series begins elsewhere in Algeria, in the north, outside of a town called Seddat, in May of 2006. Over the course of several articles the thread will lead us back to In Amenas and the events of last week, but for now we'll start the saga elsewhere.

The Seddat Massacre of 2006

Let's begin, not with the fiasco at the In Amenas natural gas site on Algeria's eastern border with Libya, deep in the Sahara Desert, but with a seemingly unrelated incident that took place seven years ago at a place called Seddat in the Kabylie region of Algeria east of the capital Algiers.

There, in May of 2006, with much fanfare, a major military operation was launched by the Algerian army to 'neutralize' (which translates in plain language as 'wipe out') a supposed Islamic terrorist cell holding out in a cave in the vicinity of Seddat. Despite the fact that the so-called war against Islamic terrorism had supposedly ended by 1998, the Algerian government had not been able to eliminate the last pockets of militant Islamic armed resistance. For nearly eight years Algiers had been repeatedly talking about "the last Islamic strongholds."

There was another problem which plagued the Algerian government, formally a parliamentary democracy, but informally and perhaps more accurately, a military dictatorship which had been run from the shadows since independence by a group of military officers, derisively referred to as the D.A.F. (which stands for Deserteurs de l'armee francaise, or deserters from the French Army. It refers to a group of Algerian officers in the French military during the Algerian War of Independence 1954-1962, who, six months before the end of the conflict, jumped ship from the French army and joined the Resistance and then quickly took power once independence came).

By 2006 the ruling Algerian military junta could not simply brush off the repeated accusations that many of the militant Islamic groups that it claimed to be fighting in the 1990s were both infiltrated by and run by the country's powerful intelligence service, the Departement de Renseignment et de la Securite, otherwise known by its initials – the DRS. It all cast a shadow over the bloodshed the 1990s and raised serious questions as to what the fighting was about in the first place.

Algeria: Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Something else had happened that plays into the plot as well. By 2006, a new security cooperation relationship was being forged, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, between Washington and Algiers. Despite a certain distrust on both sides which continues until today even,  over the five years since 9-11 it had flowered into the beginnings of a political partnership.

For different reasons, both the United States and Algeria were looking for new security partners. The United States needed a North African regional partner, a la the Shah of Iran, with a strong military to assist it in its growing "war on terrorism" in Africa. Then and now, it has been more about protecting U.S. strategic assets in oil, natural gas and strategic minerals than about fighting militant Muslims, a group of which there were precious few in North Africa at the time.

At a time when the United States had already started to shift its security concerns to Asia to meet the growing economic and political challenge of China, finding 'reliable' security partners that could fill in the military vacuum had become essential. The United States hoped to at least in part extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 'tone down' those conflict and emerge from the quagmires it had created in the Middle East and Central Asia to focus on the Far East.

Such a global strategy could not sustain a large scale U.S. military build-up in Africa much beyond the present strength of AFRICOM. Finding others who might be willing to 'partner' with Washington, be it through NATO or other arrangements, became more pressing. Two countries, both unlikely in some ways, to step up to the plate, did exactly that – France and Algeria. The series will deal with France's role in Africa, past and present in the next part of this series and leave it aside for now.

As for Algeria, it was an unlikely ally in some ways. For half a century the U.S. media had dubbed it 'the Cuba of the Mediterranean', supporting, at least verbally, national liberation struggles, criticizing U.S. imperialism, allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a strong opponent of Israel and finding itself taking positions opposed to Washington's on most issues at the United Nations. Diplomatic ties had even been severed for six years in the aftermath of the 1967 Middle East War.

And yet, here again, things were not always what they seemed. Much of the so-called antagonism was little more than posturing on both sides. For example, even during the period when U.S. – Algerian official diplomacy was frozen, Algerian-U.S. economic relations actually flourished, especially where they concerned Algerian natural gas and oil production.

The United States was anxious to break into the Algerian energy sector and did so early on with companies like Halliburton (and others). Algeria had no qualms about allying itself in business with the most conservative, if not reactionary elements of the American political spectrum, and did so enthusiastically. The United States helped Algeria break the French stranglehold on Algerian energy when, in the early 1970s, El Paso Natural Gas of Texas engaged the Algerian government in a deal to buy its natural gas. It started a flood of contracts with other countries willing to sign agreements with Algiers; if Washington would, why not other countries?

While the Algerian–U.S. energy relations went through ups and downs, they became once again quite intense after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Algeria began to privatize big chunks of its petro-chemical industries. The Algerians hoped to both  increase U.S. investment in its energy sector as well as strengthen its ties with the U.S. military establishment.

For its part, Algeria was anxious to prove – and the United States was anxious to believe – it could be a 'reliable ally' in the war on terrorism, that it could serve U.S. strategic interests in North Africa and the Sahara more or less in a similar fashion that Israel (and now Turkey, Saudi Arabia) are U.S. strategic partners elsewhere in the region. Algeria's strategy here is based on both hard politics – i.e., the U.S. emerging from the Cold War as the world's only superpower (at least militarily) and most probably watching the United States and its allies decimate Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Algiers preferred to befriend rather than alienate Washington, and to convince Washington that it could be 'useful' to it. Of course, Algeria's neighbor, Muhammar Khadaffi, tried to implement more or less the same strategy.

Understanding well, that 'fighting Communism' was  now a thing of the past, and partnering with Washington in "the war on terrorism" was the 'only show in town' (the town being the world), Algeria moved to in a number of ways to prove it could be useful. Just after 9-11 the Algerian authorities presented their American counterparts with a list of 500 Islamic terrorists as a friendly gesture.

Military exchanges followed as did visits by high level State Department and military representatives from the USA. They continue. While the Algerians vociferously deny it, there is much evidence that until the Algerians discovered that the United States was using its facilities to spy on Algeria itself, that the U.S. special forces had established a military base in Tamanrasset, in the heart of the Algerian Sahara. Evidence has yet to be presented that Algeria, like so many other countries in the region, participated in the C.I.A. rendition efforts, but then, neither has their participation been disproven. Regardless, U.S.–Algerian security ties enjoyed a level of unprecedented cooperation in the decade since 9-11, relations that despite strains, particularly over Mali, continue.

But despite these improved relations, the Algerians were not sure of the relationship and there were limits to it. Access to Algerian intelligence and security matters remained limited. Algeria most often refused to participate in joint military maneuvers which would have permitted the United States to evaluate its military strengths and weaknesses. Although Algeria had proven its ability to both manipulate, divide and destroy the Islamic based opposition movement which challenged the Algerian generals for power in the 1990s, the junta still felt a need to 'prove itself' to Washington. Prove what? That it could still be used to crush opposition movements.

Which brings us back to the Seddat operation.

There were a number of curious, if not downright bizarre aspects to it.

Seddat: An Exercise in Overkill

For one thing, it was a massive, lopsided operation, one that pitted the Algerian military and security forces, numbering in the hundreds of thousands all told, against a few dozen poorly equipped Islamic guerrilla fighters in hiding in Kabylie caves with their women and children. Reminds one of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in the early 1980s.

The assault team, led by Algerian General Ahmed Gaid Salah, major general of the Algerian National Army, was several thousand strong with communications and logistical support from the entire Algerian state apparatus. It was heavily armed with tanks, armored cars, attack helicopters, perhaps chemical weapons and all those military toys that make military dictators from Algiers to Guatemala pee in their pants with joy. Algiers seemed to be eager to prove that when "necessary" it was willing – as it had done in the 1990s – to use the full power of its military machine against its own people.

Seddat was an exercise in overkill of gargantuan proportions to counter a Lillaputian threat (if it existed at all). Mostly it was for show. Most anti-guerrilla operations are done in secret but the Seddat operation was publicly announced several months before in the Algerian press as something approaching a sporting event and followed closely by the Algerian media from beginning to end. It was all a show of sorts, as if the Algerian military had to prove its overwhelming strength to the world at large, and to the United States and France in particular.

It is a fact of no little significance that the U.S. military attache to the Algiers embassy at the time was 'invited' to accompany General Gaid Salah on this anti-terrorist mission and to watch the slaughter unfold from up close. Indeed, one could make a persuasive case that the whole affair was stage managed down to the last detail to impress the Americans that when necessary, the Algerian military could be as effective and ruthless in fighting terrorism as any government in the region and should be trusted as such. Washington should take note!

To insure the success of the operation, the Algerian authorities made sure that there was not – to use an exhausted expression 'an even playing field' that would insure that the government's casualties would be few, while the rebels would die in large numbers. The government's own statistics stated that there were no more than 75-100 militants holed up in caves near Seddat at the most. Even this proved to be an exaggeration. If Seddat had been a purely military or counter-insurgency operations, certainly, the rebels could have been flushed out and neutralized with a much smaller force and much less publicity. Nor was all that communication and military hardware necessary as the group's location was already pinpointed.

Unlike in In Amenas, where the Algerian special forces lost control of the script (more on that in a latter segment), at Seddat, everything went as planned. The 'militants' were defeated and decisively so. Obviously it was not a particularly difficult task. The American military was duly impressed. The show was apparently worth the effort as  shortly after Seddat  cooperation between the U.S. and Algerian militaries ratcheted up considerably.

Still,  news reports of the contrived confrontation, even coming from Algeria's controlled media, were unsettling. As the details of the operation found their way here and there in the Algerian press, a more cynical picture of what had actually happened began to take shape. For example, the 75 to 100 'guerrilla fighters' turned out to be only six. The rest were women and children killed in the assault, 'collateral damage' which the Algerian security forces didn't hesitate to inflict. Never one to be too concerned about collateral damage, Washington was impressed.

Chemical Weapons?

There were few local witnesses to the aftermath. At least one witness claimed to have seen the bodies of a woman breast-feeding her baby, both frozen in death. There is some speculation that the only way people die frozen in their last life activity like that, is if they are the victims of poison gas attack which kills instantly.  The allegation, will, like the mother and children, be frozen in uncertainty because the day after burying the victims' bodies, they were, according to witnesses, disinterred by the military and cremated, thus eliminating the possible evidence. But it is suggestive, isn't it, that when deemed necessary, the Algerian military has no compunctions about gassing its own people?

Washington Impressed With Algerian Repression

At least once before in the Middle East, the United States was greatly impressed by the military prowess of a regional player, by its military superiority over its neighbors. I speak of Israel's victory over Egypt and Syria in the June, 1967 War. Thus began a strategic alliance, couched in the false language of 'common values', 'defense of the only democracy in the Middle East' and other pretexts.

What impressed Washington in 1967 more than 'common values' was the power of the Israeli air force and the devastating blow Israel could inflict on Syria, Egypt and the West Bank in six short days; in so doing, secular Arab nationalism to which Washington was adamantly opposed suffered a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Thus began a well-known strategic love affair that continues until today.  Israel had impressed Washington that it could serve U.S. regional interests.

Something like that is now happening in North Africa with Algeria, an unlikely U.S. ally given its half century of anti-U.S., anti-imperialist rhetoric. Algeria has spent the decade  since 9-11 trying to impress Washington that it could play a role in North Africa  for the United States similar to what Israel plays in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Seddat Massacre – and that is essentially what it was, a massacre – was orchestrated with such a future for Algerian-U.S. relations in mind. It was a part of the overall effort to attract American attention.

In fact, Washington was impressed, so impressed that in 2012, the Obama Administration through AFRICOM General Carter Ham and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent a good deal of political energy trying to get Algeria to intervene militarily in neighboring Mali, to no avail. But however closely the Algerian Junta hopes to snuggle up to Washington, it was still not ready to be its military cat's paw in the Sahara.

At a recent talk at the University of Denver that I attended, General Ham, who impressed his audience of students that AFRICOM was more like the Peace Corps than a military special forces attack unit, noted that he had visited Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and asked him to send a military contingent to Mali. French President Hollande visited Algiers and did likewise, to no avail.

In the end, for reasons I will develop in the succeeding sections of this series, the Algerian government, having led on the United States, refused to pick up the military baton and send its troops into the Malian fray, one of the smarter decisions it has made in a long time. The Algerian generals  might crush their own insurgencies and do so by whatever means necessary, but even this  dictatorship has been careful not to involve itself, militarily at least, the affairs with its neighbors. The one time it did, by supporting the POLISARIO movement in the Western Sahara, it got a pretty bloody nose.

After reading all this, one might wonder logically, what does all this have to do with the In Amenas fiasco? The answer is everything, to be elaborated upon as the series unfolds.

Sources:

Much of the material on Seddat comes from a piece in French entitled "Le massacre de Seddat: les armes chimiques au service de la lutte antiterroriste" which appeared at the website 'Algeria Watch' which appeared on May 31, 2006. The link to the article is: http://www.algeria-watch.org/fr/aw/massacre_seddat.htm

I also want to credit Habib Souaidia, author of La sale guerre (The Dirty War) – Editions Decouverte. 2001. It was in conversations with Souaidia that I first was made aware of the Seddat Massacre.

The analysis is my own (for better or worse)

Link:

Photo exhibit – region around In-Amenas in the 1950s taken by a French soldier stationed there. Gives an idea of the surrounding areas. It was formerly called Fort Polignac.

Rob Prince is a Lecturer of International Studies at the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies and publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

Bendjedid was considered by some to be Algeria's Ronald Reagan -- a man whose main skill consisted of acting out others' scripts.

Chadli Bendjedid's Funeral: The Hypocrite's Ball

“Ils sont tous venus, aujourd’hui, célébrer celui qu’ils brocardaient hier. Il a été traîné dans la boue pendant 20 ans. C’est le bal des hypocrites” (1)

(Translation: Yes, today they all showed up to honor the person they had savaged yesterday and whose reputation they had dragged through the mud for twenty years. It was a hypocrite’s ball)

1.

In Algeria, presidents come and go; only the military and the security establishment remain, a platitude reflected by recent events. A state funeral was held for former Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid. He died of cancer in Algiers on October 6.

In contrast with the death of  neighboring Tunisia’s founding president, Habib Bourguiba  similarly removed from office  in 1987, whose passing in 2000 provoked a genuine outpouring of national grief, the response to Bendjedid’s death in Algeria was, at best, muted.

If the broad masses of Algerians shed few tears still, much of the Algerian elite, past and present were in attendance at the funeral, including:

• Those who had essentially `drafted’ Chadli Bendjedid for the presidency at the outset in 1979 (and then ran him from the shadows);

• Those who, like Khaled Nezzar, in 1992 Algeria’s Defense Minister, (now facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a Swiss Court) threatened Bendjedid’s life to pressure him to resign the presidency;

• Those who, like Abdulaziz Bouteflika, (since 1999 Algeria’s president) somehow wiggled out of a corruption scandal during Bendjedid’s time in power.

• Some of the ministers who served in his administration, among them the economic reformer, Mouloud Hamrouche, whose late 1980s market-oriented reforms threatened the  Algeria’s military junta’s hold on power (and so they dumped him along with Bendjedid).

• High level delegations from Tunisia, Mauritania  Egypt and Palestine were present as were a number of key figures from the Algerian trade union movement, political parties.

It was all rather formal – drum roll, kind words, burial with honors – feigned respect and an attempt to polish his image, to lend Bendjedid the dignity in death that often had been previously denied him. For in life, at least as president, he was used, abused and then basically discarded when his services were no longer needed. Now the crocodile tears flowed. Perhaps they were present to confirm that Bendjedid really was dead and gone, taking his secrets on all of them with him to the grave? Were they jittery about Bendjedid’s soon to be released memoires?

The eulogies contrasted with how he was viewed during his lifetime. Described by his associates in the military as `a trilingual illiterate’ (‘analphabète trilingue’), a bit of an exaggeration, Bendjedid was akin to `Algeria’s Ronald Reagan’; he was considered quite incompetent, a man whose main skill consisted of reading other people’s scripts. According to some, it was in fact hisabsence of credentials which `qualified’ him for the job making him a fine cover and fall guy for those manipulating the body politic ! (2)

2.

When late in his presidency, Bendjedid began to function under the illusion that as president he actually could wield some power, he was rather rudely reminded of the limits of his mandate…and in short order, unceremoniously dumped. Not unusual by the way for an Algerian president! It had happened a number of times in the past.

The Algerian military and security forces, that had stolen power early in the country’s post 1962 independence – and have clung to it until today – prefer to manage affairs and milk the country’s rich energy resources from behind the scenes, giving a democratic gloss to what for half a century has been little other than a military dictatorship.  Such arrangements play well in Paris and Washington.

The years that Bendjedid presided – or thought he did – over the Algerian nation, 1979 – 1992 saw the country plunge into an economic and social tailspin that triggered an all-out political crisis in 1988. That was only the beginning of the country’s crisis. On January 11, 1992, just weeks before the second round of scheduled national elections, Bendjedid, now expendable, was pressured to resign `with honor’ by a military delegation headed by Minister of Defense, General Khaled Nezzar.

The elections were immediately suspended by the self-appointed military junta led by General Larbi Belkheir (d. 2007), who had spent the Bendjedid years consolidating his power behind the scenes, and with it control of the country’s rich oil and natural gas resources. A full scale domestic armed conflict erupted, lasting until 1999, that is today referred to as `the dirty war’ (la sale guerre).

It was during the decade of the 1980s when Bendjedid was present that Algeria’s relationship with the United States, which had been strained since the early 1960s, slightly improved. Bendjedid and the U.S. Vice President George H. W. Bush exchanged visits. U.S. investments into Algeria’s energy sector rose. Exchanges of military personnel were established with the presence of high level Algerian military officers at U.S. embassy parties in Algiers becoming a normal occurrence (although closet security relationships between the two countries’ military and security agencies would not fully blossom until after September 11, 2011).

Having quietly improved ties with Algiers in the 1980s probably helps explain why, in the 1990s, when the Algerian Civil War was in full swing, the mainstream media in the United States barely covered it – and when they did, it was almost always with the spin shaped by the Algerian generals – that the war was against a rising, almost unstoppable Islamic fundamentalism that had to be crushed.

3.

Chadli Bendjedid was in fact part and parcel of a long-standing post-independence tradition that placed a purposefully ineffectual people in the presidency to give cover to the country’s  behind-the-scenes political masters: the military and the security apparatus.

So it was in 1965 with Ben Bella, removed from power in a naked coup d’etat, when Boumedienne no longer needed his guerilla image to rule. In 1992, Bendjedid was followed by Mohammed Boudiaf, a genuine hero and guerilla leader of the country’s 1954-1962 revolution against French colonialism, who tragically, was under the illusion he was being offered executive powers. Boudiaf was coaxed back from his Moroccan exile and promised by the military-security complex that he would be given executive powers.

Boudiaf appeared serious about curtailing rampant high level corruption, reigning in the power of the military-security `clans’ (3) and bringing Algeria’s rampant violence to an end through some sort of negotiated settlement, all of which threatened the status of the powers that be. After two unsuccessful attempts to poison him, Boudiaf  was `publicly’ assassinated (ie – it was shown on Algeria television), most probably by the same people who `offered’ him the presidency in the first place.

Similarly, not long after assuming power, Liamine Zeroual, who followed Boudiaf to the presidency in 1994, made serious efforts to bring an end to Algeria’s cruel civil war of the 1990s by trying to negotiate with moderate Islamicists; this rankled his military-security handlers. Soon he too was discarded. Like Boudiaf, Zeroual’s  problem was he took his job too seriously. In turn, in 1999, Zeroual was replaced by Abdulaziz Bouteflika, the current president, who has been more pliable.

Bendjedid served as Algeria’s president 1979 through the beginning of 1992 when he was forced from office by the country’s ruling military clique. Bendjedid returned briefly to the public eye in 2008 when he gave a controversial speech at a conference in el-Tarif suggesting that 16 years after his dismissal, or `resignation’, he remained bitter for how he was summarily dismissed. Bendjedid became Algeria’s president in 1979, just after the death of Houari Boumedienne. The latter had seized power from the country’s first post-independence president, Ahmad Ben Bella in 1965 in what amounted to a military coup.

(1) El Watan, 9 octobre 2012. "Obsèques nationales pour Chadli Bendjedid : L’adieu"

(2) Lounis Aggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire. http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/catalogue/index-Francalgerie__crimes_et_mensonges_d__tats-9782707147479.html. La Découverte. 2004-5. p.72

(3) The term is something of a misnomer as it does not refer to people who share blood relations as much as certain tightknit groupings vying for power within the military-security complex.

Rob Prince is a Lecturer of International Studies at the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies and publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

Daniel Benjamin in Algiers

At about the time that the United States, the European Union and NATO were putting the final touches on their not-so 'humanitarian' interventionalism in Libya, U.S. Middle East policy was developing along quite different lines in Algeria.

On March 4-7, in Algiers, the United States and Algeria formed what both countries are referring to as 'a new contact group' for counter-terrorism collaboration, cementing even further a decade of close intelligence and military cooperation between the two countries.

Underlining the importance of the security arrangement, the United States sent Daniel Benjamin, the U.S. State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, to attend. The Algerian side was represented by Algerian presidential advisor, Kamel Rezzag Bara.

At a press conference Benjamin welcomed 'the inaugural meeting of the bilateral contact group'. He asserted the U.S. intended to work with Algeria to 'counter groups that seek to launch attacks against innocents'. The crusader bombast and confrontational style of the Bush years has been replaced by a much softer touch stylistically at least. Poised, cutting a handsome 'Kennedy-like' image, Benjamin chose his words carefully.

'Algeria's future should be in its own hands', Benjamin told an audience of Algerian journalists. He continued, 'The U.S. supports the democratization process in Algeria and elsewhere in the Middle East, North Africa and the Sahel.' In response to a question, Benjamin categorically stated that 'the United States does not seek any more military bases in Africa'. Benjamin went on to state 'the future of Algeria is for Algerians to determine'.

Dick Cheney's Sahara Terrorist Scam

Indeed, the rhetoric was impeccable. If only it matched the reality!

Take, for instance, the comment that the United States does not seek military bases in Africa. The United States has been 'frantically' looking for an African home for AFRICOM, the African command center created during the Bush years to deal with Africa's growing strategic importance in terms of oil and rare minerals, and to counter China's growing influence throughout the continent.

Seems African countries – even allies – don't believe that AFRICOM is a Peace Corps-like outfit concerned with development and fighting AIDS. Despite repeated U.S. denials to the contrary, African leaders fear it is something more sinister. Imagine!

Furthermore the United States has at least one military base of some size and significance in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. There is  evidence that another one existed for a number of years in Tamanrassett, deep in the Algerian Sahara out of which U.S. Special Forces operated.

U.S. and Algerian security cooperation is more than a decade old, beginning some time just after the ending of Algeria's 'dirty war' in 1999. One could argue it began even earlier with a number of visits by then Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney to Algeria to cut oil and gas deals with the North African country despite the fact that Algeria was bogged down in what is referred to as 'The Dirty War', a civil war that nearly split the country apart.

Willing to open its oil and gas deposits to U.S. companies, the Algerian government was also able to convince the Bush Administration in the days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack that it stood with the United States as a partner in global war on terrorism; unbeknownst to many, the relations between the two countries improved considerably. Then in 2002-2003, the U.S., in collusion with its new regional ally Algeria, launched a second front in its global war on terrorism across the Sahara and Sahelian regions of Africa.

What seems to be the chemistry to bring these unlikely allies together? If British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan is to be believed – and he makes an excellent case – U.S.-Algerian cooperation 'countering terrorism' has been little more than a pretext for a strategic military alliance in which both countries gained in different ways. The actual relationship bears little of the moral rectitude suggested in Benjamin's remarks.

• For Algeria, the partnership has meant increased access to U.S. military and surveillance technology which it was denied during the 1990s due to the 'dirty war'. In the name of fighting terrorism, the alliance also extends Algerian influence over its southern neighbors in the Sahara and Sahel:  Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.
• For the United States, the arrangement permits Washington to 'piggy back' on Algerian security concerns, real and imagined, to create a security network that today extends in the north, from Algeria in the north – one of Africa's most prolific oil and natural gas producing countries, to Nigeria on Africa's western coast, another of the continent's great oil producing countries.
• The Algerian-U.S. relationship,  a marriage of convenience,  was cemented not long after 9-11 by a rather bizarre, if not surrealistic and apparently heavily contrived set of circumstances that fit the needs of both. The Bush Administration, with Dick Cheney taking the lead, wanted to open a second front on the 'global war on terrorism'  (GWOT)  in Africa focusing on the Sahara.

Only one minor problem: there was virtually no terrorism, no terrorist groups in the area. Indeed, despite its natural hazards, in 2001-2, the Sahara was arguably one of the safest places to travel anywhere in the world. If Keenan is correct, the Algerian Departement de Reseignement et Securite (DRS), the Algerian Security Service, in cooperation with the U.S. military – under the auspices then of EUCOM based in Germany – fabricated an incident and then blew it all out of proportion in the medias of both countries.

In The Dark Sahara, Keenan makes the case that the kidnapping of German speaking tourists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2002 was managed by the Algerian DRS with the knowledge if not complicity of the U.S. Special Forces with whom the Algerians worked rather closely. He substantiates claims that:

• The so-called Islamic groups which participated in the kidnappings were either penetrated or run by the DRS.
• There was no 'terrorist pipeline' from Bin Laden's Al Qaeda in Afghanstan through to Africa.
• The whole kidnapping incident was essentially staged, and then blown out of proportion by both the Algerian press (with close ties to its security establishment) to create the myth of the Saharan terrorist threat.
• My favorite part of this pervasive scam is the likelihood that the `leader' of the Islamic fundamentalist group, a fellow named El Para, was an Algerian DRS operative who trained in counter insurgency for two years at Ft. Bragg North Carolina. Keenan claims El Para was in constant contact with his Algerian security handlers during the entire time of the 2002 kidnapping.

As a result, the Algerian military and security forces got their high tech death and communication toys, and the Bush Administration its pretext to deepen its military involvement in Africa.

Keenan's hypothesis fits the Bush GWOT pattern to a tee: Military intervention requires embellishing or fabricating an impending threat. An elaborate disinformation campaign is launched. The remoteness of the Sahara makes verifying fabrication difficult,  permitting Algerians and the U.S. military to liberally embellish the truth. Who could disprove what was or was not going on in the southeastern corner of Algeria or northwestern Niger?

But then they didn't reckon with Jeremy Keenan, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the Sahara, his decade's long human connection with the Tuareg peoples who live there, and his unflagging sense of decency and unwillingness to go along with a dangerous political charade.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; across the Sahara and the Sahel, a terrorist threat with links to Al Qaeda was more a scheme hatched by the DRS in Algiers than a viable Islamic resistance movement. We've been conned once again.

Rob Prince is the publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

Cross-posted from Counterpunch.

Algeria, Part 1: Where the Demonstrators Wave Black Flags

At this moment when it appears that Muammar Gaddafi's days in power are numbered, the Libyan leader has made it clear repeatedly that he will stay and fight. So far he has. His domestic support is evaporating around him, leaders of the country's 140 tribes siding with the rebels, military units siding with the rebellion in larger and larger numbers, air force pilots and naval vessels defecting to Malta. Much of his government, other than his sons, has abandoned him as well.

What is left?

Those heavily armed private militias controlled by his sons? The army of mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa? Some Mirage jet fighter planes with, until now, pilots less than willing to bomb rebel strongholds? All that is true. Yet while the U.S. and Europe work to isolate Gaddafi,  he is not completely alone and without allies.

Libya appears more and more headed for civil war. Given his ever shrinking domestic base, one has to wonder how it is that Gaddafi can appear so defiant? It might come from the fact that he is not entirely isolated and alone. Indeed, the support that Gaddafi is garnering has stiffened the colonel's backbone.

Gaddafi has the support of at least one important regional ally, the Algerian government, which has both militarily and diplomatically thrown its full (and substantial) weight behind his effort to retain power. In so doing, it would appear that Algeria, which has long cooperated with the US and NATO on its North and Sub-Saharan Africa anti-terrorism policies, is breaking ranks to protect its regime's very survival.

Since its independence, Algeria has been controlled by its military which lives high off the country's oil profits at the expense of its own people. Algeria's leaders fear that if Gaddafi falls, their hold on power will be that much more fragile. Their support of Gaddafi is very much one to save their own skins.

If Mubarak saw the writing on the wall as Ben Ali's little castle in Tunisia crumbled, so the Algerian military leadership understands that if Gaddafi falls, it very likely is next in line, or if not, not very far down the list. Desperate to cling to power, the Algerian government is – offering a few political and economic concessions it is true – essentially reorganizing the state's substantial repressive apparatus to weather the protest storm. But in addition, it is pulling out all stops to support Gaddafi's increasingly feeble hold on power.

Maybe it is the support of its North African oil producing ally Algeria that has given Gaddafi that confident appearance that he can indeed – with a little help from his friends – hold out longer. An alliance of two of Africa's most important oil producing countries is nothing to sneeze at, and could have all kinds of implications, consequences. Should the alliance between the two tighten, and they engage  in a common front oil embargo, which some news outlets speculate could happen, oil prices could jump to as high as $220 a barrel.

Less than a week ago, an Algerian human rights group based in Germany Algeria Watch published a statement alleging that the Algerian government is providing material aid – in the form of armed military units – to Muammar Gaddafi to help prop up his shrinking (and sinking) regime. The statement is found on the website of an Algerian youth group, Mouvement Rachad, involved in the current protests against the current Algerian government.

The statement opens as such:

It is with both sadness and anger that we have learned that the Algerian government  has sent armed detachments to Libya to commit crimes against our Libyan brothers and sisters who have risen up against the bloody and corrupt regime of Muammar Khadafi [their spelling]. These armed detachments were first identified in western Libya in the city of Zaouia where some among them have been arrested. This has been reported in the media and confirmed by eye witnesses. (Prince translation)

Zaouia is the site of fierce fire fights between the residents of Zaouia, now a zone liberated from Tripoli's control and under the authority of rebel forces on the one hand, and the military elements still faithful to Gaddafi on the others. There were reports today of a 6-8 hour battle in which Gaddafi's forces, led by one of his sons, tried to recapture the city but were repulsed by the city's defenders and pushed back after fierce fighting.

Algeria Watch goes on to accuse the Algerian government of having provided the air transport planes that have carried sub-Saharan African mercenaries from Niger, Chad and the Dafur province of Sudan to Libya to strengthen Gaddafi's position militarily. It goes on to add that Algeria had played a similar role in transporting troops to Somalia to support the U.S. directed government military offensive against rebellious Somali tribes.

The statement goes on to allege that on the diplomatic front that the Algerian government has been lobbying different European powers (which are presumably France, Italy, German, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain) pressing them to continue to support Gaddafi. These diplomatic efforts are being led by Abdelkader Messahel, Algerian Minister of Magrebian and African Affairs. On the all-European level, Amar Bendjama, Algerian ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as Algeria's representative to the European Union and NATO and Belkacem Belgaid, another Algerian diplomat whose responsibilities include NATO and the EU, have together opened up an active lobbying campaign in support of Gaddafi.

The political approach that Bendjama and Belgaid are pursuing echoes Gaddafi's own statements – that if his government were to fall, Libya would fall into the hands of radical Islamic fundamentalists – all this nonsense about Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden being behind the national uprising. Gaddafi's argument is identical to what Ben Ali and Mubarak have been arguing for decades: that they are the alternative to an Islamic takeover. The West might not like them, but better Gaddafi than Osama. This kind of fear mongering – the threat of Islamic radicalism – has lost its appeal in the current protest wave in which the Islamic fundamentalist element has been marginalized or irrelevant.

The lobbying is similar to what has happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, where the first offer of concessions consists of ceding as little as possible. Bendjama and Belgaid appear to be pressing (unsuccessfully) for a solution that would see Gaddafi's son, Saif, replace his father. It is not clear if they are asking for some kind of arrangement that would protect Gaddafi from prosecution in exchange for stepping down, but such an approach is more than likely. But as one of the first demands in the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni protests was precisely that no family member (sons or family member) succeed these elder and now disgraced statements to power, it is not likely that such arguments or suggestions will carry much if any weight. There is more.

Under the direction of Colonel Djamel Bouzghaia, an advisor to Algerian President Bouteflika on security matters, Algeria has, according to the statement, 'embraced' a large number of elements of disposed Tunisian president Zine Ben Ali's private security force and republican guard. These are the same units that were used as snipers to assassinate demonstrators in Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Thala in Tunisia. Now in the employ of Algeria, they too have been sent to Libya to shore up Gaddafi's regime. Bouzghaia works directly under Major General Rachid Laalali (alias Attafi), head of Algeria's external relations bureau.

Who else is helping Gaddafi? Will be interesting to see what shakes out.

Rob Prince is the publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.