French Counter-Terror in 1995
The San Antonio Express-News ran this column of mine on September 13, 1995. I do not have a link. The subject is Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (AIG, the French acronym is GIA). I mentioned France’s experience with Alerigan terrorists in a prior post.
For France “la gloire” — that French sense of national pride and global glory always colored with a dash of Napoleonic military verve– is once more extracting a heavy price.
Conflict with radical environmentalists, like Greenpeace, over French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, is the least worrisome of France’s current intrigues. Unlike neighboring Germany which earlier this year lost a round of “propaganda war” to Greenpeace over North Sea environmental issues, the French ignore what CNN has to say.
The French understand that bullets are more dangerous than soundbites. And globally the French are facing bullets.
French troops are engaged in Bosnia and are a major component of the U.N. Rapid Reaction Force. French political interests in the Balkans are complicated. Many Frenchmen fear a “Muslim” state in Europe; at the same time the majority of the French people reject the Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing.” At the moment the people of France support Bosnian involvement, but Serbia is an old French ally. Pride, and French forces, may disappear if the war widens.
The French Army is deployed in several African could-be hot spots. In most cases the French are regarded as genuine peacekeepers, a force preventing local ideological and tribal rivals from dragging struggling nations into senseless civil war.
The situation in the east African nation of Djibouti, however, is increasingly tense. French forces posted there could be easily drawn into a civil conflict.
Algeria’s civil war, however, is the most dangerous current conflict involving France. Within the last six weeks a half-dozen terror bombings have occurred in France itself. French authorities link the bombings to the militant Algerian Muslim “Armed Islamic Group” (the AIG).
Last week the French government declared war on the terrorist “enemy without a face” and deployed regular French Army units throughout France.
The AIG and other Algerian extremists see France and Europe as part of their own local battlefield. This stems from the legacy of French rule in Algeria. In the late 1950s France was involved in a full-scale guerrilla war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF).
In 1962 President Charles DeGaulle’s government withdrew French forces from Algeria and proclaimed Algerian independence. The victorious NLF, however, imposed a one-party, socialist state. Democratic promises went unfulfilled. The NLF revolutionaries, their power centered on the military, became the new elites. With democracy stymied, religion became a haven for dissent.
The Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), currently Algeria’s main opposition party, won a resounding victory in Algeria’s 1991 elections. The ISF is a curious organization, with several moderate factions. The Algerian Army, however, instead of dealing with the moderates, canceled run-off elections and outlawed the ISF. The army’s position: Better a military dictatorship than an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship.
Inside Algeria the radical AIG used the Army’s reaction to shunt Islamic moderates aside. The AIG assassinated foreign workers (especially European Christians), journalists and Algerian women wearing “western dress.” The Algerian Army began a “dirty war” with “death squads” attacking the AIG.
The AIG leadership believes France’s support of the Algerian Army-dominated government is an alliance; this means France is a belligerent.
France struggles with its own internal “Islam problem.” About four to five million Muslims, most of them Arab immigrants and a third of them Algerian, live in France. In 1970 France had two dozen mosques. In 1994 there were around 1,000 mosques in France.
The French government confronts many difficult choices. A tough response to terrorists is one thing; a “state of siege” which leads to ethnic carnage between the French and Arab immigrants is a step towards a kind of smoldering civil war, and one that plays into the hands of extreme right-wing politicians. [ED NOTE: These paragraphs were written in 1995– the riots are no surprise, folks.]
Likewise, French strikes at AIG bases in North Africa, in the minds of the AIG leadership, makes the point that the Algerian Army and “western-oriented” Arabs and Berbers are merely another type of “colonialist.” The AIG believes this could be the political issue which would turn the “trapped majority” of the Algerian people against the NLF and the Algerian Army.
France’s new war with political Islamic terrorism promises to be long and ugly — with very little glory.
