Avuncular American

BRAC à la française: CINC Sarkozy and His Army

(Photo Source: AP)

The politics of national defense

BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure, a bureacratic DoD term that doesn't translate well into elegant French) is nevertheless what is on the President Nicolas Sarkozy's mind these days when he considers France's defense options.  BRAC - that lengthy process that the US last went through in 2005-2006, involving multiple clearances through military, Congressional, and state and local filters before any base is closed - is basically what Sarkozy and his government are proposing, though they are holding off until the end of July (maybe they are hoping that as much of France goes on vacation, no one will notice).  Update: today's "Telegramme de Brest" says that the announcement will be made by Prime Minister Francois Fillon on 24 July).

Though much of the plan had already been leaked, last week's Bastille Day pageant was allowed to take place before official pronouncements of painful cuts.  The outlines are clear, however: close bases, disband units, and make France's Army (the Navy is also due for hits, though of a lesser order, while the Air Force is to be trimmed by almost 25%) better fit for deployment abroad, whether alone, or as part of UN, EU, or NATO operations.  Sarkozy, as President of the European Union Council for the rest of 2008, also has in mind making forces available for a new "European Pillar of NATO."

As in an American BRAC process, much of this doesn't go down well with those most concerned: the military hierarchy, and the local hosts who depend on a unit's presence in their jurisdiction for economic stimulus, a kind of reverse NIMBY: "cuts are fine, as long as they're not in my constituency."  Given the military's traditional presence on France's littoral or along its eastern and northern borders, these "legacy" bases are often in economically deprived areas, making the hits even harder to absorb.  But they probably make sense from a standpoint of rationalization (much was made of the move of the 13th "Dragon" Paratroop Regiment [RDP, a reconnaissance unit] from its longtime home in the Moselle valley along the border with Germany, to southwest France where several of its sister special forces units are stationed.  Local officials only see the zero-sum aspect of losing, in the case of the RDP, half of its population.  In an excellent July 23 article, Catherine Magueur in Le Telegramme shows that party politics - shocking! - plays a large part in gerrymandering the new military map of France.  Too bad for bases and communities represented by the opposition...

Civilian control of the military

All this was hovering in the background (the excellent "JDD," le Journal de Dimanche on 13 July had a special two page pre-Bastille Day spread on Sarkozy and a discontented military) on 14 July, when France's military showed its finest marching style down the Champs Elysées.  Luckily for Sarkozy, the French military has matured from the days when, a half century ago in Algeria, its frustrated generals staged a "putsch" that helped fell the 4th Republic.  In 2008, there is grumbling in the ranks, where some feel that Sarkozy "humiliated" the honor of professional soldiers when he spoke of "amateurs" after a live-fire accident during a public event in Carcassonne - resulting in the resignation of the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Cuche.  Other officers anonymously joined a collective called "Surcouf" to sign a broadside against the "White Paper" that in the US context would have been the equivalent of the initial BRAC recommendations.  But don't expect any "putsch."

In the end, all the military wants is a little respect (one senior officer admitted that "the army is une grande sentimentale").  Many realize that "modernization" is overdue, and lament having to spend scarce resources on excess manpower when what they really need is spare parts.  Sarkozy's task (one of the many he has set himself in his "hyperpresidency") is to convince the French Army and its constituency that his reforms are in a context of recognition of the Army's worth.  One issue to monitor closely: as Sarkozy develops his "European Pillar of NATO" proposals and tries to leverage American acceptance of EU defense prerogatives in exchange for French reintegration into NATO's military command, check the French military reaction.  Away from the EU/NATO negotiations, will Sarkozy be seen as strengthening the French pillar, or undermining its foundations?  And what of the multiplicity of commitments?  Former defense minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, in the JDD, questioned how France could maintain 18 current overseas deployments, and entertain expanded commitments under an activist Sarkozy, all while reducing its military establishment.

As with all things Sarkozy, it's best to wait until the fireworks are long over, the dust settles, and then look at his military modernization campaign with a little bit of "recul."  In the meantime, wish the French Army a quiet summer holiday, and a bit of distance from its hyperactive Commander-in-Chief.

Two Shores, One Dream: Idir & El Gusto Bridge the Mediterranean

I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

The Sea in Between: Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Project

A Project Dear To The President’s Heart

On Monday’s July 14 Bastille Day in Paris, spectators will be treated to another grand military parade, one of the few such martial national day displays remaining in the democratic West.  The audience will include the leaders of the European Union member states as well as those from the (mostly Arab, but including Israel and Turkey) countries bordering the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean.  They will be gathered in the French capital for one of the most important events in the early days of the French EU Presidency, the launch of the “Union Pour la Mediterranée (UPM)” or the Union for the Mediterranean.

In Arabic, the Mediterranean Sea is poetically called Al-Bahr Al-Abyad Al-Muttawasit, "the middle white sea.”  President Nicolas Sarkozy was a schoolboy when Algeria (where his father had served in the Foreign Legion) became independent, though he may have had occasion to hear the geopolitical adage taught to generations of French schoolchildren: “The Mediterranean separates France, like the Seine separates Paris.”  Algeria was an integral part of France, and then suddenly, it wasn’t.  A million European settlers left independent Algeria, and in the intervening 46 years, millions of Algerians have settled in France.  The Med is definitely a middle passage between North and South.

With his present and former family connections in Ottoman-era Greece (mother's family), Corsica (first wife) Spain (wife No. 2, Cecilia), and Italy (current wife Carla), it is perhaps not surprising that the Mediterranean has had a special place in Sarkozy’s heart, even before his election to the Elysée Palace in spring 2007.  And this has all the hallmarks of a personal project: in June 2007, Quai d’Orsay diplomats responded with quizzical looks when asked about the new president’s Mediterranean ambitions.  Even now, on the eve of the summit, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs website gives much more space to the EU-Mediterranean Dialogue (an ongoing program) than to the Presidential UPM, which still has much to be defined (not the least of which, where will it be headquartered: Tunis on the southern shore, or Barcelona on the Spanish coast?).

Emotion-Laden North-South Relationships

The love/hate relationship between France and its former “colony” (the word was never used by the French, but the Algerians still pride themselves, sometimes even define themselves, by being at the forefront of the anti-colonialist drive from the Fifties through the Seventies) has in some ways been the bellwether of the Sarkozy Mediterranean proposal.  France and its policies are always treated with circumspection in Algeria, and few domestic points are gained in Algeria by seeming to kowtow to the former masters. (Though Algeria's ace political cartoonist Dilem has it right when he shows what Algeria's unemployed "hittistes" want out of the UPM: calm Mediterranean seas for their rafts, or preferably, French visas; emigration is still a big drain/safety valve).  At one point, it seemed that Algeria would scupper the whole deal.

In the end, Algerian President Bouteflika’s foot dragging on the Mediterranean project was overcome by careful French diplomacy, though not in the case of the one remaining holdout, Colonel (do we still call him that?) Kadhafi of Libya.  Despite blandishments (nuclear project, arms deals, wife No. 2 Cecilia as emissary-of-charm, week-long state visit to Paris last year), Kadhafi has condemned the Sarkozy Med Union.  Anyway, his life long ambition has been to unify (often literally, through mergers and sometimes with weapons) the Arab and African worlds that are Libya’s home turf.

Sarkozy’s ambitions for a French-led Mediterranean project were severely modified by Germany, which succeeded in EU-izing (opening up to non-Med EU countries what had previously been seen as a Mediterranean riparian state grouping) Sarkozy’s vision.  As former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine said today on France-Inter radio, the test of the new Med Union will be whether it can create a co-secretariat to build on the high-level co-presidential (France and Egypt) kickoff summit, and not just become a subcommittee of the EU.  Egypt, with its concentric Arab, African, and Middle East (especially longstanding relations with Israel) circles, and its experienced diplomatic corps, is an inspired choice to help France get the new grouping off the ground.

Another “Machin” or An Essential Tool?

Vedrine, along with a number of right and left of center European and southern Mediterranean luminaries, signed an “open letter” to the leaders gathering in Paris this weekend, published in Thursday’s Le Monde.  Though the letter enthuses about the Med Union’s potential for peacemaking (all eyes will be on the body language between Israeli and Syrian leaders this weekend), Vedrine on the radio spoke to the more nuts-and-bolts projects for the Union.  One not so trivial matter: North-South cooperation on cleaning up what is essentially massive a salty lake, one that gets dumped on, literally, with every effluent man and industry can produce.  If nothing else, Union for the Mediterranean success in this one crisis area could make the nascent organization worth all the hoopla.  As one commentator put it, success in "small" practical matters counts, and cited the EU's beginnings as a post-WW II coal and steel cartel combining the victors and the vanquished.

In his definitive work on the fall of France in 1940 “To Lose a Battle,” British historian (of France and Algeria) Alistair Horne starts off with a vivid portrait of another Bastille Day parade, that of the victorious French Army in July 1919, the first such parade after the end of the carnage of World War One the previous November.  At the time, the consensus was that the French Army was the biggest and best in the world.  True, but we know what the inter war period did to its relative standing against the Wehrmacht.  There was no follow up to the big show.

For the EU and Mediterranean leaders lined up on the Champs Elysées for Monday’s parade, what comes after will be the true test of the fine new Union For The Mediterranean to be unveiled this coming weekend.  Those 40 plus leaders, if not backed up by painstaking staff work, may be present at the creation of another “machin” (probably best translated as “thingy” - Charles De Gaulle’s ironic description of the UN and like multilateral organizations, which have to struggle to avoid being labeled talking shops).

Haraka mush Baraka: The Dangers of Perpetual Movement

Machin vs. functional coalition: does Sarkozy himself have the wherewithal and patience to stick with his bright shiny idea in the long term?  Wherewithal: yes (once the Quai d’Orsay is convinced that this is a going concern, it will apply itself to making it work).  Patience: this is Sarko’s Achilles heel.  The man, once described by an observant Brit as a kind of Tigger, bounces around from idea to proposal to next inspiration, whether domestic or international.  Bitter Lemons also has misgivings about his "frenetic" pace, and has devoted several articles to the Mediterranean Union plan from Arab, Israeli, and Turkish viewpoints.

The Mediterranean is timeless, but action is urgent; Sarkozy is a man in a hurry, but he’ll need to down shift and focus in this forum which will juxtapose cultures with different notions of time.  After all, his Maghrebi counterparts know the meaning behind a traditional expression, "Haraka mush Baraka."  Movement - for movement's sake - does not equate with benediction.

Dr. Said Saadi Diagnoses Algeria’s Democratic Malaise

A delegation of Algerian parliamentarians headed by RCD (Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Democratie) chairman Dr. Said Saadi is heading back home after a lobbying effort in North America and Europe.  Here in Brussels for talks with European institutions, Dr. Saadi took time to speak at the Transatlantic Institute about the situation in Algeria.

The RCD is one of two mainly Berber parties, and though it has one deputy from Ilizzi in the geographic center of Algeria, it is mostly active in the northern Kabylie region and in the capital area, where Saadi represents an Algiers voting district.  Saadi, a psychiatrist by training, has been practicing politics for most of his adult life, and after a brief sojourn in the first Bouteflika government, has returned to the opposition.

Perhaps “loyal opposition” is a more apt term, since on the most important existential question facing Algerian democracy since independence – recognition of the 1991 parliamentary victory by the Islamist FIS party – Saadi and the RCD sided with the Army putsch that overthrew then President Chadli Bendjedid and overturned the elections.  That placed the RCD on the side of the “eradicators” who favored removing the Islamists from the political scene.  So while the RCD contests certain aspects of the Algerian regime, it essentially lends it democratic credibility.  Saadi bristles at the suggestion that he is playing the regime’s game, and sued the newspaper “Le Monde” in a French court in 1998 for suggesting it.

Saadi and his delegation have been lobbying European and American officials, according to his April 1 article in the New York Post, to

seek the help of the United States and other democracies to ensure international supervision of the 2009 presidential and parliamentary elections. We also need their support to prevent a constitutional amendment to let the current president seek re-election despite the two-term limit.

Yesterday Saadi derided 2004 EU observers for certifying Algeria’s 2004 presidential elections, when Saadi accused the Army of stuffing ballot boxes.  That and other electoral fraud is the topic of an RCD brochure, which shows an “Ordre de Mission,” an official-looking laissez-passer issued by “candidate Abdelaziz Bouteflika” (who just happened also to be the President of the Republic) importuning “civil and security authorities” to lend “all necessary assistance” to the bearer of the cards.  Rather hard to refuse.  Saadi told EU election observers that if they can’t send a serious delegation in 2009, they shouldn’t send any.

Dr. Saadi’s analysis – or is it psychoanalysis? – of Algeria’s troubles on the socioeconomic front ring truest: desperate young people taking “suicidal” clandestine boat journeys across the Mediterranean; resurgence of diseases which had been eradicated previously; overcrowding in unsafe housing; and importation of Chinese labor when the unemployment rate is over 30%.  “The domination of the state by an old, corrupt and unpopular minority,” wrote Saadi, “has led to much social misery.”  Describing Bouteflika as a product of the old one-party state under the National Liberation Front (the FLN; road signs in Algiers used to point in the direction of “Le Parti”), Saadi says that the President is trying, by seeking a third term, to set himself up as a “president-for-life.”

Where is the Algerian Army in all this?  Here Saadi’s answer is more nuanced, but indicates that the Army attitude is not monolithic, which may prevent it from responding decisively should the situation further deteriorate.  Translation: in the Algeria of competing “clans,” the security forces are divided over the continuation of Bouteflika’s reign.

Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has recently written on the behind-the-scenes role of the Algerian military in his book “Ruling Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.”  In his book, Cook describes the military’s use of “a facade of democratic practices and principles” while continuing to control key institutions.  Therein lies a clue to how the Algerian regime’s management of its nominal democracy may evolve: let the RCD and other “democratic” (meaning non-Islamist) parties play the role of loyal opposition, while ensuring that the real power – over Algeria’s increasingly valuable gas and oil reserves – never leaves the hands of the same “clan” that has been in charge since independence: the military and the “nomenklatura,” those few hundred families that form the nucleus of what Algerians still call “le pouvoir.”

In other words, other than the brief period from early 1990, when the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) won freely contested municipal and regional elections, to late 1991, when they again won nationwide parliamentary elections before they were canceled by the military, Algeria has had an authoritarian regime that tolerates a degree of civilian participation.  Whether or not President Bouteflika succeeds in getting his third term, as long as the movement that won the country’s only free elections is banned, “democracy” in Algeria remains a relative term.

Contacts With the Opposition II: Ireland, Good Friday, and Terror

Today is the tenth anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which has allowed Northern Ireland to regain a measure of peaceful coexistence, as well as a considerable economic rebirth.  On a visit to Belfast circa 1999, the change in atmosphere was already apparent; Belfast bloomed with construction sites, “boutique” hotels were catering to business travelers if not tourists, and I recall that Belfast had something like the UK’s highest concentration of Mercedes and BMWs.

But as the BBC’s Panorama program showed this week, all is not love and roses between the communities; some 47 “peace walls” separate the Protestant and Catholic communities in several Ulster cities.  Though former sworn enemies Martin McGuinness of the Sinn Fein Catholic nationalists and Ian Paisley of the Protestant unionists now cavort laughingly together at the Stormont regional assembly, so much so that they’ve been dubbed “The Chuckle Brothers,” things are not so cozy on the street, where sectarianism is very much alive and well.

Yesterday’s Terrorist Is Today’s Statesman

So though the Northern Irish peace is not perfect, it is unquestionably better than the alternative.  The same might be said of Bosnia in the years after the Dayton Agreement, though the country is still divided into ethnic enclaves.  People can at least go shopping in Sarajevo without being picked off by snipers.  And Kosovo, Europe’s newest state(let), which may need an international umbilical cord for the foreseeable future, has settled into a sort of modus vivendi among its warring factions.

If Martin McGuinness – former IRA commander and convicted under terrorism charges – can now share parliamentary power with his former enemy, what does that tell us about the nature of politics?  Examples of former “terrorists” graduating to statesman status abound: Israel’s Menachim Begin of Irgun/Stern Gang infamy, becoming a peace partner with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat; Nelson Mandela, though probably the world’s most respected former leader, was originally imprisoned as the leader of the “terrorist” ANC, and still has to be "waivered" into the United States for his link with anti-apartheid terrorism; and if the French Revolution hadn’t yet “invented” the term terrorism in the late 18th century, the colonial British had similar terms a few years earlier for their American Revolutionaries, whose guerrilla operations (the “Swamp Fox”) and privateering went beyond the bounds of conventional military etiquette.

Back to the Good Friday anniversary and Tony Blair’s Finest Hour.  Today’s BBC World Service radio program “Analysis” is an excellent 9 minute evocation of the true political courage and vision that was behind the British-Irish-American (former senator George Mitchell was a key intermediary during the talks) initiative that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998.  “Analysis” notes that Blair rightly judged that the men-with-guns had to be included in the process, which tended to sideline or at least diminish the role of moderate parties like the SDLP, the largely Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party.

But Blair’s approach – if the men-with-guns are talking, they might be distracted from shooting – is singular in its audacity.  Governments, whether it is Bush’s with-us-or-against-us “hunt ‘em down in their caves” approach to Islamist extremism or Algeria’s “eradicateurs” set on destruction of the Islamist opposition, whether terrorists or simply activists or even elected officials, tend to paint a simplistic picture of radical opposition, often with predictably disastrous results.  Blair, at least in his Northern Ireland peacemaker role, took a chance and it has paid off over the last decade.

Contacts With The Opposition - Essential Diplomacy

Just Because They Run The Government Doesn't Mean They're In Charge

Astute readers will place me chronologically if I say that I joined the US Foreign Service around the time that the Shah's rule in Iran was giving way to the Islamic Revolution.  That traumatic change, when the prime US client regime in the Middle East was replaced by its polar opposite, was the cause of much soul-searching afterwards in American diplomatic circles.  How could the United States, with its pervasive presence in Iran (not just diplomatic, with consulates throughout the country, but military training facilities, oil companies, etc.) miss what later was shown to be a popular movement of massive proportions?

A few years later, at the diplomatic training center called the Foreign Service Institute, the "tradecraft" course for diplomats going off to political reporting assignments included a segment entitled "Contacts With the Opposition," and featured Ryszard Kapuscinski's "Shah Of Shahs," a must-read on the origins of the Iranian Revolution.  In discussions among young diplomats, it was clear that one of the key lessons of Iran was to avoid the trap of only talking to the people in charge, in the capital.  Unless you wanted to wind up like the US Embassy Tehran hostages - again, some of them contemporaries of mine.

In the early nineties, I found myself the interlocutor for the US Embassy in Algiers with the rising Islamist opposition, the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS.  At the time, the FIS was on a winning streak: fresh from victories in local and regional elections, they were in the city halls as mayors and councilors all across Algeria.  Their biggest victory - the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991 - was their last: the army stepped in and canceled the second round, arresting elected officials, and resulting in more than a decade of bloodshed.  But all that was still in the future.

In the process of doing my job, I used to attend political party press conferences.  Most of the time the parties were minuscule groupings of government stooges, set up to drain support from the populist (and popular) FIS.  The FIS and its public meetings were not to be missed.  One evening after one such press conference, still at the Embassy drafting my report back to Washington, I checked the telex ticker downstairs and stopped cold at the APS ("Algerie Presse Service," government-controlled) wire service story entitled something like "The Diplomat and the Sheikh."  In which a completely bogus story was planted in the Algerian dailies that I was a conduit for American money funding the FIS election campaign.  Luckily, the Ambassador was also still around, and his letter to the editor(s), in which he protested against the lies about secret funding, but defended diplomats' duties to maintain contact with all legitimate political parties, was printed in a timely manner.

Just Because They Disagree Doesn't Mean You Shouldn't Talk With Them

Therefore it came as no surprise to me that in the Algeria of March 2008, US Ambassador Robert Ford has had to defend his right to meet "political party representatives and members of civil society," after charges of American interference in Algeria's internal affairs, coming from none other than the Prime Minister, Abdelaziz Belkhadem.  Despite all the cosmetic changes since the army's overthrow of elected officials in 1992, Algeria's "nomenklatura" is still in charge, and doesn't appreciate foreign governments taking the opposition seriously.

So if it's silly, defensive, and ultimately counterproductive to expect the United States and other countries to cut off contact with opposition parties in Algeria, why do some people in the US get antsy about presidential candidates who propose essentially the same thing vis a vis America's "opposition" abroad?  Senator Barack Obama's proposition is that, if elected President, he would engage the leaders of Cuba and Iran in discussions about longstanding differences with the United States.  What is so wrong with that?  Is the simple act of talking itself a "concession," to be withheld indefinitely?

If such were always the case, Anwar Sadat would never have spoken to the Knesset, and Egypt would still be at war with Israel.  And Libya's Muammar Khadafi would still be persona non grata in the international community, and carrying on who knows what nefarious activities.  Yes, you can talk to your sworn enemies - just ask General David Petraeus, who now swears by the Sunnis, formerly of the anti-US insurgency.

Contacts with the opposition at the field level, and "talking with foes and friends," as Obama puts it, at the Presidential level, are essential tools of diplomacy.  But it's not easy: sometimes the local hosts get upset, and sometimes the home team won't understand that it is in their best interests.

Hearts & Minds, Housing & Marriage: Making Moderate Muslims

Build Them (Apartments) And They Will Come

The two leading US dailies, the New York Times and the Washington Post, today have compelling and competing views of how to explain and counter the rise of Islamic extremism.  I would suggest beginning with the NYT. The six minute video segment "Marriage Beyond Reach: Generation Faithful: Stalled Lives" by Craig Duff and Michael Slackman says it all:

With the cost of building a life beyond their grasp, many in the Arab Middle East are delaying marriage, losing hope and often turning to religion for solace.

The NYT video report starts with a Cairo wedding, the kind the wealthy can enjoy.  We lived in Egypt (Alexandria, its metropolis on the Mediterranean) in the '80s, and were at a couple of weddings.  Great fun.  In the '90s, we lived in Algeria, before the serious fighting got started.  Along with a few other postings in the Arab world, these glimpses into two countries that gave birth to powerful Islamist movements (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Salvation Front or "FIS" in Algeria) provide the background to my view of the pull of Islamic extremism: that it is born out of despair.

As in the NYT video, we knew lots of young Algerians or Egyptians who couldn't get married.  Simply because they couldn't afford housing, or no housing was available.  The young Egyptian in the video is a shop manager, and makes what is considered in Cairo a "decent" income.  But it's not enough to get his own place, which means he lives with his parents - probably squeezed between younger siblings.  He'd like to get married, just like the idle young men lining Algiers' streets.  They even have a name for them, "hittistes," a combination of French and Arabic meaning roughly "holding up a wall."  Unskilled.  Unemployed.  Unmarried.  Under the influence of... radical preachers.

In 2004, I returned to Algiers after an absence of 12 years.  The first thing that struck me was the ubiquitous construction - in a country where, in 1990, not one new building had gone up in Constantine, the third largest city, since the French departure in the early sixties.  In 2004 there were cranes everywhere, and working day and night on building sites - Chinese laborers, in a country with sky high unemployment.  But President Bouteflika had made a strategic decision, after a decade of violence: it was more important to build housing units fast (therefore with imported Chinese labor) than to build them with unskilled Algerian labor.  Such was the urgent need to give young people some hope.  In the NYT video, you'll see Dr. Hamdi Taha, whose charity tries to provide such hope to young Egyptian couples, with furniture and appliances.

In the early '90s in Algeria, just like current day Lebanon (where Hizbullah provided housing grants after the Israeli air war of 2006), it was the Islamist party that was seen as responsive to the basic needs of society.  That's why (like Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections) the Islamist FIS won every freely contested election in Algeria in 1990 and 1991, before it was banned in an Army coup in early 1992.  After more than 100,000 deaths, the Algerian government saw the need to combat the lure of radical Islam with concrete (literally) measures: housing for young couples.

What The Muslim World Does Not Need: American "Ideological Infrastructure"

Contrast the bricks-and-mortar approach outlined above with the latest great idea coming from the banks of the Potomac: more propaganda.  Walter Pincus, in "Taking A Page From The Cold War," tells us that they're at it again:

"I think over time we're going to need to build that kind of infrastructure," [CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence John A.] Kringen told the House [Armed Services Committee] panel, "because many times, it's not going to be what the U.S. government per se says, but the kind of interactions that they have through other people."  [Acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a speech Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Michael] Leiter described the "global ideological engagement, referred to by some as the 'war of ideas,' " as "a key center of gravity in the battle against al-Qaeda, its associates and those that take inspiration from the group."

Kringen's "infrastructure" is not housing for young Arabs hoping to get married and raise kids: he's talking about aiding "non-government organizations, including intellectual publications, labor unions and student groups, sometimes providing secret financial support," as paraphrased by Pincus.

Bureaucrats with seemingly unlimited resources at their disposal can and do dream up all kinds of things to "highlight the poverty of extremist thought," as Leiter put it.  But how about this: scrap all the Pentagon's new "Strategic Communication" websites that target the Muslim world, transfer an equivalent amount to "Habitat For Humanity" and similar organizations that actually help people house themselves, and let - to use a good conservative approach - the "market take care of the rest."  Nothing is as simple as that, of course, but I would wager that dollars well spent in housing people would go much farther than yet more ill-conceived programs in the "war of ideas."

European Immigrants & Islam: Radically Different Visions

(Photo Source: Unifrance.org)

A Franco-Arab Immigrant Version of "Big Night"

The Germans have entitled it "Warten auf Couscous," the original title is "La graine et le mulet," and it will be known as "Secret of the Grain" when it is eventually brought to the anglophone world.  Yes, couscous does feature prominently in the film, but that is like saying that "Gone With the Wind" should have been called "She Grows Cotton."

La graine et le mulet (the couscous in question is the mullet variety, as those who know Tunisia's fish couscous have come to appreciate) is a French film by a Tunisian-born director, Abdelatif Kechiche.  French, because it's almost all in French, takes place in Sete, a Mediterranean fishing port, and with a cast almost exclusively  composed of hyphenated French, mostly of North African origin.

Kechiche has explored this world before, in "La Faute a Voltaire" and "L'esquive," both of which garnered awards in European film festivals, as has La graine et le mulet.  But here's the thing: in his latest film, there's not a Muslim fundamentalist to be seen.  You would be hard-pressed to guess that the Maghrebi families depicted practice any religion - it's just not shown to be a part of their lives.

What we do see are lots of family: extended family, immigrant family, second generation family, mixed marriages, divorces, infidelity, and love.  The only skin you'll see is during an extended belly dance at the family restaurant (that's the converted fishing boat you see in the poster).  But I would say that certain fundamentalist elements in European Muslim communities will rail against the film, simply for its naturalistic depiction of secular Muslims going about the business of adapting to life in Europe.

For someone who has spent a chunk of his life in North Africa, the film is a joy.  The acting is natural, understated at most times, volcanic when the situation calls for emotion.  There is humor, pathos, and an uncanny feel for relations among and across France's communities.  The film's acting revelation is Hafsia Herzi, under twenty when the film was made in 2005 (it was only released in 2007).  If Marion Cotillard just won a very deserved Golden Globe for her portrayal of Edith Piaf, then Hafsia Herzi deserves honors for this, her first film role (she did win the "Marcello Mastoianni Prize" at the Venice Film Festival).

As the Hollywood Reporter said of Kechiche at Venice, "the director's lack of discipline in failing to yell cut while he's ahead" is really the only serious criticism that can be rendered against this two and a half hour film.  In all other respects, it's all thumbs up.

Another Side of European Islam, Made in Saudi Arabia

(Photo Source Bol.com) 

Leaving secular Sete, we now move to Muslim Molenbeek, a heavily-Arab immigrant neighborhood of Brussels.  Thanks to a friend at a local think tank devoted to Middle East issues, I learned about the work of Hind Fraihi, a young Belgian writer of Moroccan origin.  In this rather disturbing Deutsche Welle TV clip (thanks to You Tube), Fraihi reports on the near-takeover of Molenbeek by Muslim fundamentalists.

Thanks to Karine Ancellin Saleck of the blog "Women's International Perspective", we have this on Fraihi's work

Hind Fraihi, a young Moroccan journalist, has just published in Belgium a book entitled Infiltrated. She tells the story of how she tried to infiltrate the Islam activist groups in Brussels for her newspaper, Niewsblad.

The newspaper entrusted her with the mission to uncover Islamic political activism in Brussels. So she went out to meet the Muslims in Molenbeek, an area that is well known for being the hideout for the most radical Muslim groups in the city.  Hind roams the streets of Molenbeek and follows paths that lead her behind closed doors of clandestine mosques. She holds passionate discussions with her sisters, all dressed in black from head to toe, but she understands she is clearly kept at a fair distance. Hind Fraihi meets with the Cheikh Ayachi Bassam, who married a young Moroccan woman to the murderer of commander Messaoud, the lion of the Panchir.

But of all her expeditions amongst the “salafist” and the “jihadist” and other fundamentalists, only the deluded nihilism of young subway delinquents who live on petty theft really threatened her personally. She called upon her brother to be her bodyguard.

All along, what we feel is a diversity, rather than an invading fundamentalist presence that could be a menace on the Belgians, like some London groups with their hate speeches toward the West. Nevertheless she takes notice of the fact that right before her book was completed, a 38 year old Belgian woman, Murielle Degauque, blew herself up in Iraq. She also stresses the enormous potential that lie for Islamists to recruit society’s dropouts and orient them towards more aggressive stands (emphasis added).

Miss Fraihi concludes by unveiling another group of this Moroccan community: the far right activists. Those who support a political party which intends to get rid of them, or keep them at the lowest level of society to exploit them as much as possible. Moroccan men and women who favour Belgian nationalism or racism like the Vlams Belang and the National Front…

Hind Fraihi throws clear light, not judgmental, on the relief felt by young women who feel at odds with modern women and feel attracted by the Muslim feminists, and in the wake by Muslim activists, that she calls the Muslim Punks.

"Like some London groups with their hate speeches toward the West..."  This brings me to another revelation from my friend: a British think tank report from The Policy Exchange (Conservative Party), entitled "The Hijacking of British Islam" (download available).  Among the key findings:

* Most of the extremist literature is published and distributed by agencies linked to the Saudi Arabian government.
* Among the literature available are extracts from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (published by the Saudi Ministry of Education), and other publications peddling bizarre conspiracy theories alleging that birth control is a plot against Muslims and Arabs, and that pornography is spread as part of a Jewish plot to corrupt Muslims.

A few years ago, when I was working at the US Embassy in London, my wife and I took a stroll on a Sunday morning through Hyde Park, and made a compulsory visit to "Speakers' Corner," the place where generations of eccentrics would peddle their theories and wacko philosophies.  Only in the 21st century, the harmless eccentrics were long gone, and they were replaced - to a man - by fire-breathing exponents of an Islam that The Prophet would probably not recognize.

"The Hijacking of British Islam," cataloging books, pamphlets and all kinds of screeds subsidized by Saudi Arabia, had this as its first policy recommendation:  "i) The Saudi Arabian government must be told to stop distributing extremist literature in Britain or else risk its good relations. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is currently on a state visit to the UK [note: the study was issued in time for the October 2007 visit] and the British government should address this matter directly with him."  There is no indication that the issue of Saudi dissemination of hate literature in British mosques was ever raised.

Fast forward to... today.  Two presidents - one American, one French - both courting Saudi Arabia on their respective first visits to the Kingdom.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy:  According to Reuters

France would be an honest friend to Saudi Arabia.  "France wants to be a friend of Saudi Arabia ... who does not seek to give lessons, but says the truth, a friend who asks for nothing, but is there when needed," Sarkozy told the Saudi parliament which is an appointed body.

US President George W. Bush: AP says that while Bush told a group...

"I also want you to understand something about America — that we respect you, we respect your religion and we want to work together for the sake of freedom and peace."

... National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was telling reporters that the administration was notifying Congress of its intent to sell $20 billion in weapons, including precision-guided bombs, to the Saudis. It is "a pretty big package, lots of pieces."

Anyone who still harbors the notion that US, French, or British leaders can lecture the Saudis about their central role in proselytizing for obscurantist Islam should go back to reading their favorite fairytale.  The big three Western powers are only doing what is natural in power politics: paying obeisance to the people who count - the Saudi monarchy, the same people who can open (or close) the oil valves.

Here's what former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman said of the Kingdom after a recent visit

With Baghdad flattened, Cairo immobilized, Damascus sidelined, and the oil wealth pouring in, Riyadh has become the center of the Arab diplomatic world. Hardly a day passes without the arrival in Saudi Arabia of at least one chief of state or government who must be greeted by the 85-year-old Saudi monarch.

But Bush and Sarkozy should be wary of being taken in by what they hear; again, Amb. Freeman:

Meanwhile, there is a disturbing tendency by Americans and Arabs to hear what we want to hear when we discuss the challenges posed by Iran. Arab politesse then assures that mistaken impressions linger without correction. An example is our tendency to interpret Saudi pleas that something urgently be done to counter Iran and its nuclear weapons program as endorsement of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic. Some Saudi aficionados of air power may indeed wish for this but they are a distinct minority. In urging action to counter Tehran, most are simply expressing nostalgia for a past in which they routinely looked to the United States as patron-protector to come up with some way of solving problems without demanding anything of them except, perhaps, some of their money. But the U.S. now seems to have no ideas, only bombers.

Give us our $20 billion in weapons (US), and our €40 billion in nuclear and energy contracts (France), and don't give us any lessons on our missionary work.  Thank you, Your Majesty, for allowing us to even land in your Forbidden Kingdom.

"Elective Feudalism:" Essential Reading on Pakistan From William Dalrymple

I am not a South Asia expert; I have never set foot in Pakistan.

William Dalrymple, the Scottish writer of "From the Holy Mountain," and a slew of books on South Asia, is such an expert, and writes perceptively today in The Observer (London) via the Guardian's "Comment is Free" op-ed feature.  His article is an antidote to the tendency in the West to beatify Benazir Bhutto:

Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy, but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute and who helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first 20-month premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture

Though I don't know Pakistan personally, I have lived in other countries where "democracy" and "secularism" mean something different to the West's usual interpretation of the terms.

In Algeria, post-independence governments have largely hailed from the military "nomenklatura," the use of the Soviet term appropriate given the trend in the sixties and seventies to jettison all that was French, capitalist, and agricultural for a socialist, heavy-industrial Soviet style, turning Algeria into a Third World beacon of liberation movements.  When that self-image fell flat in the late eighties and early nineties, Islamists channeled popular frustration at rule by a nomenklatura of some 400 families and won a series of local and national elections.  When the military canceled the elections in early 1992, it unleashed a decade and a half of violence, and made Algeria synonymous with Islamist terrorism.  But the nomenklatura is still there, bolstered by record world prices for Algeria's precious natural gas exports.

In Egypt, a similar military-rooted clique has been in power since the overthrow of King Farouk in the 1950s.  Nasser to Sadat, Sadat to Mubarak, Mubarak to... Mubarak?  Yes, the Egyptian ruling elite is secular, but it too has had serious competition from Islamists, and over the years has alternated between accommodation (including ex-Muslim Brotherhood candidates in the ruling party) and repression.  Go watch the excellent "Yacoubian Building" for a two hour introduction to the contradictions in Egyptian society.

Back to Pakistan and William Dalrymple

Behind Pakistan's endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa: 'Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.'

In the West, many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational 'Islamo-fascism'. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists' ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.

When we witness repeated electoral victories by Islamists in countries as varied as Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and - lest we forget - the Palestinian Authority, either we accept that the Islamists are recognized by electors as worthy of their vote, or we reject the very premise of elections and democracy.

The US is still encouraging Pakistan to go forth with elections on January 8

After signing a condolence book for Bhutto at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Rice said the United States is in contact with "all" of the parties in Pakistan and stressed that the Jan. 8 elections should not be postponed. "Obviously, it's just very important that the democratic process go forward," she told reporters.

But Pakistanis themselves are questioning the wisdom of such a course, given Bhutto's assassination and the attempted assassination on the same day of Nawaz Sharif.  If elections happen - remember Dalrymple's term "elective feudalism" - will the US accept the outcome if it leads to a strengthening of the Islamists?

Algeria: Flags at Half Mast (Updated 12/12)

(See Update Below)

Two attacks, one against the offices of the UNHCR in Hydra, our old neighborhood in Algiers, and another killing students in the suburb of Ben Akhnoun, where my wife used to drive our kids to school every day, brought the violence in Algeria close to home today.  I extend my personal sympathies to the victims and their families.  Students in a bus going to the Law Faculty and UN officials bringing succor to refugees - these are among today's victims.

Algeria, which has had a very rough time of it since its truncated experience with multi-party democracy in the early Nineties, has had a year's worth of high-profile terrorism in the heart of the capital.  In the years leading up to autumn 2006, the capital Algiers had been largely spared the violence that had rocked the entire country in the mid-Nineties.  There was a feeling that the worst was behind them, and a building boom reflected confidence that the country was turning the page.

But in rapid succession, things started to change.  I was on a business trip to Algiers when truck bombs destroyed two police stations in late October 2006.  And a year ago - almost to the day - a bus carrying expatriate workers of Kellogg Brown Root Condor (a Halliburton affiliate at the time) was attacked in what was probably the most "secure" zone of Algiers.  Months later, 11 April 2007, the Prime Minister's office and the Ministry of Interior were bombed, in the very center of Algiers.  Today's bombings show that the perpetrators can act with impunity in areas heretofore considered "safe."

In the early Nineties, Algeria opened a window to democratic pluralism and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which had quickly mastered the art of organizing and "getting out the vote," won every free election - local and parliamentary - that was held.  In early 1992 the Algerian Army, fearing FIS retribution for decades of collusion in the pilfering the country's oil and natural gas wealth, overthrew the president, canceled the final round of elections, and threw FIS elected officials into jail.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Just like the other blasts in Algiers over the last twelve months, there will be claims of responsibility, probably from "Al-Qaeda's Committee in the Islamic Maghreb," as the GSPC is now called.  But western analysts might pause before simply chalking this up as another Al-Qaeda spectacular.  Why, for example, was the UN office hit?  Way back in the spring of 1991, when Algeria "tilted" against "Operation Desert Storm" to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, Coalition embassies (US, UK, France, but also those of Egypt and Syria) were well-protected.  True, symbolic targets like Air France were fair game for arsonists, but in the main the Government of Algeria wanted to ensure that after the Gulf War was over, it could still do business with the countries of the Coalition.

But that left the United Nations - under whose auspices the Coalition was then fighting Saddam - vulnerable.  And so it was that the UN building in Algiers was attacked by a mob, though it should have enjoyed the same protections as bilateral embassies.  As the head UN official (himself a Syrian national) said at the time, "Where is the hand?" hinting that the UN building may have been a convenient "safety valve" target, a way of letting off steam for frustrated pan-Arabist demonstrators.  The UN - it belongs to all, but really belongs to no one.

Those relatively non-lethal days of throwing a few Molotov cocktails are gone.  This is the age of the suicide bomber, and niceties like avoiding casualties by phoning in bomb warnings are a thing of the past.  I don't know what is behind today's blasts, but one thing is for sure: be wary of simplistic explanations, and search back to the root causes of this 15 year old conflict.  And ask, as my Syrian friend did, "Where is the hand?"

(Update Wednesday 12/12/2007)

Today's "Le Monde" carries a useful chronology of the deteriorating security situation in Algeria (notably Algiers) over the past year.

"Le Soir" (Brussels) has an exclusive from its correspondent in Algiers, analyzing "Who Profits from the Crimes in Algiers?"  Describing the almost instant condemnation of Interior Minister Nourredine Yazid Zerhouni (a close collaborator of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika) by radio call-ins in the immediate aftermath of yesterday's bombings, the correspondent quotes an Algiers political scientist:

It's President Bouteflika who is being targeted by the generals who don't want him to serve a third term; in 1997-98 the collective massacres made President Zeroual resign.  Now they've reactivated the same procedure against Bouteflika.

This is uncannily close to some analysis in "Algeria-Watch" in the aftermath of the April 11, 2007 bombings at the Prime Minister's and Interior Minister's offices.  At the time, Interior Minister Zerhouni himself downplayed an Al Qaeda role in the deadly bombings:

What is Yazid Zerhouni suggesting by declaring the day after the April 11, 2007 attacks in Algiers that "one must not exclude other interests (my emphasis) not wishing the Algerian State to recover, restructure and operate more efficiently."?

Algeria-Watch goes on to speculate about the conspiracy theories, which are never in short supply in Algeria.  Algeria, which truly was a world leader in the Nonaligned Movement in the halcyon days of post-independence '60s and '70s under hard man Houri Boumediene, still likes to think of itself as the "target" of outside powers, alternately France, the United States, the Gulf monarchies... depending on the particular political wind blowing.   Usually, the favorite "other interests" carrying out nefarious activities were the ex-colonists, the French.

Algeria's mercurial relationship with the US has been mostly on the upswing since the Bush Administration found in them a potential ally against terrorists in the Trans-Sahel.  But the Algerian government, which has spent a decade and a half dealing with the aftereffects of a military coup against an Islamist electoral surge, never hesitates to put the US into the hot seat when it feels its interests threatened.  Algeria's opposition to the creation of the US Africa Command AFRICOM is a case in point.  It mounted a very public campaign to distance Algeria from any potential basing of AFRICOM on its soil - though it is not even clear whether the US even contemplated such a move.

Stay tuned for nuanced analysis in the weeks ahead from those who go beyond the one day condemnations, and who may see more in these heinous bombings than the usual Al Qaeda suspects.