Historian BENJAMIN STORA is well known for his writings on Algeria and colonialism, including History of the Algerian War (1954-1962), History of Algeria After Independence (1962-1994), and The Sources of Algerian Nationalism. He has just published Imaginaires de Guerre, comparing the wars in Vietnam and Algeria as they affected the United States and France.
The following interview with Stora is abridged from the August issue of the French magazine Démocratie et Socialisme. Translation by BRENDAN DOYLE.
Question: Have the [June] elections brought a solution to Algeria?
Since the elections, several things have become clear. First, according to official figures, voter turnout was 10% lower than for the earlier vote on the constitution. This decline shows the lack of interest among a large part of the Algerian population for this type of election.
Secondly, the parties in power, the National Democratic Rally and the National Liberation Front, have not sought to crush the opposition by brandishing the election results. The two formations that stood against the regime were not humiliated. I refer to the Islamists, made up of Hamas and Enhada (based in Constantine), which between them got 100 candidates elected, and the democratic forces concentrated in Kabylie, the Front of Socialist Forces and Rally for Culture and Democracy, which won 40 seats.
[The regime] has not tried to close off the political arena, maybe because of Algerian public opinion, maybe because of world opinion.
Question: How can the violence in Algeria today be rolled back?
The main question is, will these gestures [by the regime] manage to contain the level of violence in Algeria? Will it enable us to move towards a negotiated solution?
In the last six years, there have been about 70,000 killed. According to groups such as Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights, there are 18,000 prisoners and 15,000 "disappeared". To these figures we must add the victims of punishment meted out by the Islamists on the civilian population.
The problem is that the war has been privatised. Since 1994-1995, because of the rise of the dollar and Algeria being a major oil producer, the regime has had increased income. This has enabled it to raise a militia force. One hundred and eighty thousand men have been recruited and paid to confront the Islamists.
This has led to the development of a new type of conflict that feeds on a succession of hatreds, vendettas, family and tribal vengeance, and which fragments the conflict. It's no longer a confrontation between the army and the Islamists; it's a confrontation between families. There is a risk that in privatising the war there is also a privatisation of politics, and that we're seeing society becoming autonomous from the political arena, and that is coming from the top.
There are no longer any mediators between the political arena and autonomous society. There are no rules, no mediation, no unions, no parties, no intermediate organisations, which increases the risk of terrorism and of society exploding.
There is also great social desperation. Thirty per cent of young people are unemployed, when Algeria has a youthful population.
War has destroyed mediation, terrorism has destroyed the field of politics. The political opposition doesn't talk to people in society, but to others.
We need to devote ourselves to rebuilding intermediaries — societal, cultural and even religious ones, because Algerian society is after all an Arab-Muslim society.
Today there is widespread distrust of the state, which only leads to even greater state violence.
Question: So, what is to be done?
To achieve peace in Algeria, a compromise must be found. Eradication will not provide a solution. Open peace negotiations. Zéroual made these the themes of his election campaign in November 1995. People were mobilised around them but the promises were not kept, and violence increased.
A program for modernisation or a program for "ideals and values" (secularisation, women etc.) [would be] abstract and idealistic, and inaccessible to people. Endless arguments about the barbarism of the fundamentalists or the barbarism of the state are useless if you don't have a political movement.
The forces that tend in this direction represent a majority among the population, but a minority as political forces, because the stakes in this war are not so much ideological as private. By privatising the war, the national unity for which hundreds of thousands died has been thrown into question.