‘Terrorists’ behind the Algerian hostage crisis were from Mali: PM

Algeria’s Prime Minister Abdumalik Salal said a 32-member Al-Qaeda-linked group, who were behind the hostage crisis in Algeria, were from Mali.

Around 32 “terrorists,” who were behind the Algerian hostage crisis, hailed from northern Mali, Algeria’s Prime Minister Abdumalik Salal told reporters in a press conference on Monday.

The purpose of the operation by the 32-member al-Qaeda-linked group was to embolden their negotiation clout and that’s by increasing the number of the hostages under their control as they already have a number of captives in Mali, Salal said.

The terrorist group initially intended to hijack a bus carrying oil and gas workers in the Algerian desert that also had a manager from the British oil and gas company, BP.

“The Algerian army was successful and professional in not allowing the militants to take the hostages to Mali,” he added.

In another operation, the militants wanted to detonate a gas compound on Friday but the Algerian Special Forces were “professional” in preventing the disaster from happening.

The death toll according to Salal was 37 hostages who were killed by the militants. The victims came from eight countries; however, the identity of seven slain hostages couldn’t be identified.

The whereabouts of five hostages are still unknown, he said.

Meanwhile, a Canadian national, named Shadad, was among the militants who kidnapped the foreign workers.

According to Reuters, Canada is seeking more details on reports that a Canadian was involved in the Algerian hostage-taking, the foreign affairs department said on Monday.

The Qaeda-linked militants, who were angry at French intervention in Mali, wanted to send a clear message: they could strike anywhere in the Sahara including terrorizing hundreds of foreigners from different backgrounds in Algeria.

Recapturing of key frontline towns in Mali

Meanwhile,French and Malian troops recaptured the key frontline towns of Diabaly and Douentza on Monday in a major boost to their push north to flush out Qaeda-linked rebels, AFP reported.

The inroads are a significant advance in the 11-day offensive led by former colonial power France, whose aim is the “total re-conquest” of Mali’s strategically important but sparsely populated vast desert north.

The French defense ministry in Paris said “Malian troops backed by French soldiers” retook the two towns in a “definite military victory” for the forces.

A convoy of about 30 armored vehicles transporting some 200 Malian and French troops moved into Diabaly, 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of the capital Bamako, early Monday, meeting no resistance.

The troops got a red carpet welcome from locals who cheered them as the soldiers took photographs on their mobile phones to record the triumphant entry, an AFP journalist said.

Diabaly has been the theater of air strikes and fighting since it was seized by Islamists a week ago.

Douentza lies in what was Islamist territory east and north of the town of Konna, whose capture earlier this month by extremists sparked the French intervention. Konna was recaptured by the Malian army last week.

Mali extends state of emergency

Meanwhile, Mali late Monday extended a state of emergency in place since January 12 for three months amid the French-led military offensive to flush out the Qaeda-linked Islamists from the north.

The decision was taken at a special cabinet meeting.

(english.alarabiya.net / 21.01.2013)

The hostage kidnapping in Algeria – a first evaluation

The Algerian military operation brings to mind the Russian modus operandi against the Chechens barricaded with hundreds of hostages in the Moscow Dubrovka Theater.

Algerian army guards road to gas plant

According to most media outlets, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb brigade, led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is responsible for the hostage taking in the Algerian BP oil facilities in In Amenas. According to the spokesman of Belmokhtar’s brigade quoted by Sahara Media, the kidnapping of the foreigners is in revenge for Algeria’s consent to French use of its airspace for flights headed to Mali.

In the opinion of this author the kidnapping has only indirect connection with the French intervention in Mali, and was planned many weeks or even months before the incident happened.

Rather, the attack is connected with the in-fighting among the various factions of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) on the background of the latest developments related to this organization.

It should be recorded that Mokhtar Belmokhtar has been a long-time member of AQIM, as head of the southern Sahara unit or katiba, later named the Katibat Moulathamine, or Masked Brigade.

During the past four-five years he has become more of a local warlord, acting in this huge deserted Sahel region on the borders of Mauritania and northern Mali, engaging in narcotics and cigarette smuggling and the lucrative industry of kidnapping foreign tourists and workers.

He was in conflict with the present emir of AQIM, Abu Musab Abdel Wadoud (aka Abelmalek Droukdel), who refused to nominate him as emir. It was reported that Belmokhtar split from AQIM, or was expelled from the organization, in the last months of 2012.

In spite of AQIM’s and its allies’ advances in northern Mali since the military coup there in March 2012, Algerian military forces have been successful in killing and arresting on Algerian territory some 200 militants and leaders since August 2012.

An operation on August 15, 2012, led to the arrest of the chairman of AQIM’s judicial committee, Nacib Tayeb (aka Abderrahmane Abou Ishak Essoufi) as he was headed to a leadership meeting.

In October, Algerian forces killed Bekkai Boualem (aka Khaled el-Mig), the head of external relations for al- Qaida.

On December 16, Salah Gasmi, AQIM’s number two boss and main spokesman was captured near Bouira.

He was responsible for the group’s propaganda, the co-ordination of the various small groups operating in Kabylie and is the suspected mastermind of the 2007 suicide bombings in Algiers.

His arrest weakens Droukdel’s leadership.

Finally, on January 5, 2013, Algerian security forces killed nine terrorists in Keddara, Boumerdes. One of them was identified as Izza Rezki (aka Abou Djaffar), responsible for the finances of the organization.

It is therefore possible that the main goal of Mokhtar Belmokhtar in this major terrorist operation was to enhance his position in the fight for the leadership of AQIM. If successful, the operation could also have brought him an important ransom from some of the governments or companies which had citizens among the foreign hostages, to finance his group’s future activities.

IT IS still too early to evaluate the final results of the military operation to free the hostages in the gas facilities.

From the point of view of the Algerian authorities, the most important issue was to hamper any attempt by the terrorists to blow up this important gas field, as gas and oil exports are the main source of revenue for the government. This could explain the decision to act so quickly; without, perhaps, all the necessary intelligence for a successful operation.

The Algerians wanted also to prevent political pressure from foreign governments worried for the fate of their citizens, like Japan and Norway.

Another factor was the desire to show the Algerian people the determination of the government to fight the Islamist terrorists at any price and not show any sign of political weakness after it “won” the May 2012 legislative election and, contrary to all other Arab regimes, to stop the advance of the Islamist wave.

The Algerian military and security services have led a long, deadly and cruel war against the Islamists since 1992, which has cost the lives of 100,000-150,000 Algerians.

The death of dozens of hostages, even if it could involve serious diplomatic repercussions, is less important than the stability the Algerian regime whose main goal is survival.

The Algerian military operation, in a huge gas complex were more than 600 people were working, many of them taken hostage, brings to mind the Russian modus operandi against the Chechens barricaded with hundreds of hostages in the Moscow Dubrovka Theater (October 2002) or the Beslan school hostage crisis (September 2004).

(www.jpost.com / 21.01.2013)

APS: 18 dead as Algerian forces launch ‘final assault’

ALGIERS (Reuters) — Algerian special forces on Saturday launched a “final assault” on Islamists holding foreign hostages at a gas plant in the Algerian desert, killing 11 of the al-Qaida-linked fighters, the country’s official APS news agency said.

Seven foreign hostages held by the militants have been killed by their captors, APS said.

(www.maannews.net / 19.01.2013)

Algeria says desert siege over, dozens killed

The Amenas Gas Field in Algeria is seen in this October 8, 2012 handout image courtesy of DigitalGlobe.

 

ALGIERS (Reuters) — Algerian forces stormed a desert gas complex to free hundreds of hostages but 30, including several Westerners, were killed in the assault along with at least 11 of their Islamist captors, an Algerian security source told Reuters.

Western leaders whose compatriots were being held did little to disguise their irritation at being kept in the dark by Algeria before the raid – and over its bloody outcome. French, British and Japanese staff were among the dead, the source said.

An Irish engineer who survived said he saw four jeeps full of hostages blown up by Algerian troops whose commanders said they moved in about 30 hours after the siege began because the gunmen had demanded to be allowed to take their captives abroad.

And while a crisis has ended that posed a serious dilemma for Paris and its allies as French troops attacked the hostage-takers’ al-Qaida allies in neighboring Mali, it left question marks over the ability of OPEC-member Algeria to protect vital energy resources and strained its relations with Western powers.

Two Japanese, two Britons and a French national were among at least seven foreigners killed, the source told Reuters. Eight dead hostages were Algerian. The nationalities of the rest, as well as of perhaps dozens more who escaped, were unclear. Some 600 local Algerian workers, less well guarded, survived.

Fourteen Japanese were among those still unaccounted for by the early hours of Friday, their Japanese employer said.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has cancelled part of his trip in Southeast Asia, his first overseas trip since taking office, and is considering flying home early due to the hostage crisis, Japan’s top government spokesman said on Friday.

“The action of Algerian forces was regrettable,” said Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, adding Tokyo had not been informed of the operation in advance.

Americans, Norwegians, Romanians and an Austrian have also been mentioned by their governments as having been captured by the militants who called themselves the “Battalion of Blood” and had demanded France end its week-old offensive in Mali.

Underlining the view of African and Western leaders that they face a multinational Islamist insurgency across the Sahara — a conflict that prompted France to send hundreds of troops to Mali last week — the official source said only two of the 11 dead militants were Algerian, including the squad’s leader.

The bodies of three Egyptians, two Tunisians, two Libyans, a Malian and a Frenchman were found, the security source said.

The group had claimed to have dozens of guerrillas on site and it was unclear whether any militants had managed to escape.

The overall commander, Algerian officials said, was Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of Afghanistan in the 1980s and Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990s. He appears not to have been present and has now risen in stature among a host of Saharan Islamists, flush with arms and fighters from chaotic Libya, whom Western powers fear could spread violence far beyond the desert.

‘No to blackmail’

Algeria’s government spokesman made clear the leadership in Algiers remains implacably at odds with Islamist guerrillas who remain at large in the south years after the civil war in which some 200,000 people died. Communication Minister Mohamed Said repeated their refusal ever to negotiate with hostage-takers.

“We say that in the face of terrorism, yesterday as today as tomorrow, there will be no negotiation, no blackmail, no respite in the struggle against terrorism,” he told APS news agency.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who warned people to prepare for bad news and who cancelled a major policy speech on Friday to deal with the situation, said through a spokesman that he would have liked Algeria to have consulted before the raid.

A Briton and an Algerian had also been killed on Wednesday.

The prime minister of Norway, whose state energy company Statoil runs the Tigantourine gas field with Britain’s BP and Algeria’s national oil company, said he too was not informed.

US officials had no clear information on the fate of Americans, though a US military drone had flown over the area. Washington, like its European allies, has endorsed France’s move to protect the Malian capital by mounting air strikes last week and now sending 1,400 ground troops to attack Islamist rebels.

A US official said on Thursday it would provide transport aircraft to help France with a mission whose vital importance, President Francois Hollande said, was demonstrated by the attack in Algeria. Some fear, however, that going on the offensive in the remote region could provoke more bloodshed closer to home.

The apparent ease with which the fighters swooped in from the dunes to take control of an important energy facility, which produces some 10 percent of the natural gas on which Algeria depends for its export income, has raised questions, over the value of security measures that are outwardly draconian.

Foreign firms were pulling non-essential staff out of the country, which has recovered stability only in recent years and whose ruling establishment, heirs to fighters who ended French rule 50 years ago, has resisted demands for reform and political freedoms of the kind that swept North Africa in the Arab Spring.

“The embarrassment for the government is great,” said Azzedine Layachi, an Algerian political scientist at New York’s St John’s University. “The heart of Algeria’s economy is in the south. where the oil and gas fields are. For this group to have attacked there, in spite of tremendous security, is remarkable.”

‘Kill infidels’

A local man who had escaped from the facility told Reuters the militants appeared to have inside knowledge of the layout of the complex, supporting the view of security experts that their raid was long-planned, even if the Mali war provided a motive.

“The terrorists told us at the very start that they would not hurt Muslims but were only interested in the Christians and infidels,” Abdelkader, 53, said by telephone from his home in the nearby town of In Amenas. “‘We will kill them,’ they said.”

Algiers, whose leaders have long had frosty relations with the former colonial power France and other Western countries, may have some explaining to do over its tactics in putting an end to a hostage crisis whose scale was comparable to few in recent decades bar those involving Chechen militants in Russia.

Government spokesman Said sounded unapologetic, however: “When the terrorist group insisted on leaving the facility, taking the foreign hostages with them to neighboring states, the order was issued to special units to attack the position where the terrorists were entrenched,” he told state news agency APS, which said some 600 local workers were freed.

The militants said earlier they had 41 foreign hostages.

‘Army blasted hostages’

Stephen McFaul, an electrical engineer, told his family in Northern Ireland after the operation that he narrowly escaped death, first when bound and gagged by the gunmen who fastened explosives around the hostages’ necks and then on Thursday when he was in a convoy of five vehicles driving across the complex.

“(The gunmen) were moving five jeeploads of hostages from one part of the compound,” his brother Brian McFaul said. “At that stage, they were intercepted by the Algerian army.

“The army bombed four out of five of the trucks and four of them were destroyed … He presumed everyone else in the other trucks was killed … The truck my brother was in crashed and at that stage Stephen was able to make a break for his freedom.”

McFaul said it was unclear whether the vehicles had been struck by missiles fired from helicopters or by ground forces.

The attack in Algeria did not stop France from pressing on with its campaign in Mali. It said on Thursday it now had 1,400 troops on the ground there, and combat was under way against the rebels that it first began targeting from the air last week.

“What is happening in Algeria justifies all the more the decision I made in the name of France to intervene in Mali in line with the UN charter,” Hollande said on Thursday.

The French action last week came as a surprise but received widespread public international support. Neighboring African countries planning to provide ground troops for a UN force by September have said they will move faster to deploy them.

(www.maannews.net / 18.01.2013)

Algeria Attack Planned Before Mali Intervention, Officials Say

WASHINGTON Jan 17 (Reuters) – Algerian militants planned their hostage-taking attack on a remote desert gas plant well before a French military operation against militants in neighboring Mali, European and U.S. national security officials said on Thursday.

Intelligence indicates that the hostage takers, believed to be members of a breakaway faction of al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), had planned to capture the hostages and take them to a hideout where it would be harder to mount a rescue attempt, a European security official said.

Representatives of the hostage takers told a news service in nearby Mauritania that the attack was a response to the French military operation to clear out Islamic fighters who have taken control of a large swathe of territory in northern Mali. The French operation began on Friday, Jan. 11.

However, U.S. and Western security sources said they believed it was more likely that the motivation behind the hostage-taking was to obtain a ransom, most likely in cash, but also possibly to seek a release of militant prisoners.

The standoff began when gunmen stormed the gas facility on Wednesday. They said they were holding 41 foreigners and demanded a halt to the French military operation in Mali.

Twenty-five foreign hostages escaped and six were killed on Thursday when Algerian forces launched an operation to free them at a remote desert gas plant, Algerian sources said, as one of the biggest international hostage crises in decades unfolded.

The operation was said to be continuing, however, and there were conflicting and confused reports from the region.

More than five Americans were believed to be among the hostages along with around 10 Britons, as well as citizens of other countries, Western sources said.

Several Western security sources said that although details about the hostage-taking remain murky, available evidence suggests the attack was too sophisticated to have been organized in the wake of the French operation in Mali.

The sources said it was more likely the hostage-takers had seized on news of that operation as a pretext for their attack.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who has advised President Barack Obama on counterterrorism policy, said the hostage-taking could fuel criticism that U.S. authorities should have been paying closer attention to the threat posed by Islamic militants in north Africa.

Some of Obama’s political opponents for months have been raising similar questions about the U.S. security and intelligence posture in Benghazi, Libya, where militants launched a deadly attack on two U.S. official installations last Sept. 11.

U.S. and European sources said the reported leader of the Algerian militant faction that took workers from BP and Statoil hostage, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is a former leading member of AQIM. He either split from, or was thrown out of, the al Qaeda affiliate because he was regarded as too difficult to work with and too interested in self-promotion, they said.

A 2008 State Department cable classified “secret” and made public by WikiLeaks said an associate of Belmokhtar may have been involved in handling two Canadian diplomats taken hostage by AQIM in Mali in December of that year. They were later freed.

The cable also alleged that Belmokhtar allegedly once targeted a German diplomat in Mauritania for kidnapping-for-ransom. The cable said that as of 2008, however, Belmokhtar had “specifically ordered his operatives to avoid targeting Am Cits (American Citizens) for fear of retribution from the government.”

(www.huffingtonpost.com / 17.01.2013)

Live updates on the Algeria hostage crisis

At a remote Algerian gas field, militants and Algerian authorities clashed today, with conflicting reports saying some hostages, possibly Americans among them, may have been killed and others may have escaped.

Reuters: military raid is over?

Reuters quotes Algeria’s official news agency as announcing that the military raid on the gas complex had ended. The report – sourced to a state-run news agency quoting an anonymous official – has not been independently confirmed. It’s not clear whether or not we are meant to understand this as implying that the military has overrun the complex, or that it has simply stopped its assault. It’s currently 9:29 p.m. in Algeria, six hours ahead of U.S. east coast time, so the dark conditions may have discouraged the military from continuing any attack.

ALGIERS, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Algeria’s state news agency APS said on Thursday that the military operation to free hostages at a remote desert gas facility had ended, quoting an unnamed official source who gave no further details. (Reporting by Lamine Chikhi; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

@Reuters

Algerian state news agency APS quotes official saying military operation at gas facility is over bit.ly/USxxHN #BREAKING

First reports on Algerian raid

The Algerian military has assaulted the gas field in an operation that, according to an Algerian government statement over the radio, has rescued some hostages but resulted in some deaths as well. These reports, which appear in the New York Times. Wall Street Journal, and Reuters are preliminary and have not been confirmed by sources outside of the Algerian government.

Reuters also reports that the Algerian state news agency says that the military operation has ended.

Here, from the Times, are some quotes from the Algerian radio announcement translated into English:

The operation resulted in the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and the liberation of a considerable number of hostages,” [Communications Minister Mohand Saïd] Oublaïd said. “Unfortunately, we deplore also the death of some, as well as some who were wounded. We do not have final numbers.”

He also said “the operation is ongoing, given the complexity of the site, to liberate the rest of the hostages and those who are trapped inside.”

Uncertainty on American hostages?

The White House, judging by the today’s press conference, is being careful not to give any indication one way or another as to the status of the Americans taken hostage in Algeria. Here’s Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin:

At Thursday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney said there’s no definitive information on whether the Americans are among the dead or the living.

“We are in contact with Algerian authorities and our international partners as well as with BP’s security office in London. Unfortunately, the best information we have at this time, as I said, indicates that U.S. citizens are among the hostages. But we don’t have, at this point, more details to provide to you. We’re certainly concerned about reports of loss of life and are seeking clarity from the government of Algeria,” he said.

“But at this point you can’t say whether those Americans are alive or dead?” a reporter asked Carney.

“I just can only say that we are deeply concerned about any loss of innocent life and are seeking clarity from the government of Algeria,” he said.

This detail-poor statement could be for several possible reasons. That the White House doesn’t know is just one possible explanation. It’s also possible, for example, that the White House doesn’t want to inadvertently tip off the hostage-takers to some recent  development, or that officials want to hold off on any announcements until the situation resolves.

After the political backlash to the administration’s early statements on the consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya which may have ultimately killed UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s chances at becoming Secretary of State, the White House may feel politically compelled to say as little as possible.

Cameron: ‘Very difficult news’

British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a public statement about the ongoing hostage crisis, ominously warned Britons to prepare for the worst. “It’s a fluid situation, it’s ongoing, it’s very uncertain,” he said. “We should be prepared for the possibility of further bad news, very difficult news, in this extremely difficult situation.”

A British spokesperson told the BBC that Cameron “spoke to President Obama this afternoon and shared the latest developments in Algeria and agreed that their priority was to establish the facts on the ground.”

Japan protests Algerian raid

The Algerian military apparently did not alert the U.S., Britain. or Japan that it was planning to assault the gas complex where hostages from all four countries are being held, according to diplomatic officials from those countries. Japanese officials have expressed open frustration with the Algerian government, calling on them to halt the raid, which they warn could endanger the Japanese hostages. Here’s the New York Times:

Japan expressed even stronger concern, saying Algeria had not only failed to advise of the operation ahead of time but that Japan had asked Algeria to halt the operation because it was endangering the hostages. “We asked Algeria to put human lives first and asked Algeria to strictly refrain,” the chief Cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, quoted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as telling his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmalek Sellal, by telephone late Thursday.

Algeria’s military, which staged a coup in 1991 to cancel the country’s first truly democratic elections, wields enormous political power within the country and often operates autonomously. It’s not exactly the sort of country, in other words, where generals would necessarily make sure they get the go-ahead from civilian overseers who might be more concerned about, for example, diplomacy.

Cat-and-Mouse chase

U.S. and French intelligence have been tracking Algerian terrorist groups, of the same sort that seized hostages at a gas field on Wednesday, for years. The Post’s Edward Cody reported on that effort in 2010. He focused on the effort to track a guy named Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, who at the time commanded some forces with a group called al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an Algeria-based group that took on the al-Qaeda moniker in 2006.

Cody’s story is a fascinating read. It also helps to shed some light on the threat that these groups pose, how they operate, and the cat-and-mouse game they play with Western intelligence agencies.

But with the capture of a number of European hostages over the past several years – and now a calculated effort to impose Abu Zeid’s brand name on terrorist activities in the Sahel – he has emerged in the public eye as a substantial threat in mineral-rich northwestern Africa and, in the assessment of some experts, as the possible next chief of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Abu Zeid’s activities may have caught the attention of U.S. counterterrorism authorities as well. In recent declarations, his group said U.S. personnel have been spotted on an Algerian military base at Tamanrasset, near the Malian border hills where Abu Zeid is headquartered, with the apparent assignment of helping local governments monitor al-Qaeda movements across the region.

Guidere, who systematically monitors al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Internet traffic, said the United States has supplied electronic intelligence on Abu Zeid to France to help track French hostages, with U.S. personnel either stationed at or passing through Tamanrasset apparently part of the operation. In response, he added, Abu Zeid recently ordered his combatants to halt satellite telephone communications, which are vulnerable to monitoring by U.S. satellites or drones.

Cody also reported on Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who is believed to be the leader behind today’s hostage crisis. At the time, Belmokhtar was also leading AQIM militants (he has since left the group to start his own), but French and U.S. officials appeared less concerned about him:

Belmokhtar, an Algerian who lost an eye fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, has been played down by European anti-terrorism specialists because, they say, he is often focused less on jihad than on raising cash by protecting cigarette and cocaine smuggling that has traditionally flourished in the area.

This again raises a question I’ve brought up several times today: Is Belmokhtar’s attack principally motivated by commercial interests or ideological? In other words, is he just taking hostages to try to get some ransom money, as he’s done in the past, or is this meant as explicitly as an act of political terrorism?

Al-Qaeda in Algeria

As is often the case with militant groups operating in the Arabic-speaking world, the one that seized a gas field in eastern Algeria appears to have some links to al-Qaeda. But those links, based on the currently available information, appear sketchy. And the group to which they may be linked, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, is not the same as the Afghanistan-and-Pakistan-based “central” al-Qaeda that is better known to Americans.

The Pentagon reacts

The Post’s Craig Whitlock, who covers the Pentagon, is traveling with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He reports here on how defense officials on the trip are talking about the hostage crisis unfolding in Algeria. So far, they seem to be cautious about what they know, are having a tough time following the events in the remote Saharan desert, or, more probably, both. Here’s Whitlock:

Pentagon officials said they were still trying to sort out conflicting reports about what happened at the gas plant in Algeria, how many Americans  may have been involved, and what course of action U.S. military forces
might take in response.

“Details remain very murky over this raid and what has happened,” said a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “We’re assessing reports that the Algerians may have
conducted some kind of action in connection with the incident but cannot confirm precisely what happened.”

George Little, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, declined to comment on reports that a U.S. surveillance drone had been deployed to Algeria to fly over the gas plant.

In an interview Thursday with ABC News, Panetta said “about 100 people” were at the gas plant when the attack occurred, but added, “how many of them are actually being held hostage we just don’t know.”

He said initial reports were that the hostages included “somewhere in the vicinity” of seven or eight Americans, adding, “right now we just really don’t know.”

UK didn’t know about attack in advance

British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would have appreciated a little advance warning.

With Algerian insurgents holding foreign hostages, the Algerian government launched a military operation without notifying London, an official inside 10 Downing Street for Cameron said after the British leader’s phone conversation with his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmalek Sellal. The hostages reportedly include some British citizens, and the gas facility held by the militants is run by BP, a British company, along with Norway’s Statoil and Algeria’s Sonatrach.

Cameron “expressed concern” at the situation, and was “disappointed” that the Algerian government had not provided advance notice before taking action, The Post’s Anthony Faiola reports from London.

There have been reports of casualties in the operation, but Algeria’s state news service, APS, says nearly 600 Algerian workers have been freed by the army’s special forces..The report cited unidentified local sources.

Europe already feeling impact

Whatever the militants’ motivation for seizing the In Amenas gas facility in eastern Algeria, it is already having an economic effect in Europe, which imports huge amounts of energy from North Africa. The Financial Times’ Guy Chazan reports that the amount of gas pumped from Algeria across the Mediterranean has already dropped by about 10 million cubic meters a day. That’s about 13 or 14 percent of all Algerian exports into Europe. In other words: it’s a lot.

Chazan explains that, although this is unlikely to cause a gas shortage, it could still be bad news for the already-troubled European economy:

It could also have implications for European energy security. The continent has long been dependent on Algeria for energy imports. The country is the third-largest supplier of gas into the EU, after Russia and Norway, and In Amenas’ production alone accounts for 2 per cent of European demand.

The biggest economic pain, though, will of course be in Algeria itself. The In Amenas field produced $3.9 billion a year in exports. Energy is a big component of the Algerian economy, and this crisis, even once it ends, could risk scaring off potential investors. If you were a European energy executive, how much money would you want to put into North Africa right now?

BP: ‘Reports of casualties’

BP, a joint owner of the oil complex where hostages have been held in Algeria, has begun pulling out non-essential workers from the North Africa nation. The company issued the news in a somber release on the situation: :

We have been informed by the UK and Algerian governments that the Algerian army is attempting to take control of the In Amenas site.

The situation remains unclear and we continue to seek updates from the authorities.

Sadly, there have been some reports of casualties but we are still lacking any confirmed or reliable information. There are also reports of hostages being released or escaping.

“Supporting these families is our priority and we are doing all we can to help during this sad and uncertain time,” said Bob Dudley, BP Group Chief Executive. We are in contact with the UK and Algerian Governments and will provide updates as soon as further confirmed information is available.

As a precautionary measure, staged plans are underway to bring a group of non-essential workers out of Algeria.

Your four-sentence catch-up on the Algeria crisis

• On Wednesday morning, a group of militants stormed a gas complex in a remote part of eastern Algeria.

• The militants issued a flurry of demands, including an end to the French intervention in neighboring Mali, in exchange for their hostages, which include Americans.

• The Algerian military is currently attempting to re-take the complex, according to the British and French foreign ministries.

• There have been reports of freed hostages, but at this point it’s really hard to know what’s happening.

Hostages for money or ideology?

The militants who have seized the gas complex in eastern Algeria are, according to the BBC quoting Algerian officials, led by a man named Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Two big questions that are probably on your mind right now: who is that? Is he al-Qaeda?

The short answers: he is an old-school, Afghanistan-trained jihadist who also runs a criminal network. As for the al-Qaeda question, that all depends on how you define al-Qaeda.

The longer answers are, as always, more interesting. The BBC has a big profileof Belmokhtar, which include his three nicknames, all of them quite revealing. The first is “The One-Eyed,” which is self-explanatory. The second, from the French intelligence authorities who work heavily in Algeria, their former colony, is “The Uncatchable.” And the third, used by local Algerians, is “Marlboro Man,” for his illicit cigarette trade.

That’s the thing about Algerian jihadists like Belmokhtar – you can never really tell if they use criminal enterprises to fund their jihad, or if jihad is the ideological cover for lucrative criminal activities. His militants have made a lot of claims about their reason for taking the hostages, one of which is revenge for the French military intervention in neighboring Mali. But they have also said it was to punish Algeria for cooperating with the French military, which is not particularly popular among Algerian Islamists (more on this later). And it’s worth noting that Belmokhtar has been taking hostages for years, ransoming them off for large sums of money.

As to the al-Qaeda connection, Belmokhtar is believed to have trained with al-Qaeda during the 1980s Afghan-Soviet war and to have more recently been a member of the North Africa-based faction, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But he fell out with its leaders and now leads two different groups with the names Khaled Abu al-Abbas Brigade and the Signed-in-Blood Battalion. It’s not clear how large they are and whether these are ideology-driven or criminal organizations.

Freed hostage from N. Ireland identified

A 36-year-old man from Northern Ireland has been identified as one of the foreigners who had been held hostage in Algeria. He is free and safe, a government official and family told an Northern Ireland television network.

UTV identified the man as Stephen McFaul, of West Belfast, and said he had called his family after his release. The network said the release was confirmed by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

AP: Militants still claim 7 hostages

The Associated Press is reporting that a spokesperson representing the militants at the Algerian gas field say that they still hold seven hostages, including people from the U.S., Britain, Japan, and Belgium.

Other reports have indicated that the original number of hostages may have been much higher than seven. If both of those reports are true – and we can’t say for sure that they are – then that would suggest that something happened to the other hostages. There are any number of possibilities. A number of sources do report that the Algerian military had raided the facility, freeing some number of the hostages.

The AP report on the remaining hostages tracks with earlier reports from the Algerian press, passed along here from Al-Jazeera English:

AJELive

@AJELive

Seven foreign #hostages still held hostage in #Algeria gas plant: 2 Americans, 3 Belgians, 1 Japanese, 1 British, according to ANI agency.

A hostage goes free

Ireland’s Foreign Affairs office says, according to the Guardian, that an Irish citizen who had been among the hostages is now believed to be safe and “freed from captivity.” He’s reportedly called home.

As we noted with the earlier report that some Americans have called home, if this report is true, is does not necessarily mean that all freed hostages have called home, or that all hostages have been freed.

Air strikes?

The latest unconfirmed bit of information that’s now widely reported is that the Algerian military has deployed air strikes as part of its (possible, unconfirmed) raid on the gas complex. The French Press Association (AFP)says that an air strike killed some number of people, although they appear to source it to the Algerian media, which appears to source it to a spokesperson for the militants.

If the Algerian military is using air strikes, that would be a potentially odd choice for a hostage situation. Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, briefly explained why. Whether he meant to shed skepticism on the report itself or on the potential use of air strikes, both are interesting points.

Steven A. Cook@stevenacook

I’m not a guns and trucks kid, but airstrikes dont seem like they would be effective if one were trying to rescue hostages. #Algeria

ABC: 3 U.S. hostages

A report from ABC News says three Americans were among the hostages held by Islamic insurgents in central Algeria.

The report cites an unidentified senior U.S. intelligence official and came before an Algerian military operation on the site, a natural gas field partly owned by BP.

The identities of the Americans have not been released by the U.S. government or the oil company.

Example of Algeria uncertainty

You’re going to hear a lot of caveats on this liveblog about how difficult it is to know what’s happening in Algeria right now. Between the fog of war and the contradictory news reports from international and local sources, it’s just never easy to differentiate fact from rumor.

To illustrate that point, at 10:05 a.m. EST, the Algerian news service Tout sur l’Algerie reported that the Algerian military was now in full control of the gas complex where the hostages had been (are being?) held. The report has not been confirmed by other sources. Three minutes later, a news organization in neighboring Mauritania reported that Algerian forces were just beginningtheir raid. So, unless the Algerian military has developed time travel, at least one of these is wrong. That’s not to pick on either news service, just a reminder of how difficult it is to really know what’s happening in the east Algerian expanse.

Did U.S. hostages call home?

Fox News reports that, according to “U.S. official sources,” some number of American hostages are thought to have escaped from ongoing hostage crisis and called home.

The report has not been reproduced elsewhere; many news reports on the Algeria crisis been contradictory, particularly those that discuss the possibility that some hostages have escaped. The report does not indicate whether or notall Americans are believe to have escaped, for example, or whether all escaped Americans have called home. That’s not to knock Fox News, but it’s important to keep these caveats in mind.

Panetta: ‘Military assets’ use possible

ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz is traveling with U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta today and, like any good reporter, asked him about the ongoing hostage crisis in Algeria. Panetta told Raddatz, according to her Twitter account, that the U.S. was considering “how we can bring our military assets to bear in order to deal with it.”

Raddatz also spoke with a “senior official” who admitted that, just like the rest of us, he or she doesn’t really know what’s happening there. This point can’t really be over-emphasized: the fog of war makes it difficult to know which contradictory reports to value and which to dismiss. That even someone this senior wouldn’t know indicates just how difficult the situation is to read right now.

Martha Raddatz

@MarthaRaddatz

Snr US official tells me situation remains unclear in Algeria. They are trying to get clarity but just don’t know anything for sure

 

Martha Raddatz

@MarthaRaddatz

secdef to me on algeria “we are going to look at..how best to addrss + how can we bring r military assets to bear in order to deal with it”

A map of the gas complex

A previous version of this entry showed an image of the town of In Amenas. The New York Times is now reporting the attack took place at Tiguentourine, a gas complex to the southwest of the town of In Amenas.

(The Washington Post)

BP statement on the In Amenas gas field

The attack took place at the In Amenas gas field, in the southeast oil-rich fields of Algeria. The In Amenas gas field is operated in partnership between Algerian state oil company, Sonatrach, with BP and Statoil. BP said the site was attacked and occupied by a group of unidentified armed people on Thursday morning. The oil company put out this statement Friday:

“BP confirms that the major security incident at the In Amenas joint venture site in Algeria is continuing. The situation on site remains unresolved and fragile. Armed groups still occupy the site and hold a number of site personnel.

Conflicting reports over hostage numbers

It’s unclear how many hostages might have been taken and how many might have escaped. Here are just a few of the conflicting reports:

• A state-run Algerian news agency said 30 Algerian workers managed to flee their captors at the In Amenas gas complex.
• The Associated Press quoted an unidentified Algerian security official as saying at least 20 foreigners, including Americans and Europeans, escaped.
• Private Algerian news outlets reported that 15 foreigners were able to escape.
• Reports citing Algerian security sources said the assailants retained 20 to 40 foreign nationals, including Americans, Europeans and Japanese.
• Al-Jazeera quotes a Mauritanian news agency that said 35 hostages and 15 kidnappers have been killed, according to the group holding the hostages.

(www.washingtonpost.com / 17.01.2013)

U.S. demands ‘clarity’ about death reports in Algeria hostage crisis

Algerian troops have surrounded the Islamist gunmen who kidnapped workers from the Amenas gas field in Algeria.

The United Sate demanded clarification from Algeria on Thursday about reports of deaths in the hostage crisis at a gas complex besieged by Islamists, while Japan called for an immediate cease of Algerian military operations against the Islamist kidnapers.

“This is an ongoing situation and we are seeking clarity,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters when asked about the Algerian military operation to break the desert siege. President Barack Obama was being briefed regularly by his national security team, he said.

Carney said the U.S. government was still trying to determine the number of casualties and who they were, and was also in touch with BP officials in London. He said there was no immediate confirmation of al-Qaeda links to the hostage situation and Washington was trying to find out what group was behind it.

Algerian troops launched an air and ground assault Thursday on the gas complex, killing nearly 50, most of them hostages, the kidnappers said as they threatened to kill their remaining captives.

Algeria’s state news agency reported that 600 Algerian hostages were freed. There were no reports about the faith of Western hostages, a number of them from the United States and Japan.

Japan has urged Algeria to put an immediate end to the military operation, a senior minister said on Friday.

Vice foreign minister Minoru Kiuchi, who is now in Algeria, met the country’s foreign minister “and urged the Algerian government to stop the operation immediately”, chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo.

French President warned that the hostage crisis was unfolding in “terrible conditions.”

Mauritania’s ANI news agency reported that at least 34 hostages and 14 Qaeda-linked Islamist kidnapers were killed on Thursday in an air strike by the Algerian armed forces.

It is not immediately possible to independently verify the information. The agency does have close contact with the group which claimed responsibility for the mass kidnapping.

ANI news has also reported seven foreign hostages are still alive, citing one of the al Qaeda-linked abductors.

The agency claims a spokesman for the kidnappers said those hostages were three Belgians, two Americans, a Japanese and a Briton. No details were given for the Algerians who were also captured.

Veteran Islamist fighter Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian with ties to Al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility.

Linked to a string of kidnappings of foreigners in North Africa in the last decade, Algerian-born Belmokhtar has earned a reputation as one of the most daring and elusive Islamic jihadist leaders operating in one of the remotest corners of the globe – the vast Sahara desert.

“He’s one of the best known warlords of the Sahara,” said Stephen Ellis, an expert on organised crime and professor at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands. He said Belmokhtar had also gained notoriety as a Saharan smuggler, especially of cigarettes.

French intelligence dubbed Belmokhtar “the uncatchable” in 2002.

(english.alarabiya.net / 17.01.2013)

Dozens held after Islamists attack Algerian gas field

Islamist militants attacked a gas field in Algeria on Wednesday, claiming to have kidnapped up to 41 foreigners including seven Americans in a dawn raid in retaliation for France’s intervention in Mali, according to regional media reports.

The raiders were also reported to have killed three people, including a Briton and a French national.

An al Qaeda affiliated group said the raid had been carried out because of Algeria’s decision to allow France to use its air space for attacks against Islamists in Mali, where French forces have been in action against al Qaeda-linked militants since last week.

The attack in southern Algeria also raised fears that the French action in Mali could prompt further Islamist revenge attacks on Western targets in Africa, where al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) operates across borders in the Sahara desert, and in Europe.

AQIM said it had carried out Wednesday’s raid on the In Amenas gas facility in OPEC member Algeria, Mauritania’s ANI news agency reported.

The Algerian interior ministry said: “A terrorist group, heavily armed and using three vehicles, launched an attack this Wednesday at 5 a.m. against a Sonatrach base in Tigantourine, near In Amenas, about 100 km (60 miles) from the Algerian and Libyan border.”

“The Algerian authorities will not respond to the demands of the terrorists and will not negotiate,” Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia was quoted as saying by official news agency APS.

The gas field is operated by a joint venture including BP, Norwegian oil firm Statoil and Algerian state company Sonatrach.

ARMED MEN

BP said armed men were still occupying facilities at the gas field, which produces 9 billion cubic meters of gas a year(160,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day), more than a tenth of the country’s overall gas output, and 60,000 barrels a day of condensate.

“The site was attacked and occupied by a group of unidentified armed people at about 0500 UK time. Contact with the site is extremely difficult, but we understand that armed individuals are still occupying the In Amenas operations site,” it said.

A spokesman for BP said it usually had fewer than 20 people working at the site but would not be drawn on whether there were any talks with the hostage takers. He said: “Obviously we are doing everything we can to make sure our people are okay.”

APS said a Briton and an Algerian security guard had been killed and seven people were injured. A French national was also killed in the attack, a local source said.

Also among those reported kidnapped by various sources were five Japanese nationals working for the Japanese engineering firm JGC Corp, a French national, an Austrian, an Irishman, and a number of Britons.

The U.S. State Department said it believed some U.S. citizens were also among the hostages, while Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said 13 employees of Statoil, a minority shareholder in the gas venture, were being held.

A member of an Islamist group styling itself the “Blood Battalion” was quoted by Mauritanian media as saying that five of the hostages were being held at the gas facility and 36 were in a housing area. APS said the Islamist raiders had freed Algerians working at the gas facility, though Regis Arnoux, head of French company CIS Catering, told JDD weekly newspaper that 150 Algerian employees of his company were being held at the site.

“The operation was in response to the blatant interference by Algeria and the opening of its air space to French aircraft to bomb northern Mali,” the Islamist spokesman told Mauritania’s ANI news agency.

ANI, which has regular direct contact with Islamists, said that fighters under the command of Mokhtar Belmokhtar were holding the foreigners.

Interior Minister Kablia also told APS that Belmokhtar was leading the group of about 20 individuals, whom he said were not from Mali, Libya or “any other neighboring state”.

Belmokhtar, dubbed by French intelligence as “the uncatchable”, for years commanded al Qaeda fighters in the Sahara before setting up his own armed Islamist group late last year after an apparent fallout with other militant leaders.

The Algerian army was in the area of the gas facility, according to French and Algerian sources.

ANI reported that the Islamists said they were surrounded by Algerian forces and warned that any attempt to free the hostages would lead to a “tragic end”. One of the hostage takers told ANI that the perimeter of the site had been mined.

SECURITY IMPLICATIONS

The attack was the first time in years that Islamist militants are known to have launched an attack on an Algerian energy facility.

The attack could have implications for security across the whole of Algeria’s energy sector, which supplies about a quarter of Europe’s natural gas imports and exports millions of barrels of crude oil each year.

Such an attack would require a large and heavily armed insurgent force with a degree of freedom to move around, all elements that al Qaeda has not previously had.

However, the conflict in neighboring Libya in 2011 changed the balance of force. Security experts say al Qaeda was able to obtain arms, including heavy weapons, from the looted arsenals of former leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The five Japanese work for the engineering firm JGC Corporation, Jiji news agency reported, quoting company officials. JGC has a deal with Sonatrach-BP-Statoil Association for work in gas production at In Amenas.

A reporter for Japan’s NHK television managed to call a JGC worker in Algeria.

The worker said he got a phone call from a colleague at the gas field. “It was around 6 a.m. this morning. He said that he had been hearing gunshots for about 20 minutes. I wasn’t able to get through to him since.”

French troops launched their first ground operation against Islamist rebels in Mali on Wednesday in an action to dislodge from a strategic town al Qaeda-linked fighters who have resisted six days of air strikes.

(www.reuters.com / 16.01.2013)

Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco follow different paths towards reform in Arab Spring

In this April 30, 2012 file photo, Algerians walk by posters for election lists displayed in front of the main post office in downtown Algiers. Two years after an itinerant Tunisian fruitseller set himself on fire to protest government injustice and ignited uprisings across the Middle East, the three nations of the Maghreb _ Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco_ have taken wildly different paths, from wholesale political change in Tunisia, to business as usual in oil-rich Algeria.

RABAT, Morocco — Two years after an itinerant Tunisian fruit-seller set himself on fire to protest government injustice and ignited uprisings across the Middle East, the three nations of the Maghreb — the former French colonies of North Africa — have taken vastly different paths. Tunisia has seen wholesale political change. In oil-rich Algeria, it’s business as usual. Somewhere in the middle is Morocco, which has trumpeted what it describes as a third way of controlled change as a model for the region.

These outcomes sum up much of the Middle East’s disparate reactions to the Arab Spring — and their success or failure may hold lessons for the whole region.

Morocco and Algeria seem remarkably stable, despite the social tensions boiling beneath their calm facade. Resource-strapped Tunisia seems to have fared poorly, with a struggling economy and dire predictions of chaos. Yet it’s also the country that has made the most progress toward a more open society.

MOROCCO:

On the surface, Morocco seems to be the Maghreb nation that has fared the best in the Arab Spring, with massive protests by the pro-democracy February 20th youth movement bringing a swift promise by the king to reform the constitution, devolving more powers to elected officials. A referendum on the amended constitution was approved by 98 percent of the people and in early elections, a moderate Islamist party long in the opposition won the right to head the new governing coalition.

Abdelilah Benkirane of the Justice and Development Party became the strongest prime minister in decades and promised to root out corruption, while working to help the country’s most needy.

“Our government is working in cooperation with the other institutions under the leadership of his majesty,” Communication Minister Mustapha Khalfi told The Associated Press. “It’s what we call a gradual reform with stability, a third path between revolution and the old way of governing.”

Yet on Nov. 18, in Morocco’s capital Rabat, a few dozen activists attempted to rally in front of the parliament to protest the king’s $300 million personal budget, one of the largest for a monarchy in the world and a serious burden for the struggling economy.

Even before the protesters could gather, they were set upon by club wielding riot police and chased through the elegant art-deco streets of the capital. Yet, just a week earlier, thousands had been allowed to protest against the prime minister. Despite a new constitution and promises of reform, the hereditary monarchy ruling this nation of 32 million for the last 350 years remains in charge and above criticism.

None other than the king’s first cousin, Prince Moulay Hisham, now a professor at Stanford, disputes the monarch’s vision of Morocco finding the middle path to reform.

In a recent interview with France 24 news channel, he argued that the monarchy only changed the constitution under heavy pressure from the pro-democracy demonstrations and as the movement faltered, so did reform.

“In the absence of true, strong democratic force to carry on the project and guarantee that it was a stage and not a final step, the spirit of the new constitution has been frozen,” he said.

After the elections, demonstrations petered out and a year and a half after the constitution was passed, most of its amendments have yet to be implemented.

Abadila Maaelaynine, an activist with February 20, said the economy and social inequalities haven’t improved, and there are still daily human rights violations, especially against demonstrations.

“So the promise of real change on the ground is not yet there.”

ALGERIA:

The energy giant has been referred to as the exception to the Arab Spring. Early protests calling for reform fizzled and were quickly repressed by highly vigilant security forces. While President Abdelaziz Bouteflika went on to promise a host of reforms, including in the laws governing the media and political parties, little has been achieved over the past two years.

Dozens of new parties were legalized but it made little difference in parliamentary elections in May 2012 or November’s municipal elections, which were poorly attended and just strengthened the ruling party. For the most part life has returned to the way it was before the Arab Spring.

With its enormous oil and gas reserves, Algeria also has vast financial resources lacking to most Arab Spring countries, allowing it to douse potential unrest with large amounts of cash.

“There was an attempt to buy a social peace — don’t ask political questions and we’ll sort out your economic needs,” said Algerian sociologist Nasser Djabi. “The government … played for time and it seems to have worked.”

The ruling party has only widened its control over the various elected bodies, and as neighboring Tunisia and Egypt looked more and more unstable, Algeria has come under increasingly less pressure from Europe and the U.S. to reform, he added.

The rise of radical Islamic groups in the Sahara and especially northern Mali has also made Algeria and its powerful military an attractive partner in the war on terror.

Meanwhile, talk of amending the constitution has been shelved for the near future. According to Nourreddine Benissad, head of Algeria’s main human rights group, political freedoms are on the wane and the elections have been far from free and transparent.

“It’s practically illegal to demonstrate or even gather,” he said. “There is no real political will to carry out social, political or economic reforms.”

Instead, any change in Algeria is expected to come only in 2014 when President Bouteflika’s latest term ends and he is expected to step down. At that point, there should be an opening for a new political generation, and a power struggle between the military and members of the ruling party is expected.

TUNISIA:

Of the three Maghreb countries, the birthplace of the Arab Spring has appeared to be closest to the brink of violence and even a new uprising. Over the past few weeks, there has been a rising confrontation between the main labor union and the moderate Islamist party that won elections after the overthrow of the dictator.

There were days of rioting in one regional city that nearly culminated in a nationwide general strike on Dec. 13, which had been expected to degenerate into further violence until the two sides negotiated a last minute compromise.

Tunisia, a largely middle class republic of 10 million, was once one of the most repressive police states in the region under the 23-year rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, until his overthrow in January 2011.

After a relatively rocky transition, Tunisians surged to the polls in record numbers on Oct. 23 and gave the most votes to Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party that had been an implacable foe of the old regime. The Islamists went on to form a coalition with two other secular parties and promised democracy and jobs.

A year later, political tensions have soared to new heights. There is constant talk that the coalition is set to fracture; disaffected youths demanding jobs riot in town after town; and radical Islamism is on the rise.

Ghazi Gheriari, a political analyst at Tunis University, said the post-election period marking the second phase of Tunisia’s transition — while having more popular legitimacy — has been marked by less consensus and more bickering.

There has also been the rise of an aggressive ultraconservative Islamist movement known as Salafism that has increasingly resorted to violence. “With the new government, Tunisia is seeing more tension and problems with freedoms,” said Gheriari.

Part of the problem is that political opposition in the elected assembly has been weak, with little real support in the population, meaning it presents little effective counterweight to the ruling coalition.

Instead, the real opposition has been the unions and civil associations that have stood up to the government over issues such as putting references to Islamic law in the new constitution and describing women, in one clause, as complementary rather than equal to men. In both cases, the Islamist government backed down.

This, in fact, has been perhaps the redeeming hallmark of Tunisia’s transition: Even amid periodic riots, political crises and standoffs, the tension has always been defused and a compromise reached between the feuding parties. That contrasts with Egypt, where each side seems at every stage to be ready to carry their stand over the brink and into violence.

The ability to achieve agreement amid searing acrimony may be what saves Tunisia’s experiment in democracy.

Kamel Labidi, a long time campaigner for human rights and freedom of expression, attributes this strength partly to high education levels and the military’s historical lack of a role in the country — as well as the presence of a labor movement to balance out the Islamists.

“The Islamists understood it was in their interest to make concessions,” he said.

(www.washingtonpost.com / 03.01.2013)

The Battle of Algiers: historical truth and filmic representation

The bitter divisions within the FLN are ignored. Instead, Gillo Pontecorvo, in his 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, presents the war uniquely in terms of the FLN against the French paratroopers. We begin a new series exploring the many facets of this remarkable film.

The ‘Battle of Algiers’ was a pivotal event in the Algerian War of Independence.  Taking place in the tiny backstreets and alleys of the Algiers Casbah from the summer of 1956 through to October 1957, the fighting set the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) against the elite paratroopers of the French Army.

To call it a battle, however, is a misnomer.  This was not urban warfare on a grand scale like Stalingrad in 1942 or even the Irish Easter uprising of 1916.  There was no sustained street-to-street combat.  Rather the confrontation took the form of short bursts of fighting at close quarters, interspersed with the bombing of civilians on the FLN side and mass round-ups and torture on the French side.  At the heart of this violence was one struggle: for the control of the capital’s Muslim population.

Similarly there is a debate about the exact starting point.  Did the ‘Battle of Algiers’ begin with the guillotining of two FLN prisoners, Ahmed Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj on 19 June 1956 which provoked FLN operatives to respond with twenty-one attacks in Algiers, leaving ten dead?

Did it begin with shadowy elements in the French police that planted a bomb in the densely populated Casbah on 10 August 1956, killing up to seventy people which led the FLN to explode bombs at two crowded French cafes in the city centre on 30 September?

Ruins of the Casbah after its explosion by paratroopers.

Or did it begin on 7 January 1957 when the French civilian authorities, at a loss to maintain law and order, handed police powers over to the French paratroopers commanded by General Jacques Massu?

In contrast there is a clearer sense of an end point: 7 October 1957 when the last FLN leader, Ali Ammar alias Ali la Pointe, was cornered in a safe house near the top of the Casbah – the first sequence in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film. Refusing to surrender, he was blown up by French paratrooper bomb experts.  Then, within the rubble, the paratroopers exhumed Ali la Pointe’s corpse as the physical proof of French military victory.

With us or against us

The roots of the ‘Battle of Algiers’ must be traced back to the history of Algerian nationalism.  On 1 November 1954 the FLN launched a series of bombing attacks across Algeria.  A completely unknown new organisation, formed clandestinely just a few weeks before hand, FLN tracts, found scattered in the remote countryside, were uncompromising.  Referring to splits within the nationalist movement without naming the protagonists, the 1 November 1954 Declaration underlined that these were in the past.  Every Algerian, whatever their previous political allegiances, now had one duty: to rally behind the FLN – the new embodiment of the Algerian nation.  Significantly, violence was at the centre of the revolution and those who placed their hopes in a gradualist solution were denounced as ‘traitors’ and ‘reformists’.  FLN violence was keyed into absolutes.  There was no third way.  Algerians could only be for or against the FLN.

The FLN, therefore, had two inter-connected targets.  Through immediate military action it wanted to overthrow French colonial rule, in place since 1830.  But it also wanted to predominate over all other political rivals.  Now the FLN alone could give orders and the existing parties – the Algerian Communist Party (PCA), the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (UDMA) and Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD) – were told to dissolve themselves and join the FLN or else face reprisals.

Through violence the FLN hoped to spark mass revolt.  This did not happen.  For the first ten months the conflict was restricted to rural eastern Algeria.  Thereafter it did spread to the rest of the country, and by the summer of 1956 Algeria was in the grip of a full scale conflict as the FLN was confronted with a left-of-centre government led by the Socialist Party, the Republican Front, which hoped to quell the uprising through a dramatic intensification of the conflict.  This included the granting of special repressive powers to the army and a surge in troop levels, bolstered by the recall of reservists, that rose to 400,000.

One final surge

By this point the dominant figure in the FLN was the thirty-six old Abbane Ramdane. A political prisoner in November 1954, Abbane Ramdane joined the FLN on his release in early 1955 and quickly rose to assume the leadership of the internal FLN; a position which set him against the external leadership based in Cairo who, he argued, had no right to give orders because they were far from the harsh realities of the war. Abbane Ramdane was the brains behind the FLN’s strategy in launching the ‘Battle of Algiers’.  With a UN vote on Algeria imminent at the beginning of 1957 he believed that victory was within the FLN’s grasp.  He was convinced that France had lost the political will to fight on.  All that was needed, he argued, was one final surge that would force the French into negotiations.  This was the thinking behind the eight-day strike, timed in advance of the UN vote.  It was also the thinking behind the campaign of urban terrorism.  Continuous violence in Algiers, the centre of French power, would demonstrate that the FLN struggle was not just pockets of resistance in the mountains but a mass movement supported by the towns and the cities.  It would create a climate of panic that would sap the French capacity to stay in Algeria.  As one FLN directive stated: ‘A bomb causing the death of ten people and wounding fifty others is the equivalent on a psychological level to the loss of a French battalion.’ Finally, by launching such co-ordinated violence, Abbane Ramdane wanted to show that it was the FLN, and not the rival Mouvement National Algérien led by the Algerian nationalist veteran Messali Hadj, which was the true representative of the Algerian nation, and the only political force that the French should negotiate with,

Abbane Ramdane.

Faced with this challenge the Republican Front government effectively gave the French paratroopers a free hand to destroy the FLN in Algiers by any means possible and what followed was a cycle of violence and counter-violence.  In the alleyways, cellars, sewers and tunnels of the Casbah the paratroopers and FLN played out a deadly game of hunter and hunted. The army resorted to torture on a systematic scale to extract information that included the ‘disappearance’ of some 3,024 prisoners.  Yet, there is no doubt that this repression strengthened support for the FLN.  Out of the Casbah’s total population of 80,000, between thirty and forty per cent of its active male population was arrested at one stage or another, and in truth this had always been part of the FLN’s strategy.  In pulling the trigger and letting the French react, it was unleashing a process of violence that would force the Algerian population full-square behind the FLN. As the Le Monde journalist Jean Lacouture later admitted, France had won militarily but lost politically because the methods of victory turned international opinion against the French cause.

The consequences for the FLN were equally far-reaching.  The severity of French repression meant that the leadership were forced to leave Algeria.  Henceforth the FLN leadership would reside in exile.  Cut off from the population and the realities of the war, its power structures would develop outside of a country riven by power struggles, where the military came to predominate over any form of civilian power: a fact exemplified by the death of Abbane Ramdane at the hands of Algerian officers in Morocco in December 1957.

Black and white

Gillo Pontecorvo’s film was made on location in 1965. Talking to participants and using for the most part non-professional actors, the film, shot in grainy black and white, has a newsreel quality which means that it is often mistaken for a documentary.  Much of the film’s narrative follows the facts outlined above as Pontecorvo depicted, in a brutally honest manner, the effects of both Frenchand FLN violence.  Yet the film also diverges from the facts.  On the French side, Colonel Mathieu, played brilliantly by the French actor Jean Martin whose anti-Algerian War stance had led him to be blacklisted in France, is a fictional character, albeit one clearly based upon the two actual military leaders – General Jacques Massu and Colonel Marcel Bigeard. It is also highly selective.  There is nothing of the role of the Algerian Communists, who supplied the bomb making expertise to the FLN, or the rival MNA, still an important political force in early 1957.  Equally, the bitter divisions within the FLN are ignored, as in the case of Abbane Ramdane who is absent as an historical figure.  Instead Pontecorvo presents the war uniquely in terms of the FLN against the French paratroopers.

Finally, the importance of Frantz Fanon for Pontecorvo must be underlined.  Born in 1925 in the French-ruled Caribbean island of Martinique, a veteran of the World War Two Free French, Fanon studied psychology at Lyon University in the late 1940s, before arriving in Algeria in October 1953 as a psychiatrist in a hospital just south of Algiers.  In 1956 Fanon resigned in protest at the Algerian War and made his way to Tunis to join the FLN where, in books and articles, he became a leading voice of the Algerian Revolution. Above all Fanon extolled the virtues of mirror violence, justifying this as a liberational act against the inherent violence of colonial rule.  Fanon died in 1961, but his arguments infuse Pontecorvo’s film, in particular the film’s depiction of the role of women in carrying out bombing attacks on French cafes.  This remarkable sequence was framed by Fanon’s 1959 book L’An cinq de la revolution algérienne (published in English under the title A Dying Colonialism ), which stressed how the actions of these Algerian women, either using the veil for hiding weapons, or discarding it to pass themselves off in a decoy function as sexually available French females, were challenging traditional values.

Yet, in terms of understanding the war between 1954 and 1962 as a whole, this reliance on Fanon can lead to misunderstandings, especially if it is seen to encapsulate the Algerian historical experience.  The Algerian women bombers from the ‘Battle of Algiers’ were urban, educated and more middle class; in other words a minority, because most of the women involved in struggle were rural and, in many cases, illiterate.  Similarly, until the final few months of the conflict in 1962, the ‘Battle of Algiers’ was the one moment of sustained urban guerrilla warfare. Instead the Algerian War was overwhelmingly a rural war, fought in the mountains and the countryside.

(opendemocracy.net / 26.12.2012)