Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of bloody rioting throughout Algeria in October 1988 - "Black October," which symbolized what many in Algeria call "les annees noires," the Eighties. Things were bad, but how many Algerians could have imagined that things would get even worse, in what became in the Nineties "les annees rouges?"
I'll be reviewing Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed by Martin Evans and John Phillips in the forthcoming issue of the Middle East Journal, and will provide readers with the full review of this essential work in a future post. As it happens, I've just read the chapter on "Black October," and if any one chapter captures the sense of the book's title, it is this one.
When I arrived in Algeria in early 1990, the figurative smoke and ashes from the riots barely more than a year earlier were still in the air. I wish I had had the wisdom of Evans and Phillips' analysis then, as I reported on the effervescent political scene for the American Embassy. What they write about Algeria's young men, frustrated, unemployed, disillusioned with the broken promises of an increasingly geriatric and corrupt leadership - all of that rings true and creates a vivid mental image of what was a tinderbox ready for a match.
It is still unclear if any specific incident sparked the riots, which were preceded by "wild rumors" of imminent violence. As Evans and Phillips relate, then Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid benefited - at least temporarily - in the riots' aftermath, winning a landslide re-election weeks later. But the turning point was that the rioting youth showed that authority was no longer sacrosanct, and that it could be humiliated. Even more, the savage repression of the rioters revealed that the Algerian Army could and would fire on, and torture, its fellow citizens. The stage was set for far worse violence in the coming decade. Check out the excellent trilingual site of Algeria Watch for articles, time lines, analysis.
What had led to this despair of the dispossessed? Here's Ray Takeyh of the Council of Foreign Relations, writing in 2003:
The year 1988 proved to be a watershed in Algeria's modern history. Declining oil prices and the emergence of a global surge toward free markets led the regime to launch a liberalization and deregulation program that entailed the elimination of many social-welfare services and subsidies. The removal of state controls at a time of financial shortfall disproportionately affected the urban working class and the poor. The socially disruptive ramifications of this policy were exacerbated by high inflation and the emergence of an underground economy. The gap between rich and poor continued to grow while official corruption, an endemic feature of Algerian bureaucracy, reached alarming rates. The much-eroded social compact between the revolutionary regime and the populace ruptured with the October 1988 riots throughout Algeria's urban centers. The brutal suppression of the marches by the military further undermined the legitimacy of a regime that based its power on its historical role as a force for liberation. In the aftermath of the riots, that pillar finally began to crumble.
Sounds a bit like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.
What followed was what I saw between 1990 and 1992. A sclerotic ruling party, the FLN, that took for granted winning elections unopposed for decades, and didn't see the formidable electoral force of the Islamist FIS rising to take over local and regional councils and mayorships of all the major Algerian cities in June 1990. And which missed the boat again in December 1991 and lost the first round of parliamentary elections to a FIS that again got out the vote.
The only answer that the Army could provide was to cancel the elections, round up the elected, and plunge the country into a decade-plus of barbaric violence. It all started - though no one knew it at the time - twenty years ago.