- #36
aquitaine
- 30
- 9
The Egyptian professional military (most with US training) has seen the disastrous results of strict religious rule in Iran on their counterparts from 1979 to the present, the Islamist military power grab in places like Turkey and will not repeat that mistake again.
At least so far it hasn't ended like when Algeria's military deposed an elected Islamist president.
The army saw this outcome as unacceptable. The FIS had made open threats against the ruling pouvoir, condemning them as unpatriotic and pro-French, as well as financially corrupt. Additionally, FIS leadership was at best divided on the desirability of democracy, and some expressed fears that a FIS government would be, as U. S. Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian put it, "one man, one vote, one time. "
On January 11, 1992 the army canceled the electoral process, forcing President Chadli Bendjedid to resign and bringing in the exiled independence fighter Mohammed Boudiaf to serve as a new president. However, on 29 June 1992 he was assassinated by one of his body guards, a Lieutenant L. Boumaarafi. The assassin was sentenced to death in a closed trial in 1995. The sentence was not carried out. So many FIS members were arrested—5,000 by the army's account, 30,000 according to FIS, and including Abdelkader Hachani—that the jails had insufficient space to hold them in; camps were set up for them in the Sahara desert, and bearded men feared to leave their houses lest they be arrested as FIS sympathizers.
A state of emergency was declared, and many ordinary constitutional rights were suspended. Any protests that occurred were suppressed, and human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, reported frequent government use of torture and holding of suspects without charge or trial. The government officially dissolved the FIS on March 4.
Of the few FIS activists that remained free, many took this as a declaration of war. Throughout much of the country, remaining FIS activists, along with some Islamists too radical for FIS, took to the hills with whatever weapons were available and became guerrilla fighters. Their first attacks on the security forces (not counting the Guemmar incident) began barely a week after the coup, and soldiers and policemen rapidly became targets.
As in previous wars, the guerrillas were almost exclusively based in the mountains of northern Algeria, where the forest and scrub cover were well-suited to guerrilla warfare, and in certain areas of the cities; the very sparsely populated but oil-rich Sahara would remain mostly peaceful for almost the entire duration of the conflict. This meant that the government's principal source of money—oil exporting—was largely unaffected.
And that went on for ten years. Nasty.
