Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach

One From Marginalization to Massacres A Political Process Explanation of GIA Violence in Algeria

In 1997, the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, GIA) perpetrated a wave of massacres against civilians in villages and hamlets south of Algiers. These massacres featured the most barbaric forms of brutality and execution, including throat slitting, decapitation, mutilation, rape, kidnapping , and the slaughter of children, women, and the elderly. The massacres, which claimed thousands of lives, continued well into the new millennium.1 The massacres in Algeria took place in a context of mass Islamist insurgency , which included attacks on security forces, government of¤cials, journalists , intellectuals, foreigners, and public workers. What is mystifying about the massacres of 1997 is that they overwhelmingly targeted civilians in Islamist strongholds.2 Why would Muslim rebels turn against the people who at one point supported them and provided aid and shelter? Indeed, massacres were concentrated in Algiers and towns to the southwest, including Medea, Blida, and Ain De®a, all of which constituted the geographic backbone of support for Islamism. Many of the victims backed the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, FIS) during the 1991 elections and subsequently gave help to the armed groups ¤ghting the Algerian regime. Anticivilian violence and massacres are not unique to the Islamist movement in Algeria. The recent history of Islamist violence in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel, and southern Philippines serves as a reminder that anticivilian bloodshed is a recurrent phenomenon in the Muslim world. Nor are radical Islamists unique in engaging in mass butchery . The histories of ethnic nationalism, fascism, socialism, and non-Islamic fundamentalism are replete with examples of anticivilian carnage. One need only recall contemporary events in Bosnia, India, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka. One From Marginalization to Massacres A Political Process Explanation of GIA Violence in Algeria Mohammed M. Hafez 37 The pervasiveness of anticivilian violence during the course of mass insurgency raises important questions: How can we explain massacres of helpless civilians? Which variables help us make sense of the near genocidal violence against ordinary people? And what conditions seem to engender the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants? This chapter presents a political process explanation of anticivilian violence and contends that massacres and other forms of anticivilian violence are part and parcel of a radicalization process. Perpetrators of mass violence are not simply driven by motivational imperatives, such as relative deprivation, ideological orientation, or rational calculation. They must undergo a progression of radicalization that is intimately connected to the broader political process of violent contention. Speci¤cally, massacres are more likely to appear when three conditions related to repression converge: (1) state repression creates a political environment of bifurcation and brutality; (2) insurgents create exclusive organizations to shield themselves from repression; and (3) rebels promote antisystem frames to motivate violent collective action to overthrow agents of repression. State repression, particularly indiscriminate repression against movement supporters, creates a generalized environment of brutality and injustice that gives insurgents a shared sense of victimization and legitimacy, which in turn can be used to justify unspeakable acts of terror. This repression also creates a need for exclusive mobilization structures to shield insurgents from external repression and discourage internal defections. These exclusive organizations tend to create “spirals of encapsulation” (Della Porta 1995a, 12) that gradually pull insurgents away from the broader society, isolating them in the underground where they lose touch with reality and increasingly begin to view the goals and strategies of their movement in emotive, rather than strategic , terms. In addition, state repression often facilitates the diffusion of antisystem collective action frames within the insurgent movement. These frames— condensed symbols of meaning that fashion shared understandings of the insurgent’s world to legitimate and motivate collective action (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Moss 1997)—portray the institutionalized political system as fundamentally corrupt, thereby denying the possibility of reform . Moreover, antisystem frames depict the struggle as a ¤ght to the death between two irreconcilable forces, limiting the possibility of neutrality. According to such frames, opponents and those who directly and indirectly support them must be displaced. The con®uence of a repressive political environment, exclusive insurgent organizations, and antisystem collective action frames in Algeria occurred during the 1990s and best explains GIA violence against civilians. The de facto military coup that ended the Islamic movement’s drive to parliament in 1992 and subsequent indiscriminate repression created a political context of Mohammed M. Hafez 38 “injustice” that intensi¤ed Islamists’ sense of rage and righteousness. The realities of repression forced...