Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Asia and Africa

Chapter 11: Terrorism in Northern Africa

chapter 11 Terrorism in Northern Africa T errorism on the African continent is unique. Just as each African state is unique in its history and culture, each state has a unique terrorist situation. In this chapter we address terrorist activity in the region, focusing on the states with high incidences of terrorism. Terrorism in Africa is misinterpreted and misunderstood when compared in analyses with the rest of the world. The most common tendency when studying any subject is to find commonalities within the subject and then draw conclusions from those common traits. When looking at terrorism in Africa, it is difficult to find a common trait other than terrorism itself. The first difficulty lies in the common misunderstanding of the continent. David Lamb said it best: “No continent has been more mistreated, misunderstood and misrepresented over the years than Africa” (Lamb, 1987: 12). The climates, cultures, ethnicities, geography, and governments vary tremendously, yet we still tend to group the region under the single heading—Africa—and assume there is a single, easily understandable culture and governance under that heading. To keep the discussion of terrorism on the African continent manageable , we divided the analysis into two chapters by region: northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a division of the continent by terrorist activity or groups but purely by geographical boundaries commonly accepted in the literature. There are five major states of interest in northern Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. In Sub-Saharan Africa (Chapter 12) we explore the four states experiencing the highest levels of terrorism: Uganda, Angola, Kenya, and South Africa. These nine states account for 75 percent of all regional international terrorism and 91 percent of all domestic terrorism. 167 North African Terrorism North Africa is comprised of those countries north of the Sahara Desert. Their main cities stretch along the coastal waters from the Atlantic Ocean, around the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, past the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Behind these cities and separating these states from the remainder of the continent is a vast emptiness of the Sahara Desert, which forms a formidable obstacle and separates the northern states from their central and southern neighbors. Given their high volume of terrorist activities, we focus on five North African states, which account for 63 percent of international terrorism and 72 percent of domestic terrorism on the continent (Table 10). Because of recent attacks and increased activity by Al-Qaeda in northern Africa, the George W. Bush administration designated northern Africa as a key region in combating the spread of global terrorism (Lyman and Morris, 2004). This region of Africa does deserve the most attention in the international war on terrorism, and the state with the highest number of terrorist incidents, Algeria, is of special interest. Sudan is also of special interest not only for the massive instability revolving around the genocide being perpetrated by the Muslim-dominated, dictatorial government but also for the fact that Sudan was the state that initially harbored Al-Qaeda and allowed it to grow and thrive. Secular or Sharia Law in Algeria? In Algeria in December 1991, the political party of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised for victory after the first round of elections (Hall, 2005: 73). The rise to power of this Islamic-based political party threatened the power base of the more secular National Liberation Front (FLN). In January 1992, “a group of military officers led by Khaled Nezzar, the Defense Minister, stepped in and engineered a coup d’état” (Volpi, 2006: 555). This prompted a decade of violence, 1992–2002, that resulted in the loss of at least 100,000 lives from fighting between the emergence of armed religious and ethnic groups (Testas, 2002: 161). Recorded during this same time period were 181 terrorist incidents in Algeria. This leaves only six incidents prior to the coup. This, by far, ranks as the highest terrorist rate on the continent and is triple the number of incidents in any other state in Africa except Egypt (MIPT-TKB). 168 Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Asia and Africa The response of the Algerian government was not democratic, but the government was facing a very real terrorist threat. The secular government was, and is, caught between a rock and a hard place. As the government cracks down on Islamic terrorism, the legitimate political arm representing Islamists gains ground. If FIS was able to...