September 19, 2008
The Economist
Abstract:
Two years ago a ruthless Algerian terrorist outfit, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French abbreviation, GSPC, announced it was joining al-Qaeda. Since then, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as the group is now known in counter-terrorism circles, has stepped up a bombing campaign in Algeria and claimed responsibility for operations in several other North African countries. Last month the Moroccan government said it had broken up a terrorist cell with links to the group, while Algeria has toughened its security measures since more than 70 people were killed in attacks by AQIM in the last two weeks of August. The emergence of a powerful regional group of Islamist insurgents, recruiting members from among the millions of religious and poor North Africans, is rattling all the governments in the region and raises the unnerving prospect of a new wave of North African bombers heading for the cities of western Europe. But does AQIM really exist as a co-ordinated regional organisation?
So far there is little evidence that it does. Until now, nearly all of AQIM’s claimed attacks have been in a rectangle of land to the east of Algeria’s capital, Algiers. (The GSPC, from which AQIM has emerged, is a ruthless remnant from the civil war which began after the Algerian army stepped in to prevent Islamists from taking over after they had won the first round of an election in December 1991, thereby prompting a decade of strife that left as many as 200,000 people dead.) In this mountainous zone, clashes between AQIM fighters and Algerian security forces are occurring almost every day. Whenever the authorities claim a big victory, AQIM invariably sets off a suicide-bomb or a remote-controlled explosion, usually aimed at Algerian forces, sometimes at foreigners. AQIM said it was behind the double bombing last December of the UN offices in Algiers and a court house, killing more than 40 people. But AQIM’s presence elsewhere in the region is fuzzier. In Algeria, says George Joffé, a north Africa specialist at Cambridge University, there is “constant low-level violence, a bit like in Colombia”. But he doubts that AQIM is a “coherent regional organisation, more a series of groups with national agendas and a common ideology”. He discounts the idea that they are controlled by al-Qaeda’s leaders on the Afghan-Pakistan border....
October 5, 2006
Middle East Media Research Institute
Abstract:
Since the "Berber Spring" of 1980, the Kabylie region in northern Algeria has often been the center of agitation for political reform in the country. Two groups from Kabylie have recently launched ambitious programs for political reform. The Arouch Citizens' Movement, a non-parliamentary association of popular councils that arose in the aftermath of clashes with security forces in 2001, adopted, at a conference held September 21-22, the Memorandum for a Democratic and Social Republic in Algeria. The memorandum calls for democratic reform, separation of religion and state, and granting Amazigh (Berber) the status of a national language alongside Arabic. The second group, the Movement for Autonomy in Kabylie (MAK), was also slated to hold a conference on September 21-22, to promote its March 2006 Tifrit Declaration, but the conference was postponed to November after state authorities refused to grant the necessary permits. Whereas the Arouch Memorandum presents its demands as being the fulfillment of the ideals of the Algerian War of Independence, the Tifrit Declaration calls for political decentralization, local autonomy, and a clean break with what it terms "militarist Arabo-Islamic Algeria."...
Algeria 
