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This conflict is the result of recent pressures and events, which have left militant Islamists craving political significance
Politicians and the media have raised the prospect of a "decades-long" struggle against Islamist extremism in northern Africa. Faced with the information vacuum from Algeria, it's unsurprising that we've heard so much about the supposedly pathological history of a country of which little else is known, and of the threat apparently posed by al-Qaida-linked Islamism, growing in a propitiously violent environment, to the region and to Europe.
But this latest episode has nothing to do with Algeria's war of independence, and little to do with its crisis in the 1990s.
In Amenas was the latest and most spectacular of a series of terrorist atrocities perpetrated over the past decade by Islamist guerrillas in Algeria: the most high-profile, because it involved foreigners, and the most audacious, because it was the first time that a serious assault had been mounted on the oil and gas facilities in the Algerian south that are economically vital, heavily guarded and very remote. Throughout the insurgency and civil war that consumed Algeria for a terrible decade from 1992 onwards, attacks on civilians, intellectuals, security forces, "immodest" women, journalists and state facilities occurred overwhelmingly in the north, in the major towns and cities and in isolated rural communities. Foreigners largely fled the country – and those who came back, especially to work in the oil sector, were heavily protected in Saharan camps which the insurgents ignored. This was a struggle waged within Algerian society, between factions in the regime, and among the Islamists themselves.
The 1990s' jihadi Islamists were isolated and exhausted – and perhaps, as many in and outside Algeria now believe, infiltrated and manipulated to some degree – by the uncompromising war waged against them by the army and security forces, a war that also involved disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a "privatisation" of violence such that the real perpetrators of many incidents will never be known. They became politically irrelevant; many were co-opted or amnestied, and the remnant became a small, active, but isolated fringe, "contained" in a few mountain regions – and more recently in the Sahara.
They have been able to mount occasional major attacks, suicide-bombing the prime minister's office and the offices of the UN development programme in Algiers in 2007. But they have lacked a real presence on the Algerian political scene, let alone in the global media spotlight. While the militants claimed that the In Amenas attack was retaliation for French intervention in Mali (and for Algeria's co-operation in opening its airspace), the scale and planning involved suggest that this was a late-coming pretext for an operation prepared some time in advance to return the limping Maghribi jihad to prominence.
Outdone by Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, Algeria's militant Islamists have been struggling to remain relevant. They have long lost whatever political significance they had as real opponents of the Algerian regime, which comprehensively defeated them a decade ago. They have no social constituency in Algeria; Islamists in the Algerian parliament (generally labelled "moderate") – as with the Moroccan Justice and Development party or the Tunisian Nahda movement, both of whom are now getting to grips with the practicalities of government in the wake of the Arab spring – are more important and have a very different agenda. The war that ravaged northern Algeria in the 1990s is over.
The overspill of the Libyan uprising and civil war, particularly in northern Mali, has given Algeria's militants a new opportunity. But the conflict in Mali – however severe, and albeit now expressed in a handy language of jihad that gives it global currency – is also about local dynamics: longstanding northern resentment of the south, local economic networks protected by and serving local interests, useful local alliances. Algeria's multinational Islamists, adopting the style and the acronyms of the global jihadi brand, are no doubt keen to get in on the act.
But today's conflict is the result of recent pressures and circumstances: the instability caused by Gaddafi's collapse, the impasse in Algerian politics as everyone waits for the ageing generation at the top to die, responses to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the "global war on terror", to 9/11. Any future conflict, like all those of the past, will have its own specific causes – and only to that extent will it bear a relation to the struggles of Algeria's history.