That prospect unnerved Algeria’s Arab neighbors and sent tremors as far away as Egypt, Turkey and France. And at the epicenter, Algeria’s French-speaking elite is panicking. “As a woman, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” says a 28-year-old Algiers pharmacist. “If the FIS takes control, I vow I’ll be out of the country within a year.” Mainstream newspapers called for an Army coup to reverse the voters’ verdict, and the defeated “democratic” parties flooded the courts with accusations of election fraud. More than 100,000 anti-fundamentalists marched through the streets of Algiers last week shouting “Long live democracy” and “Down with Islamic fascism.”
When the final returns from a first round of voting were announced last week, it became clear that fundamentalism will triumph in Algeria-and soon. The fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front took 188 out of 430 seats in the national legislature. The National Liberation Front (FLN), until recently the country’s only legal party, took just 15 seats; a new socialist party won 25, all of them representing Algeria’s Berber region. Now the fundamentalists need only 28 out of 199 seats in runoff elections Jan. 16 to win an outright majority.
As they prepare to take power, the fundamentalists are trying to soften their image. “There will be no bloodbaths,” promised Abdelkader Hachani, who heads the party while its two top officials remain behind bars. He said that the FIS is prepared to “cohabit” with current President Chadli Bendjedid until president scheduled for next year. But such assurances were small comfort to Algerian liberals who have heard the imams-whom they dub “the beards”-call for a total ban on alcohol and the death sentence for homosexuality and adultery.
Such oratory also sows terror among Algeria’s neighbors. In Tunisia, an illegal but well-organized fundamentalist party called Hizb al-Nahda (Party of Rebirth) runs an effective guerrilla war against the wobbly regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Morocco’s King Hassan II claims to be the “father” of his nation’s Muslims, but fundamentalist students regularly flout his paternal authority, frequently closing university classes and delaying exams. And jitters over a fresh outbreak of Islamic political assertiveness stretched into Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has been active for decades, and Turkey, where the fundamentalist Welfare Party won just under 17 percent of the national vote last October.
About 820,000 Algerian citizens live legally in France, which has a total Muslim population of about 3 million. Traditionally, Algerian immigrants have been strong enemies of fundamentalism, but the Algerian government controls the Grand Mosque in Paris and pays the salaries of more than 100 imams scattered across the country. When the FIS takes over in Algiers next year, it could–and probably will–try to place its own fire breathers in French mosques. In any event, the election victory has already produced anti-Arab vituperation from the xenophobic National Front.
Few European experts on Islam believe that Algeria will take the same ultraradical path as Iran. Rather, they foresee the emergence of an Islam-oriented state similar to Saudi Arabia, which was the FIS’s chief financial supporter until the Algerian fundamentalists chose to back Iraq in the gulf war. The new Algeria is likely to go slowly on radical reforms, if only because it needs trade and aid from Western Europe. But-barring a military crackdown, which some observers think possible–there is virtually no chance that the FLN or the feeble cluster of Algerian “democratic” parties can block a period of fundamentalist rule. There are just too many Algerian voters like Salah Benhabiles, a 24-year-old baker’s apprentice in Algiers, who wanted change. “I vomit the government, the FLN,” he says. “At least the FIS will get rid of them. And that’s all that really matters!”
Photo: A call to ‘save democracy’: Socialists rally to denounce the fundamentalist triumph
