Let us quickly recapitulate, for those to whom both Nigeria and Algeria belong on an alien planet — or, as in some encounters I have had, are indeed the same nation since they sound alike. What happened was that in both countries — in 1993 in one case, 1992 in the other — a recognized political party looked all set to win an election. At that point, however, the process was truncated by the military for no other reason than that it did not like the face of the winners. There was a critical difference, however. The victorious party in Nigeria did not promote a manifesto that would abrogate all further democratic ventures, while in the Algerian case this formed the core of its manifesto. You will understand therefore why, whenever anyone approached me for an opinion on the situation in Algeria after those elections, I quickly looked for an escape route. Easy enough to simplify the issue and say, yes, take the democratic walk to its logical conclusion, but then, as we have attempted to question, just what is the logical conclusion of the democratic option? Dictatorship of a kind different from the dictatorial status quo?
Perhaps we can approach this dilemma obliquely, citing a very recent, and instructive, development within Nigeria — one that is, however, only a partial and tepid echo of the Algerian situation. Following the May 2003 elections, the second since that nation’s return to democracy, the Sharia pioneering state, Zamfara— progressively followed by nine others — declared that its governance would henceforth be comprehensively based on the Sharia in its strictest Islamic application. One of the later subscribers to Sharia rule was the Yobe state. In December that same year, the governor, himself a Muslim, found himself obliged to take stern measures against an extremist movement that named itself after the Taliban.This group rose against the state government, claiming that it had failed to keep strict adherence to the Sharia. The sect launched an insurrection, took over some police stations — one of which, incidentally, it renamed Afghanistan — inflicted a number of casualties, and sought to overthrow the elected government. It was subdued by state forces, the movement banned and the Council of Ulamas, the religious leaders, dissolved.
Would it be totally illogical to project that this could also easily have been the fate of Algeria if indeed the victorious party had succeeded in forming a government? Once righteousness replaces rights in the exercise of power, the way is paved for a permanent contest based on the primacy of the holier-than-thou.
However, this is mere speculation.What we do know, as fact, is that since the undemocratic choice was made in Algeria, over 150,000 lives have been lost, several of these in a most grisly manner. And not just writers, cinéastes, painters, journalists, intellectuals — those purveyors of impure thoughts who are always the primary targets of fundamentalist reformers and thinkers— though these, as usual, have also been at the forefront of carnage. We are speaking here of entire villages and sectors of urban society that were considered guilty of flouting, at one level or another, the purist laws of the opposition, now transformed into a quasi-state, or simply of failing to show sufficient dedication to spiritual expectations. A resistance movement that began as a legitimate reaction to the thwarting of popular will, expressed along democratic lines, has degenerated into an orgy of competitive bestiality. State and quasi-state are locked in a deadly struggle, marked by a complete abandonment of the final vestiges of the norms of civilized society.
Such extremism could not stay localized for long. We have only to recollect that some of the leaders of this new insurgency cut their teeth in the struggle for the liberation of Afghanistan, a struggle that triumphed with the expulsion of Soviet forces of occupation from that nation, then recollect that such mujahideen are pitted against a regime whose leaders are also veterans in the bruising war of liberation against French colonialism. And the consequence of these antecedents for global politics? The end of the notion of a nationalist war that would remain strictly within national confines. Perhaps such a notion had long since dissipated — only not much notice was paid at the time — dispelled by the Vietnam War, a war that sought no more than the liberation of its land from the domination of foreigners.
Regarding that war, I must express a puzzle.Vietnam, then known as Indochina, fought two wars of liberation, first from France, which she defeated at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu, then from the United States, which felt that she knew a thing or two that France did not. No one can forget the saturation bombing carried out by the United States in the latter stages of the war — a brutal assault that was actually described by the president, Richard Nixon, as an exercise to bomb North Vietnam to the negotiating table — nor the earlier barrage of defoliants whose effects have yet to wear off completely in that nation, the deadly chemical weapon napalm, with horrendous images of inhuman disfiguration permanently seared on world memory. Now, the puzzle is this. I find it curious that the North Vietnamese, victims of two world powers in rapid succession, did not ever consider designating the entire world a war arena where innocents and guilty alike would be legitimately targeted. Not one incident of hijacking took place during those wars, neither did the taking of hostages, or the random detonation of bombs in places of tourist attraction or religious worship. United Nations agencies, as well as humanitarian organizations, appear to have enjoyed the respect due to neutrals in conflict. Most unbelievable of all, however, was the aftermath of that war, the now ritual encounters between U.S. veterans and their former enemies in an embrace of reconciliation.
Certainly, during the entire Vietnam wars, it would have been an excessive claim to suggest that the world was trapped in a climate of fear.While we may dispute in the end what lessons must be drawn from this contrast, what remains certain is that it is one that needs to be closely studied. In the fifth lecture of this series, “ ‘I Am Right;You Are Dead,’ ” we shall take this up again. Certainly we cannot ignore the antecedent histories of such peoples, their philosophies, and their religions.The same observation may be made, albeit in a different vein, of the antiapartheid struggle that was waged with no less commitment and intensity against a ruthless foe. The oppressed black people of South Africa did not pronounce the outside world guilty of the crime of continuing to survive while a majority race was being ground to earth by an implacable machinery of racist governance. There are hidden lessons in these studies in contrast, lessons that may enable us, after acknowledging the principal sources of the current climate of fear, to seek remedies that go beyond the rectification of the glaring and sustained conduct of global injustice.
It is always easy enough to address the material factors of conflict, and we do know that in most cases, such will be found as the primary causes. They can be identified and grasped, and usually provide a basis for negotiation even in the most intense moments of conflict. Nations fight over land, over water supply and other material resources, and, in civil wars, also over political marginalization — these are accessible causes of discontent, cogent in their manifestations. They go to the heart of a people’s sense of social security and need for survival. Intermeshed with these, however, but not so intricately as to be totally inseparable, is a much neglected factor in its own right — the quotient of power, the will to dominate, to control, that strange impulse that persuades certain temperaments that they can realize their existence either individually or collectively only through the domination of others. We are speaking here of that phase when a struggle moves beyond its material causes — to restore parity within an exploitative order or whatever — and becomes one that is dedicated to the seizure and exercise of raw power. It goes to the heart of the phenomenon of those dictators who, long past their creative usefulness, still cling ruthlessly to the seat of power, a contemporary instance of which can be seen in the pitiable condition of the once revolutionary, now merely embarrassing ruler of Zimbabwe, whose rule is sustained today not by popular acceptance but by the agency of terror.