A week after the Algerian president has been re-elected, having made but one single wheeled-chaired public appearance to cast his vote in the ballot, the Algerian election has been dubbed a fraud, rigged and a pantomime of democracy.
Whether this election is a farce is a matter of perspective. Some have asked whether having a candidate run an electoral campaign without actually having been seen running for his seat was a premiere in history. Given President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s physical state of decrepitude there are attenuating circumstances to account for his public discretion during the electoral campaign that opposed him to five other aspirants.
If one goes further back in history though, being appointed in absentia is not unmatched: Guy de Lusignan was crowned king of Jerusalem in the cathedral of Famagusta, and symbolically ruled over the kingdom of Jerusalem even after Jerusalem had been formally lost to Saladin. This anecdote took place in the 12th century. It goes as follows: king Baldwin IV was another ailing ruler whose leprosy left him without a direct heir. He appointed his brother in law, Guy de Lusignan as successor. Having grown disillusioned with him, he tried to get his sister Sybilla to have her marriage annulled. She refused. Upon attending her brother’s funeral in Jerusalem, Sybilla succeeded in getting crowned queen of Jerusalem provided she had her marriage to Guy annulled. She agreed, setting but one condition: that she would be free to choose her next husband as she wished. No sooner did she become queen did she opt to remarry Guy de Lusignan thus making him king of Jerusalem. The story gets more tortuous when Jerusalem was lost to Saladin in 1187. Lusigan took refuge in Cyprus. He saw the island as temporary dwelling before Jerusalem would be re-conquered. It is in the cathedral of Famagusta, the geographical point closest to Jerusalem that Guy de Lusignan chose to get crowned King of Jerusalem in absentia. A title his family would conserve for some three hundred years. That, in my book beats Bouteflika’s fourth term as president of Algeria.
If things are put back into a more recent historical perspective, it is easy to acknowledge that Algeria is not the only country to have had a tortuous relationship with power or how it is accessed. The Crusades lay the template for Colonization; in turn colonization of Algeria paved the way for a ghastly war of independence. It may be relevant to wonder why, as Alistair Horne puts it in the preface of his excellent book A Savage War of Independence, why, ‘four decades of independence provided little of peace or prosperity for the Algerians?’ Why indeed?
When sitting my interview to gain a seat at Oxford’s Oriental Institude, one of the final questions put to me by Professor Robin Ostle who was to become my tutor at St John’s college later that year was whether the 1991 Algerian legislative elections which would have granted the Islamic Front of Salvation power should have gone through instead of being over-ruled by the military. I mused, at the time, aged 16, history lessons stopped somewhere around the cold war and I knew very little about the intricate contemporary history of North Africa. My answer went against all mainstream political analyst’s views that expressed dismay at the interruption of a democratic process. I replied that I did not believe democracy to be the best suited regime for a country such as Algeria.
At the time, the concept of a democratic Islamic state seemed to me to contain a contradiction in terms. An irreconcilable contradiction. Democracy to me is not merely a process. Churchill’s words were still ringing loud in my ears. The year he died after having had a prolific career as a writer and statesmen he professed -no doubt speaking out of personal experience- that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Being a young idealistic mind I still intellectually grappled with the concept of power.
After living through the last decade of the twentieth century and the eventful first one of this century, I have gained more knowledge into contemporary history and somewhat lost my idealism. I nonetheless remain true to what was then my instinctual and partly un-researched response.
-“What would then be a better suited regime for a country such as Algeria” went on to ask Dr Ostle, partially amused.
– “I haven’t figured it out yet but am working on it, when I’ve made some progress, I will let you know.” I still sometimes wonder.
Bouteflika first accessed power in 1999. Last week he was re-instated to serve his fourth mandate. I am not in a position to say if this is right or wrong. But what I can say is that unlike the 1991 election that posed a dilemma to the liberal moral conscience, this election poses a question to the social conscience. It forces us to ask deeper questions, to delve deeper into what has become the twenty first century’s powder keg, namely the Middle East and North Africa region.
There seems to be a pattern that dooms the apparatus of democracy inherited from a violent decolonization process to a mutation into militaristic regimes of governance. When it comes to the Arab world, history has proved that in the absence of strong historical ideological legitimacy, socialist regimes have morphed into militaristic regimes. In a nutshell, every single regime that started with being a socialist democracy in what is now referred to as the MENA region has evolved into military rule: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Israel and Algeria.
Syria is currently being blown into smithereens by an atrocious civil war, Iraq is in the throes of extremist violence, Libya’s carcass is up for grabs, Egypt is in post-revolutionary turmoil. The only stable regimes have proved to be monarchies: Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
What is to become of Algeria? Are Algerians to blame for having opted for a form of social stability? Or are they ready for second helpings of chaos? The state of surrounding countries makes a strong case for caution. After all, Algeria has had its Arab spring, and the fratricidal war that ensued provided the matrix for conflicts that have set other countries ablaze. Perhaps a decaying president supported by a strong military is a better option than civil war. Perhaps the real question to ask is whether Algeria will emerge as the regional super-power it is, whether Algeria will be able to contribute its energy revenues towards the construction of its social fabric. Whether Algeria’s economy will be open for business to serve its citizens. Whether Algeria will be able to make peace with itself, exhume the memory of decades of trauma and lay its policy of official amnesia to rest.
Perhaps it is time for Arabs to stop gazing at their navels or at the West for a form of validation guided mainly by political and economic motivations. Perhaps it is time to stop wondering whether democracy grafted on Arab soil can succeed, and look further and broader in order to take heed of the examples of countries which have successfully emerged out of Civil war: Argentina, South-Africa or even South-Korea in order to build a sustainable social order. Perhaps it would be better to remember that history is a vast corpus and works not in crumbs.
Photo by Faten Aggad, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license