Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
07ALGIERS1810
2007-12-21 10:14:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Algiers
Cable title:  

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ISLAMISTS GONE?

Tags:  PGOV PHUM KDEM KISL AG 
pdf how-to read a cable
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RUEHMD/AMEMBASSY MADRID 8743
RUEHNM/AMEMBASSY NIAMEY 1412
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RUEHRB/AMEMBASSY RABAT 2088
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RUEHTRO/AMEMBASSY TRIPOLI
RUEHTU/AMEMBASSY TUNIS 6945
RUEHCL/AMCONSUL CASABLANCA 3192
RUEPGBA/CDR USEUCOM INTEL VAIHINGEN GE
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 ALGIERS 001810 

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/05/2017
TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM KISL AG
SUBJECT: WHERE HAVE ALL THE ISLAMISTS GONE?

REF: A. ALGIERS 1749

B. ALGIERS 1267

Classified By: Ambassador Robert Ford for reasons 1.4(b) and (d)

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 04 ALGIERS 001810

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/05/2017
TAGS: PGOV PHUM KDEM KISL AG
SUBJECT: WHERE HAVE ALL THE ISLAMISTS GONE?

REF: A. ALGIERS 1749

B. ALGIERS 1267

Classified By: Ambassador Robert Ford for reasons 1.4(b) and (d)


1. (C) SUMMARY: Many observers here think Islamist parties
suffered a significant defeat in the November 29 local
elections (ref A). The moderate Islamist MSP, a member of
the presidential coalition, received an official total of
just 10.69 percent of the vote, while the opposition Islah
party received a mere 1.48 percent. The MSP won more votes
and more seats at the local level, but it actually finished
behind both of its partners in the governing coalition as
well as a previous little-known secular opposition party.
Many saw its fourth-place showing as a defeat. Party
officials from both Islah and MSP attribute the poor showing
to two factors. The first, general disillusionment with
their role in the political process, led to low Islamist
participation in an already low voter turnout. The second,
echoed by journalists we spoke to, is a belief among
Islamists that a deliberate effort is underway to weaken
their presence in Algeria's political space (ref B). Given
the dissatisfaction their voters feel, Islamist leaders tell
us that continuing to push Islamist parties out of the
political process risks fueling a rise in extremism as
Islamists search for new forms of political expression. END
SUMMARY.

--------------
MAIN ISLAMIST PARTY SATISFIED - OFFICIALLY
--------------


2. (U) Many observers here pointed at the collection of
Islamist parties garnering less than 15 percent of the vote
as evidence that the Islamists parties are declining in
influence. The main Islamist party, the Movement for a
Society of Peace (also known as the MSP or its Arabic acronym
Hamas) officially claims it did well. Party leader, and
Cabinet Minister Without Portfolio Abou Djerrah Soltani, told
the Algerian press on December 1 that the party's electoral
gains on November 29 were satisfactory. He noted that

-- MSP gained 300,000 more votes than it had won in the 2002
local elections;
-- MSP candidates won 1,100 seats in city councils across
Algeria compared to 660 in the 2002 elections;

-- MSP has a majority in 82 city councils across Algeria,
compared to majorities in 38 councils after the 2002
elections;
-- MSP won seats in 47 of 48 provincial councils, compared
to seats in 18 provincial councils in the 2002 elections.


3. (C) That said, observers here note that MSP, previously
the third-most popular party in the country in terms of
seats, won fewer seats nationwide than the previously
unimportant Algerian National Front (FNA). MSP finished in
fourth place, far behind its governing coalition partners,
the secular-oriented FLN and RND parties. MSP Vice President
(and Soltani rival) Abdelmajid Menasra defended to Poloff on
December 2 his party's showing, however, saying that since
Islam maintained an extremely significant role in Algerian
society, it was simply a question of how this sentiment would
express itself in the political arena. Menasra said that the
MSP was "content" with the results, and that "fraud was not
as bad" as he had expected. In this private conversation,
however, he acknowledged that the election results were a
setback, and MSP's electoral base didn't turn out as hoped.

--------------
HARDER ISLAMIST OPPOSITION FARES BADLY
--------------


4. (C) Mohamed Boulahia, the new and controversial leader of
the harder line opposition Islamist party Islah, told Poloff
on December 3 that his party's poor showing in the elections
-- 1.5 percent of votes cast for APCs (city councils),and
just one percent of votes cast for APWs (provincial councils)
-- resulted from four years of internal party turmoil from
which the party was only just emerging. He also charged that
Shaykh Abdellah Djaballah, former leader of Islah, had taken
all of the party's money, further crippling the
organization's ability to get out its message. Thus, he

ALGIERS 00001810 002 OF 004


said, the Islah of 2007 should be viewed as a new political
party. (Note: Islah was able to put forward approximately
400 candidate lists in the election. It ran in all 48
provinces, though not for every city and provincial council.)
Boulahia acknowledged that the party still has some distance
to go to address its internal leadership and management
problems.

--------------
ISLAMIST BASE DIDN'T TURN OUT
--------------


5. (C) Boulahia referenced the high abstention rate in the
November 29 elections and said the official participation
rate of 45 percent had been inflated by the government and
was more likely closer to 25 percent. He said that many
individuals who voted -- most of whom were older people, he
said -- did so not because they were interested in the
candidates or out of conviction, but to facilitate obtaining
government documents such as birth certificates and passports
at a later date. (Note: There is a widespread rumor that
the government will begin requiring individuals to prove they
voted in order to obtain certain basic official documents.
End Note.) The average Algerian is simply not interested in
politics now and is preoccupied with daily social problems,
he observed.


6. (C) Further, Boulahia said, the wounds of the 1992
elections that the Islamic Salvation Front had won and which
were "called off without any legal evidence," were still
open. These wounds caused Islamists to believe that the
system lacks transparency and fairness. Abdallah Djaballah,
Boulahia rival for leadership of the Islah Party, claimed to
us on December 17 that the poor showing by Islamist parties
was due to widespread dissatisfaction with the process among
Islamist voters, the vast majority of whom heeded a call from
Djaballah and former Islamic Salvation Front leaders like Ali
Benhadj to boycott the elections. MSP Vice President
Abdelmajid Menasra also told us on December 3 that Islamist
supporters largely believed the system was rigged against
them and, therefore, they abstained from voting. Even MSP
leader Soltani acknowledged in his December 1 press
conference that young people who might have been expected to
vote for change through the MSP against the FLN and RND
parties didn't vote. Meanwhile, Islah leader Boulahia added
that there was a stratum of "Salafist partisans" who rejected
elections outright because they viewed them as a
contradiction to Islamic law. He predicted that absent
positive change in Algeria's socio-economic situation, there
would be unrest, a point his party rival Djaballah also
emphasized to us on December 17.

--------------
ELECTION IRREGULARITIES -- WHO IS TO BLAME ?
--------------


7. (C) Boulahia maintained that Islamist losses in the
elections were attributable in part also to deliberate
government efforts to clamp down on any political figure that
has Islamist leanings. In the process leading up to the
November 29 local elections, the a source in the
Constitutional Council told us on December 18 that a record
number of candidates were rejected by the Interior Ministry.
Official Interior Ministry figures show that 944
coalition-leading party FLN candidates were rejected, along
with 732 from the ruling coalition partner RND party, 587
from the Islamist member of the ruling coalition MSP party,
547 from the Communist Workers' Party, 216 from the secular
opposition RCD party, 373 from the secular opposition FFS
party and 250 from the Islamist opposition Islah party.
(These figures were collated before the parties began the
appeals process.) In the 2002 local elections, Mohamed
Bedjaoui, then president of the Constitutional Council, took
into consideration a total of 187 appeals from political
parties about their rejected candidates. In 2007, the
numbers skyrocketed, with 329 appeals from the FLN alone, 160
from the RND, 211 from the MSP, 70 from the Workers Party, 58
from the RCD, 81 from the FFS and 38 from Islah. Of these
appeals, the Constitutional Council source told us that the
FLN had 138 candidates reinstated, the RND 31, MSP 94, the
Workers Party 34, FFS 33 and Islah 31. Political parties and
the Interior Ministry often release conflicting or vague

ALGIERS 00001810 003 OF 004


statistics, but all sources agree that the number of rejected
candidates reached new heights in 2007. (Comment: At first
glance, at least, it is hard to see that Islamist parties
such as MSP and Islah suffered any more than non-Islamist
parties in terms of the Interior Ministry blocking
candidacies. End Comment.)


8. (C) Mohamed Boulahia complained to us about numerous
other procedural problems with the elections. These included
the absence of an independent election monitoring commission,
voting boxes filled with bogus ballots and, in some locations
and in contrast to previous standard practice, the lack of
certification that voting boxes were actually empty before
the official start of voting. On November 29, in one of the
voting centers in the eastern city of Batna, he said, the
number of votes counted was 1,020, while the number of
registered voters was 1,014. Such instances of alleged
fraud, Boulahia said, contributed to a lack of transparency
for the elections (ref A).


9. (C) In addition to citing specific cases of fraud,
Boulahia was quick to identify the Interior Ministry as the
main source of election-related trouble. (Comment: Boulahia
gained his post as Islah leader as a result of Interior
Ministry manipulation against Shaykh Djaballah, so there is
more than a little irony in his complaints now about ministry
interference. End Comment.) He noted that Interior Minister
Yazid Zerhouni had stated that any fraud committed during the
elections would come at the hand of political parties.
Boulahia specifically accused the FLN and National Democratic
Rally RND, both members of the governing coalition, of being
behind any election-related fraud. For example, Boulahia
claimed, as many as 80 percent of individuals charged with
conducting the voting were actually FLN and RND members. The
government appointed these individuals, and they served the
government's interests. He also asserted that this
"structure" had been in place since the opening of Algeria's
political space in the early 1990s.

--------------
EFFORTS TO CO-OPT AND SUBDUE POLITICAL ISLAM
--------------


10. (C) Journalists Habib Rachidine (Arabic-language daily
El-Bilad) and Nourredine Merdaci (French-language daily
L'Expression) echoed Djaballah and Boulahia's view that there
is a concerted effort underway to remove Islamist influence
from Algeria's political landscape. In December 4
conversations, they told us that the weakening of MSP and
marginalization of other smaller Islamist movements is paving
the way for the return to the single-party era. According to
Rachidine, the FLN and RND are virtually indistinguishable
from one another and they certainly are not Islamist.


11. (C) Both journalists focused on what they perceived to be
the declining influence of the MSP. Merdaci maintained the
party was discredited when it decided to join the
presidential coalition. In doing so, he said, it had tried
to shed its religious mantle, only to lose support from the
party faithful. Rachidine maintained that the MSP had been
transformed from a strong competitor into a "third wheel"
used by the "Pouvoir" (the civil/military inner circle
running Algeria).


12. (C) Rachidine drew attention to Zerhouni's election-day
press conference, in which Zerhouni repeatedly used the
Arabic word "tasjid" (to cause to bow down or prostrate,
implying in this case, to the government) rather than
"tajsid" (to embody, in this case, the will of the people) to
describe the outcome of the elections. Rachidine said that
Zerhouni, who is known to have difficulty with Arabic, may
have misspoken, but he still conveyed a clear message to the
political class, namely that the evisceration of the Islamist
movements had begun.

--------------
COMMENT: EXTREMISTS WIN ?
--------------


13. (C) It is not surprising that MSP leader Soltani
justified his party's showing, but many in the party are
unhappy with the results. It also is not surprising the

ALGIERS 00001810 004 OF 004


fading Islah's party leader Boulahia would blame a variety of
people rather than his own campaign which many acknowledge to
have been lackluster. What is also clear is that the
abstention rate in both the May and November elections was
low, especially among the young people who propelled the
Islamic Salvation Front to victory in the 1990 and 1991
elections. The question is why those young people don't vote
in general, and why they don't vote much for Islamists.
There is some government manipulation of voting results, as
we have noted previously. The Islamist parties have their
own, self-made troubles. MSP suffers a credibility hit due
to its membership in the governing coalition. It is not
exactly an opposition party in a country where many in the
electorate want change. Meanwhile, Islah has plenty of
leadership problems. These moderate, legal Islamist parties
have also been generally ineffective at displaying an ability
to govern in any meaningfully different way, even at the
local level.


14. (C) Moreover, the brutal, decade-long civil war
discredited political Islam for many Algerians and
established it as a threat in the eyes of Le Pouvoir. As we
reported in ref B, the government has pursued a strategy
calculated to divide moderate Islamists while keeping the
hardest line Islamists, such as former Islamic Salvation
Front leaders, outside the political process altogether.
These factors, combined with a growing public sense that the
political process lacks meaning, produced late November's
underwhelming performance by the Islamist parties.
Nonetheless, Islam is no less relevant in Algeria, despite
the difficulties it has faced in manifesting itself
politically. Our contacts agree that while Islamists, still
a significant presence at the social level, chose not to
express themselves in these elections, their dissatisfaction
is real, and they may look for other ways to express it. If
the warnings of Djaballah and others are to be believed,
there is no guarantee that these will resemble the moderate,
controlled political Islam preferred by the Algerian
government. They warn that dissatisfaction with the legal
political system will push many dedicated young Islamists
into extremist causes.
FORD