BOUTEFLIKA'S ARMY: CIVILIAN CONTROL AT WHAT PRICE?

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 ALGIERS 000035

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/13/2034
TAGS: PGOV PINS PREL PTER MARR KISL AG
SUBJECT: BOUTEFLIKA'S ARMY: CIVILIAN CONTROL AT WHAT PRICE?

REF: A. 08 ALGIERS 1307

B. 08 ALGIERS 1121

C. 08 ALGIERS 1220

D. 08 ALGIERS 1208

Classified By: Ambassador David D. Pearce; reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).


1. (S) SUMMARY: Since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika famously
announced his intention to be "more than three-quarters of a
president" following his election in 1999, he has struggled
to assert greater control over Algeria's army to avoid
becoming yet another leader designated and replaced at will
by Algeria's generals. Those familiar with the regime say he
has since succeeded to a significant degree in weakening the
grip of the Directorate for Intelligence and Security (DRS,
the military intelligence service) over the army by
systematically replacing generals and regional commanders
with loyalists, many of whom hail from Bouteflika's native
Tlemcen region. Critics tell us that while Bouteflika has
ostensibly asserted greater civilian control over the
military, he has also "broken" the army by placing loyalty
over competence in his tug of war with the DRS. While
today's army no longer takes to the streets to quell violent
social protests and Algeria's Interior Ministry is hiring
thousands of new police officers, one opposition leader sums
up the result as "a transition from a military state to a
police state" rather than a democratic opening. The result
is a leadership structure, or "Pouvoir," that now consists
not of a single center of power but of several, such that
decision-making has become an inefficient process of
negotiation and argument rarely exposed to public view. END
SUMMARY.

ALGERIA'S PARALLEL SOCIETY
--------------


2. (S) Former Prime Minister Sid Ahmed Ghozali explained to
the Ambassador on December 31 that there are two parallel
societies in Algeria, one on the surface and another behind
the scenes. Ghozali was joined by former DRS officer Chefik
Mesbah, who explained that while a complex system of
political variables was not unique to the Algerian system,
the difference was that the Algerian system was invisible
while in the U.S., in contrast, the variables at play were
visible. Algeria's parallel societies did not intersect,
creating two almost entirely self-referential worlds. Mesbah
explained that the split mirrored the distance between the
heavily Islamist street and an older, French-educated ruling
class. Where is the current leader, he wondered, who can
visit the crowded working-class Algiers neighborhoods of
Boubsila or El Harrach? The Algeria of Boubsila, Mesbah
said, is not Bouteflika's Algeria.

TRUST NOTHING OFFICIAL
--------------


3. (S) Prominent human rights lawyer Ali Yahia Abdenour,
president emeritus of the Algerian League for the Defense of
Human Rights (LADDH),also described the current political
leadership as divided between the "apparent power" led by
Bouteflika and the "hidden power" most often personified by
General Mohamed "Toufik" Mediene, head of the DRS. According
to Abdenour, an ongoing tension between these two centers of
power has focused on control of the army, with Bouteflika's
age and declining health causing interested factions within
the Pouvoir to jockey for position just as they did when
then-President Houari Boumediene lay in a coma in 1978.
Ghozali said that because of Bouteflika's efforts to exert
greater influence over the army, these hidden rivalries had
splintered the Pouvoir into several different centers of
power, with the result that decisionmaking has become a
painful process of negotiation and consensus-building.
Because all of the relevant discussions are hidden from
public view, Ghozali cautioned, the public discourse of the
media and official government statements should be taken with
a grain of salt: "Trust nothing official," he said.

A BROKEN ARMY?
--------------


4. (S) Long-time National Liberation Front (FLN) insider
Abdelkader Bounekraf resigned his post on the FLN central
committee in the beginning of 2008, lamenting the FLN was not
the same one he fought for beginning in 1954. Bounekraf
remains a visible figure and known critic of FLN Secretary
General Abdelaziz Belkhadem, whom he blames for Islamizing

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the FLN and weakening its appeal as a cherished symbol of the
Algerian state. At the same time, Bounekraf told us
recently, the other primary symbol of the state -- the army
-- had also changed. He said that Bouteflika had "broken"
the army by gradually replacing older generals with a newer,
less experienced cadre of officers who were loyal to
Bouteflika but not as competent as the generals they
replaced. Behind the scenes of the public promotion of a
class of colonels to the rank of general in June 2008 lay
much resentment from older colonels and generals who felt
more qualified and experienced. A disproportionate number of
the new generals hail from Bouteflika's native western
province of Tlemcen, further weakening the traditional army
power base in eastern Algeria. In Bounekraf's view,
Bouteflika had compromised the army's role as guarantor of
the stability and survival of the Algerian state, and had
done so primarily as an effort to solidify his position as
president.


5. (S) Mesbah reinforced Bounekraf's view, saying that he had
visited retired General Khaled Nezzar (ref A) shortly before
the holidays to convey his greetings. In attendance were
several of the newer, younger generals whom Bouteflika had
promoted in June of 2008. Mesbah said that Nezzar
acknowledged that times had changed, telling the generals
"the days of coups d'etat are over" in Algeria, and it was
now time to exert influence in other ways. Ghozali explained
to the Ambassador that the Algerian system was one that
"designated" its leaders, citing the process by which he had
been named -- "tapped by the generals" -- to become prime
minister in June 1991. Today the Algerian system still
designated its officials, he said, with lists even of customs
officials reviewed by influential business leaders connected
to Bouteflika. Because Bouteflika had succeeded in
disconnecting the DRS from the army more than ever before,
however, Ghozali said the designation process was now slower,
marked by hidden negotiation and compromise between several
different centers of power.

AN ATOMIZED, INCOMPETENT SYSTEM
--------------


6. (S) The "system" that Ghozali referred to was also
described to the Ambassador recently by another former prime
minister, Ahmed Benbitour, as one of weak institutions that
suffered from a profound lack of competence and vision.
Benbitour explained that this lack of competence was due to a
variety of factors, most notably the brain drain that
resulted from the terrorism of the 1990s and an education
system whose quality had dropped off dramatically since the
early 1980s. Ghozali said that after the education of the
generation born in the 1950s (including Prime Minister Ahmed
Ouyahia and Algerian Ambassador to the U.S. Abdallah Baali),
institutions such as the Ecole Nationale d'Administration
closed or changed focus, creating a steep drop-off in
education quality. Mesbah added that the shortcomings of
Algeria's arabization campaign (ref B) had further weakened
Algeria's institutions, and that the general nature of the
system itself was one of co-opting and eliminating those who
stand out or rock the boat. The system, he added, is not
built to produce change, and "cannot produce an Obama."


7. (S) Mesbah asserted that decisions such as granting legal
status to a political party or civil society organization --
or tapping individuals for leadership positions -- were not
always carefully calculated. Incompetence within the ranks
of the Pouvoir was extreme. While it was easy from the
outside to assign greater meaning to such decisions, Mesbah
said many decisions came to pass simply because the people
making them did not know what to do and thus chose to do
nothing and let inertia take its course. On the other hand,
Ghozali said, the decision to do nothing could be quite
deliberate. He cited his own effort to form a political
party in advance of the 1999 presidential election. His
would-be party never received legal approval from the
interior ministry, and was thus prevented from opening bank
accounts and holding meetings. "You will never see a paper
trail here," Ghozali told the Ambassador, "You just get
silence, not even a receipt that you filed your request."

BOUTEFLIKA BETS ON ZERHOUNI AND THE ZAOUIAS
--------------


8. (S) Within the context of Bouteflika's tug of war with
Mediene and the DRS for control of the army, opposition
leader Said Sadi of the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD)

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explained on November 4 that Bouteflika was aware of the need
to maintain law and order and relied heavily on Interior
Minister Yazid Zerhouni to do so. Zerhouni and Algerian
national police chief Ali Tounsi spoke publicly on several
occasions in 2008 of their ambitious plan to expand the
national police force to 200,000 by 2010. In January of
2008, the police force consisted of 117,243 officers, with an
estimated 15,000 new trainees recruited in 2008. Zerhouni
announced at a May 2008 conference in Nouakchott of western
Mediterranean interior ministers that the 2006-2010 campaign
to strengthen the national police and gendarmerie, including
equipment, higher salaries and training, was expected to cost
four billion euros. Sadi said that Bouteflika trusts
Zerhouni far more than he trusts Mediene, but that given
Bouteflika's "three-quarters of a president" comment,
outsiders should not mistake the expansion of the civilian
police force as a democratic opening. Bouteflika, Sadi said,
had no intention of losing control, making his strategy
simply "a transition from military state to police state."


9. (S) Bouteflika's other vehicle for exercising control has
been to use the Sufi religious schools -- the zaouias -- for
political mobilization and to counter the more extreme brand
of Salafism creeping into Algerian society (ref C).
Abdenour, the aging denizen of Algeria's human rights scene,
told us that Bouteflika needed the zaouias not only as a
political tool but also to boost his credibility with the
Islamist electorate, which "was significant." Abdenour said
that Bouteflika had "become a mystic" and his age and illness
had driven him to turn to religion as a way of atoning for
youthful indiscretions. The zaouias also provided Bouteflika
with an additional base of support among Islamists, in the
face of competition from the DRS and an army whose loyalty he
has never fully taken for granted. If there is one thing the
DRS and army do not like, Abdenour explained, it is the
Islamists, after fighting them so bitterly during the 1990s.

COMMENT
--------------


10. (S) While Bouteflika's efforts to solidify his position
by exerting greater control over the army appear to have
succeeded to a degree in prying control of the army away from
the DRS, the result appears to be a decentralized, splintered
Pouvoir with reduced decisionmaking capacity. Our contacts,
all of whom have personal knowledge of the actors involved,
believe this has ominous implications for the long-term
stability of the regime, given their lack of faith in the
ability of the police to fill a void left by a weakened army.
The DRS has shown signs of seeking to reassert its control
over the army, but since Bouteflika wields the power to
appoint and remove generals, the DRS's primary lever appears
to be the process of designating a Bouteflika successor.
Meanwhile, Ghozali said that the speed and debate-free manner
in which the constitution was revised in November (ref D)
made it clear that the system was preparing to hold true to
its history of designating leaders. Whether that leader was
ultimately Bouteflika or not, Ghozali and Mesbah said that
the process would be hidden as it had always been in the past
-- only this time, the process would be less efficient and
involve more negotiations and compromises behind the scenes.
Mesbah concluded that the rival power centers within
Algeria's hidden parallel society mirrored the institutional
atomization of the Algerian political system writ large: a
series of largely incompetent institutions left spinning
their wheels independently of one another, with nothing to
connect the dots.
PEARCE