INTRODUCTON
The Islamic revolution in Iran cleared the path to a succession of events more or less interconnected that would later on have a considerable impact on many nations around the world. Although a lot of the work that led to the insurrection was done by progressive forces and political parties within Iran through a lengthy and continuous process requiring a considerable amount of field work, it was understandably the Islamic political parties and organisations that reaped its fruit and the return of Khomeini in 1979 was the start of the Islamic state. The death toll before and after the constitution of the Islamic state is largely contested from both sides. According to Khomeini 60 thousand people were killed by the SAVAC and the Shah’s army, others give the number of 2 to 3 thousand. The number of protesters and political prisoners executed by the Islamic state after the fall of the Shah was estimated to be around 8 thousand. The new leader of Iran didn’t hide his intentions to export the Islamic revolution to the rest of the Muslim world with complete disregard for the differences in culture, traditions and history. He called it the Islamic revival.
For the surrounding golf states the events were very disturbing, this kind of insurrection could gather momentum and rapidly become an epidemic. The spill-over effect of this revolution had to be controlled. A strategy had to be devised to minimise this effect and attenuate or channel the momentum created by this uprising within the Arab countries somewhere else.
The west was just as concerned as the Golf states but not necessarily for the same reasons. One of the first decisions made by Ayatollah Khomeini was to end diplomatic relations with the state of Israel and hand the building previously occupied by its embassy to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States were damaged and the hostage crisis in November 1979 where 66 American citizens were seized from the US embassy in Tehran by Islamic militants didn’t help. The militants kept 55 hostages for more than a year. The relationship between Iran and the US didn’t improve after the liberation of the hostages in January 1981 after 444 days of sequestration thanks to the successful marathon made by the Algerian diplomacy known for its expertise in the art of mediation.
Chapter one
When and where they all met.
One of the main strategies adopted by Saudia Arabia and other middle eastern Arab countries to lessen the effect of the spill-over of the Islamic revolution was to widen the gap between the Sunni and Shia ideologies. Shiites were depicted as non-believers who had no respect for the mother of all believers Aicha and the prophet’s companions.
The second strategy was to channel all the energy created by the Islamic revolution in Iran in most of the Muslim world towards a cause that would be deemed worthy by the rest of Muslim world. The soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government provided such cause. As many as 35 thousand men were recruited mainly from north Africa by Oussama Ben Laden who incidentally visited the US in 1979 and was working for the Saudi secret service who also had close ties with the CIA. The recruits were sent to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in a place that Ben Laden called the base (Al-Qaida) for military training provided by CIA agents. They will join the Islamic groups within Afghanistan in their fight for what was depicted as jihadist’s war against the atheists.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. This quote by Seneca Lucius a philosopher from ancient Rome in 50 AD inspired the western politicians and their services since as early as the 1950s when the CIA and British MI-6 had close links with the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt when the target was the revolutionary regime of Djamal Abdou Nacer who nationalised the Suez canal in 1956.
Robert Dreyfuss, the investigative journalist, in his book, The devil’s game: How The United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, asserted that the CIA and the west used the brotherhood in an attempt to overthrow president Nacer and the Mossad used the brothers in 1982 during the uprising in Syria’s Homs in an attempt to destroy president Hafidh Al-Assad. After the last failed assassination plot against president Nacer of Egypt and the crackdown by the Egyptian leader on the brotherhood mouvement, its leaders were extracted by the CIA and MI-6 and settled in Saudia Arabia. The Saudis financed and controlled the movement.
Robert Dreyfuss found this rare photograph of Said Ramadan, son in law of Hassan Al-Banna and chief organiser for the Muslim brotherhood with president Eisenhower in the oval office. He also claims that by then or soon after Ramadan was recruited as a CIA agent.
William Engdahl American geopolitician and author in his book, The Lost Hegemon, explains that practically all the terrorist jihadi groups were a western creation starting with Ben Laden’s Al-Qaida.
Western services inspired the strategies adopted by the golf states. The split created between Shia and Sunni Muslims was considered a divide and conquer approach that will serve western and Israeli interests in the MENA region.
Operation cyclone was the code name for the CIA program to finance, train, and arm the Islamic groups fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The recruits from Algeria and some neighbouring countries were financed by Saudia Arabia and other golf states while the British MI-6 had its own program. Less than three years after the soviet withdrawal in 1989 the world witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For the Iranians who didn’t hide their intention to export their revolution to other Muslim countries, the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was expected thanks to the Islamic revolution and its effect on the Muslim world.
For the Afghan people the metamorphosis was complete, thousands will flee the country looking for a safe haven that will be provided by the same people who participated in causing their ordeal.
For the Afghan people the metamorphosis was complete .
Following this train of thoughts Afghanistan could be considered as the first collateral damage of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Chapter two
In North Africa, Algeria, the suspicious illness and subsequential death in 1978 of president Boumediene, a visionary who’ll prove to be hard to replace, led to a partial disintegration of the system. A completely naïve and incompetent handling of the economy led to its collapse. The excessive public spending and the abrupt transformation of the Algerian society into a consumer society together with a drop of 20usd in oil prices between 1980 and 1988, led to a policy of austerity which in turn led to public unrest and riots on the 5th of October 1988. After the civil unrest which lasted 6 days, the Algerian president promised what he called democratic reforms. The words total chaos, anarchy and moral decay come to mind to describe the state of the country.
Once again, they all met (only this time it was more discrete)
Algeria was already living what Khomeini called the Islamic revival. Fundamentalist Islam was already putting down roots in a large part of the country. Young men, inspired by, in one hand the Islamic state in Iran and on the other hand by the numerous preaches they were continuously subjected to under the nonchalant eyes of the Algerian authorities, started to gather in small groups and organise what seemed like military training in the mountains or at the sea side. Stories were being shared among people describing the war in Afghanistan and the jihadist who blew a Russian tank to pieces just by throwing a stone at it and screaming Allah o Akbar. Of course, neither the anti-tank nor the stinger missiles supplied by the CIA were mentioned.
During 132 years of continuously rejected French colonisation and after the independence, Algeria never stopped being a Muslim country but had a different approach to religion, a very tolerant approach. The universal values which are also the values of Islam were shared by the people but the religious practices were left to each individual’s discretion and there was a mutual respect between conservative and progressive minds.
Democratic reforms meant multipartyism and freedom of speech. As new political parties started emerging like mushrooms. Political Islam was represented by a few parties but it was the party of those who were from the beginning of the eighties preparing for confrontation that won the support of the electorate. The Algerian military saw clearly what was going on and kept warning the president but he wouldn’t budge and the rest of the government was too busy negotiating handouts from the international monetary fund with more and more stringent conditions each time. Algerian culture and traditions were being swept aside to be replaced by the new fashion, the Afghan clothing for some and the Saudi style for others. The metamorphosis was almost complete even before the first municipal elections and the land slide success of the FIS the Islamic front. Members of the Islamic party took over the majority of the local councils. The people who elected them hoping that they were going to tackle corruption and clean up the local council were to say the least disappointed. Land was distributed between prominent members of the party, and the same morally decadent overall behaviour was maintained but with different people in charge. Large meetings were held all over the country and preachers from all over the middle east were invited to address the tens of thousand worshipers. One of the leaders of the party said openly that they will use this democracy to reach power then get rid of this western concept that doesn’t fit with our sharia. An invited guest, an imam from Kuwait was cheered by the people present in a full football stadium when he called the prophet of Islam, the laughing killer. That day many people fainted when the organisers of the meeting used a laser to write Allah in the sky, as if the designer and creator of the universe was a narcissist who enjoyed writing his name. The party was financed by rich members who were hoping to profit from its success and from some of the Golf states and France representing the west as Algeria was considered its exclusive preserve.
Those who worked towards definitely shutting down this historical bastion of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism called Algeria, were already jubilating and celebrating their success but they overlooked the most important factor that differentiated Algeria from other countries, its history. The Algerian revolution was and still is a unique example of bravery and sacrifice in the fight against imperialism and settler colonialism. Amilcar Cabral the African revolutionary from Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde said that if the Muslims go to Mecca for pilgrimage and the Christians go to the Vatican then the revolutionaries go to Algeria. Practically all the revolutionary movements had bureaus in Algeria, the black panthers, the Irish revolutionary army, African freedom fighters, Nelson Mandela amongst others received military training in Algeria.
The Algerian revolutionary army had to put an end to the masquerade, the president was asked to resign and the military took over. Those who were already prepared for confrontation started their jihad against their own popular army and their own people. Soon the new multinational fundamentalist groups created by western services with help from the Saudis and the brotherhood in Afghanistan joined in and Algeria started its war against terrorism. Intellectuals, artists, teachers, public figures, civil servants, were slaughtered in a daily basis, complete neighbourhoods and villages were decimated. Algerian citizens were butchered because of their line of work and often just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, a market, an airport or inside their homes. Groups of young patriots led by more experience freedom fighters from the revolution of independence started forming to protect their villages and their neighbourhoods from the terrorists.
The country was completely isolated apart from a few friends who believed in its capacity to return the situation in its favour. For western countries and their allies in the Arab world, the Algerian Army stopped the democratic process. They ignored the fact that Algeria as an Islamic state would also ignore it but they hoped for a weakened armed forces and a country easier to handle as it will lose its identity, its culture and its historical strength. The French government and medias called the terrorists, the mujaheddins and started a who kills who propaganda in an attempt to put the blame of the death toll on the Algerian security forces, a failed attempt because by then the people knew who the butchers were by name and where they came from.
After ten years of hardship and suffering, the Algerian security forces had the upper hand in their war against terror with precious help from civilian patriots. President Lamine Zeroual who was previously a high-ranking officer and started the peace process gave a clear warning to the rest of the Arab republics when he said, we entered the dark tunnel of civil war and are gradually coming out of it, to those who laughed at our ordeal, I say that they will soon live the same experience but we will not laugh at their suffering because we know what war does to nations. Clearly the Algerian leader was fully aware of what the future was hiding for the Arab republics.
The Algerians learnt three lessons from what was labelled the dark decade. The first is that democratic reforms are a lengthy step by step process that require a legal frame work to follow each step and not a trial-and-error method because mistakes can prove to be fatal. The second is that when we agree that it is God the creator of the universe who dictated the writings, we need to remember that the reading is done by humans who can easily take it out of contest and use it to destroy instead of building, to take life instead of preserving it and most of all to serve knowingly or unknowingly the doubtful agendas of the economic and politic interests of western imperialism and colonialism. And the third is that being totally dependent of the IMF is a lot like selling your sole to the devil, you will lose a lot more than what you gain.
After Afghanistan, Algeria could be considered the second collateral damage of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Algeria was alone in its fight against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism unleashed by the CIA, western services with the support of the Muslim brotherhood, some golf states and neighbouring Morrocco. The Irony of the situation is that two enemies, Iran on one hand and Saudia Arabia backed by the west on the other were financing and supporting terror, death and destruction in Algeria.
