One day before the start of 2008, we learned of the death of a detainee at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. After four “suicides” in this camp of sinister repute (1), three simultaneous ones (a Yemeni and two Saudis) on 10 June 2006 and a fourth on 30 May 2007 (a Saudi), here we have a fifth victim (an Afghan). Abdul Razzak, aged 68, did not commit suicide: he died on 30 December of colorectal cancer, after undergoing chemotherapy since October. Arrested in January 2003, Abdul Razzak was presented by the US authorities as “having had numerous links with forces hostile to the coalition”.
At Guantánamo, nearly 300 detainees are still languishing in inhuman conditions, some suffering from serious illnesses, without trial or even charge. They are caught in a real trap. They do not want to be handed over to the authorities of their countries of origin, where they risk worse treatment than at Guantánamo; the US authorities, who only want to be rid of them, refuse them access to US soil for fear that they will sue the US government; and no third country is willing to take them in.
The end of 2007 was also a period when the “al-Qaeda” bogeyman was brandished to excess.
On 11 December, two explosions bring grief to two districts of Algiers (Ben Aknoun and Hydra), and the Algerian interior minister, Yazid Zerhouni, immediately tells the press of his “conviction” that it is the work of “al-Qaeda”, whereas many observers see in it the usual expression in Algeria of a clan struggle at the top of power, this time probably over Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s third presidential term. And when he was criticised for not waiting for the course and results of an investigation, the “free and independent” Algerian media produced, within hours, a communiqué from the “al-Qaeda Branch in the Islamic Maghreb” claiming responsibility for the attacks.
On 24 December, four French nationals are killed and a fifth seriously wounded by gunfire in Mauritania, in an attack by unidentified armed men on a road near Aleg, east of Nouakchott. The media, notably the French media, first spoke of a criminal act and of “an armed robbery attempt by three men travelling in a saloon car”, but two days later the Mauritanian interior minister, Yall Zakaria Alassane, asserted that it was a “terrorist act” committed by groups affiliated to al-Qaeda. This would be the occasion for purges within Mauritania’s Islamic movement, many of whose members had only recently been released following international pressure. Yall Alassane’s spokesman would explain that terrorist acts are the price Mauritania must pay for entering the era of globalisation.
On 27 December, an attack in Rawalpindi near Islamabad claims the life of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Many Pakistanis suspect the intelligence services of her bitter adversary Pervez Musharraf, but the Pakistani interior minister, Hamid Nawaz, hastens to declare: “We have proof that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are behind the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto.” What does this proof consist of? A telephone conversation intercepted by his services in which the alleged head of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, “congratulated one of his men after the attack”. Mehsud immediately denied this version of events and any involvement in the murder.
Apart from their atrocity, what these events have in common is that they represent “political opportunities” for repressive and corrupt regimes which now swear only by al-Qaeda in order to win the approval of their master, the tenant of the White House. The Algerian regime, on the verge of collapse in 2001, temporarily found a second wind after the events of 11 September and even succeeded in “selling itself” across the Atlantic as “the Expert” in counter-terrorism, in return for support of every kind.
To make their theses believable, the authorities of these countries produce “communiqués” and “telephone calls” that cannot be authenticated, and other “clues” that cannot be verified. This reminds me of the 1990s, when the GIA was rampant in Algeria. Communiqués poured from Algiers into newsrooms around the world without anyone being able to authenticate them, and GIA spokesmen abroad were connected to military barracks in Algeria to receive their instructions (see Paris Match, 9 October 1997).
For Algerians who lived through the tragic events of the 1990s, and who later discovered how certain circles of the Algerian military regime had manipulated violence, attacks, massacres and other crimes against humanity for strategic and political ends, as part of the counter-insurgency struggle, al-Qaeda is merely the GIA’s mutant on a global scale.
What if al-Qaeda were nothing but a phantom created by experts in COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy, a well-honed tool and a well-established discipline in most of the world’s military academies, notably Western ones, tested many times on the continents of the South in the second half of the 20th century? Why this frightening phantom? To divert attention from what is happening in the many Guantánamos set up in the four corners of the world, and to make us forget the war being waged against humanity (repression, humiliation, plunder and so on) in lawless states, which are ever more numerous.
I know this is a disturbing question. It makes us uncomfortable because, as citizens living in the 21st century, in the age of the internet and the mobile phone, we refuse to admit that we may be the unfortunate victims of a huge “intellectual swindle”; because we carry within us the assurance, even the arrogance, of those who have lost the capacity to question things and interrogate events. This is the ill of this young century: the absence of critical thinking, not among ordinary mortals, but among the “elites”, who were trained precisely to seek to tell truth from falsehood.
Otherwise, how can one explain citizens’ blind trust in dominant official discourse?
In reality, if we “swallow” this discourse so easily, without time to “chew” it properly, it is because we are subjected to a formidable media machine that spreads it continuously, a machine directly or indirectly under orders, which calls on self-proclaimed “experts” in terrorism, the Arab world, the Maghreb, Islam and so on, to “validate” it, delivering to us their murky exegeses of the theses decreed by criminal regimes at national or global level. The latest scoop, recently delivered by a so-called “al-Qaeda expert” invited onto the set of France 24, is that the “al-Qaeda Branch in the Islamic Maghreb” has just introduced a diploma in “jihad sciences” to compete with the traditional branches! This news evidently allowed him to explain why a bus of students was near the site of one of the explosions in Algiers.
If we “swallow” this discourse so easily, to the point of “intellectual indigestion”, it is because it is lent credence by the understandable silence of the intelligence services, who know what is being plotted behind the scenes, and above all by the complicit silence of chancelleries that keep quiet about what they know in order to protect political and/or economic interests. On this subject, I recall the words of an officer of the French DST, whom I met more than ten years ago, about the attacks committed in Paris in 1995: “Our forensic police did their job. We were able to identify leads pointing to the Algerian services. We wrote an investigation report, but the political authorities preferred to put it in a drawer.”
May the year 2008 open our eyes and our hearts so that we see more clearly and do not die idiots.
Abbas Aroua, 1 January 2008
* The calendar of dumbing-down begins on 11 September 2001
