ALGIERS: Demoralised Algerians fear more bloodshed after al Qaeda attacks killed 71 people, with some critics blaming government peace efforts for raising militant morale through excessive use of amnesty.
Some analysts said the bloodiest week in years had put the government of the giant north African country on the defensive and provided worrying evidence the guerrillas were increasingly well-trained and well-supplied with new recruits. The result is a public mood of gloom and hints from some critics that the violence was in part a result of ill-advised indulgence shown by the government to the 16-year-old rebellion.
"Algerians are tired of death, fear and funeral processions and nothing reassures them," an editorial in Liberte daily said. "On the contrary they seem to be on a trip into the recent past," it said in reference to an earlier, more intense period of violence during a mass Islamist uprising in the 1990s .
In the latest attacks, two car bombs in Bouira town southeast of Algiers on Wednesday killed 12 people and wounded 42. A bombing on Tuesday killed 48 people and guerrilla ambushes on Sunday killed 11 in areas east of Algiers.
Tuesday's bombing of a crowd of men queuing up to take an entrance exam at a military college recalled similar al Qaeda attacks in Iraq aimed at security force recruitment centres.
"The target is similar to tactics used by Al Qaeda in Iraq, which may suggest that information (both regarding strategy and tactics) is being shared throughout the international Salafi Jihadi movement," wrote Geoff Porter, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. He called the attack a "harsh reminder" of the fact that Algeria continues to be the third most active al Qaeda battleground after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
An Islamist revolt began in 1992 after the then military-backed authorities, fearing an Iran-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election which an Islamist party was set to win. More than 150,000 people were killed in ensuing the violence.
AMBIVALENT POLICY ON ISLAMIS
The rebels, long in decline, do not pose a national threat although they are still able to menace mountainous Kabylie and the south thanks to local factors -- criminal and family links and the use of remote terrain, according to Algerians.
Some commentators said an ill-considered indulgence by the state towards former rebels had sapped security force readiness and raised the morale of rebels seeking to set up purist Islamic rule, making it easier for the armed groups to recruit. They said al Qaeda's north Africa wing -- formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat -- saw the government's policy of reconciliation as a sign of weakness, since it offers an open-ended amnesty to rebels who disarm.
"The time has come to change the country's course and renounce this ambivalent policy with Islamism... Algerians do not have the impression the state is throwing all its resources into this fight," wrote El Watan daily editor Omar Belhouchet.
Critics say a government publicity campaign in 2006 calling on rebels to disarm under an amnesty had prompted troops and police to ask why they should bother to risk their lives when insurgents could give up and rejoin society at any time. Government opponents say officials inadvertently encouraged the rebels by mishandling a 2006 amnesty for rebels. By law the six-month immunity offer, which was rejected by the GSPC at the outset, expired at the end of August 2006.
"While the ambiguity remains in the authorities approach, the armed groups will exploit it to regain the terrain and strike," wrote Belhouchet. "What's conceded under the policy of ... Reconciliation is taken as a sign of weakness."
Some Algerians say President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, widely expected to change the constitution to enable him to seek a third term in office in 2009 polls, has promoted reconciliation in part in order to curry favour with the large Islamist trend in Algerian society.
The amnesty is part of a reconciliation plan which also included releases from prison of more than 2,000 former rebels.
