The End Of Islamic Revolution?

__"The Decline of Revolutionary Islam in Algeria and Egypt" by Fawaz A. Gerges, in Survival (Spring 1999), International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 Tavistock St., London, England WC2E 7NQ.__

Though Islamic extremists in Algeria and Egypt continue to mount terrorist attacks, they no longer pose a serious threat to the survival of the pro-Western regimes there, contends Gerges, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Sarah Lawrence College. "Unable to face or subvert the superior forces of the governments they opposed, militant Islamists in Algeria and Egypt instead terrorize the civilian population and deter foreign investment."

In both countries, as elsewhere in the Middle East, Gerges says, the Islamic movements have been fractured by factionalism. In Algeria, the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA) since 1996 "has targeted civilian areas inhabited by supporters of its rivals, particularly the mainstream Front Islamique de Salut (FIS)." Many of the civilians slain in this oil- and natural gasrich land of 29 million "are partisans of various Islamist groups," Gerges points out—a fact often overlooked by the news media. "Algeria’s Islamist revolution is devouring its children."

Now headed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the military-dominated Algerian regime, which began a crackdown on the Islamic Front umbrella group in 1992, seems to have won the war, Gerges says. In 1997, the Army of Islamic Salvation (AIS), the armed wing of the FIS, declared a unilateral, unconditional peace, and began collaborating with the Algerian army in its fight against the GIA. The GIA guerrillas have been reduced in number to a few hundred, Gerges says, "and the arbitrary and irrational nature of GIA violence has alienated an outraged public."

In Egypt, the violence has been intermittent rather than protracted, but since the early 1990s, thousands have been killed or injured, and the tourist industry badly damaged. By 1995, however, President Hosni Mubarak’s government had limited the threat posed by militant Islamist groups such as al-Jama’a and Jihad, killing most of their effective leaders and confining most of the violence to gun battles between the authorities and militants in central and upper Egypt, away from Cairo and most tourist sites. In 1996, the government declared victory.

But the destruction of al-Jama’a and Jihad as organized movements, Gerges notes, "caused them to splinter into radical cells and factions," which it was difficult for the government to control. Just how difficult became clear in September and November 1997, when al-Jama’a and Jihad made terrorist attacks in central Egypt, Luxor, and Cairo itself, leaving more than 100 Western and Egyptian civilians dead. In Egypt and in the wider Muslim world, the Luxor massacre turned public opinion against alJama’a, which is now only "a shadow of its former self, with its rank and file in exile or stage in an ‘Islamic Revolution’ that began on the run." with the overthrow of the Shah’s regime in

The fall of the Egyptian or Algerian Iran in 1979." But 20 years after that event, regimes to Islamic militants, Gerges points he concludes, "the Islamist revolutionary out, would have suggested "a new, expansive movement seems to be a spent force."