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Islam and democracy : the failure dialogue in Algeria
The Algerian civil conflict raged most fiercely between 1992 and
1999. It involved a large proportion of the population in a struggle for
power that only partially obeyed a political logic. Political violence
began with the arbitrary arrests and torture of pro-Islamic demon-
strators by the army and the police, and with the revenge killings of
civil servants by Islamic guerrillas. Later, these violent tactics were
used against people who were not directly involved in the struggle
for political power. At first the Islamic guerrillas waged a spectacular
campaign of assassination and bombing directed at foreign nationals
and assets in a desperate attempt to force foreign governments to
drop their support for the Algerian junta. By the mid-1990s the use
of terror had spread even to the most apolitical segments of the rural
population, as blood feuds, struggles over land ownership and
organised crime grew out of the confrontation between the pro-
government militias and Islamic guerrilla groups. In 1999, as the
main military players agreed upon a strategy to de-escalate the
conflict, it remained uncertain how far they had the capability and the willingness to reconstruct the political consensus that existed
during the most promising episodes of the democratic transition.
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