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The hostage-taking affair at the Ain Amenas natural gas plant showed the Algerian Government as less than a cooperative player in security matters, while breathing new life into the salafist movement.
THE JIHADIST ASSAULT IN ALGERIA IN JANUARY 2013 highlighted the extent to which the Algiers Government, operating with its own set of rules quite apart from the international community, moved to the center of the debate as to whether or not al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its allies could be eliminated from their control of neighboring northern Mali, and if so, where those jihadis might move next.
What had become clear was that the Algerian Government's obsessive secrecy and authoritarianism had become the main obstacle in dealing with the issue. Much of the problem for the international community is not that the Government was supportive of the salaflst/jihadist terrorists, but that it is entrenched in an historical approach which has an imperative toward national expansionism1, and an accompanying paranoia, particularly with regard to its nuclear weapons program2.
The Algerian Government was uncompromising in its response to the January 2013 crisis at Ain Amenas natural gas plant, and equally emphatic in its refusal to brook intervention or cooperation with the several foreign governments - including the UK, Norway, and the US - which felt that they had a strong interest in the handling of the incident. When it was reported on Sunday, January 20, 2013, that 81 people had died in a four-day assault, prisoner-taking, and Government counter-attack at Ain Amenas in the eastern border area of Algeria, it was clear that the...