Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Algeria sends the West a message by taking in Gaddafi's brood



Neighbour thinks the Libyan revolution gathered Western support because the land is so rich in oil

By Robert Fisk
Wednesday, 31 August 2011

".....But there are darker, bloodier contacts between the two countries' security services, which have used torture, political killing and massacre to assert their will over their people; the Algerians many times passed on the fruit of their "anti-terrorist" experience to Gaddafi's mukhabarat. The Algerian tale contained more bloodbaths – 150,000 deaths, mostly civilians, scarcely measures up to the fewer tortures and murders in Gaddafi's Libya – but both governments knew that to retain power meant wielding terrible power.

Besides, Algeria does not intend to be a second Libya. The country is freer and marginally more democratic than it was in the dreadful 1990s. But it believes – not without reason – that the Libyan revolution gathered Western support because Gaddafi's land is so rich in oil.

Algeria itself possesses the eighth-largest natural gas reserves in the world and is the fourth-largest gas exporter. Beneath its deserts lie 12.5 billion barrels of oil reserves and 27 per cent of current oil exports are bought by the United States. Algerians are well aware that if Libya's national export was potatoes, the West would no more have intervened than it would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein's principal resource was asparagus.

So if anyone else challenges the rule of the pouvoir, it is not going to collapse in a "democratic" spring. Taking in Gaddafi's wife and brood was a gesture aimed more at the West than at the remains of the tyrant's élite in Libya."

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