The Conflicts of the 1990s

The three wars of the 1980s ended towards the end of the decade, when the Cold War was also coming to its close. After the fall of the military regimes in Latin America at the beginning of the 1980s and that of the Soviet bloc in 1989, many observers thought the Middle East would also experience a process of democratisation.

Similarly, the failure of the Iranian model and the instability of postwar Afghanistan seemed to indicate a weakening of Islamism as a radical strategy. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, followed by a new ‘Gulf War' (2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991), and violence and wars in the peripheries of the Muslim world such as Bosnia, Chechnya and Tajikistan, however, created the conditions for a new wave of violence, which lasted throughout the 1990s. Although Islamism constituted only one of the components of these local conflicts, they were seen as parts of one single jihadist chain. The collapse of the state in Somalia and the military coups of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan (1989 and 1993) also offered to jihadi fighters new spaces of protection, where they could gain military experience, and interact with each other.

The main fields of struggle of the 1990s, however, were located in the Arab world itself: in Egypt and Algeria. In Egypt, where public opinion was radicalised in response to the Mubarak regime's unconditional cooperation with the USA in the 1991 war, the repression of the pacific Muslim Brotherhood made space for the radical Gama'a Islamiya (‘Islamic Association/Community').^{^[182]} Guerrilla warfare lasted until the massacres of tourists in Luxor in 1997 and claimed several thousand lives. In Algeria, the collapse of ‘Algerian socialism' and the brutal repression of the non-Islamist social riots of October 1988 paved the way for the ascent of the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), which was almost certain to win the elections of 1992.

The election process, which included two rounds of voting, was interrupted after the first round by what the Algerian political language describes as le Pouvoir (‘The Powers that be'). The repression which followed could only reinforce those militants who, in contrast to the leadership of the party, never believed in an electoral strategy. The young militants of the FIS created a new organisation called the GIA (Groupe Islamique Arme), whose multiple factions played a decisive role in a range of brutal attacks. The Algerian army and security forces also responded to the uprising with extreme cruelty. In less than one decade, violence claimed some 200,000 lives, and the civil war became a ‘fratricide' - one with many communities and families divided, and with violence taking an increasingly ‘intimate' form.

Violence in Egypt and in Algeria was both a continuation of the Afghan war and a breaking-point with it. Many figures such as Tayyib al-Afghani and Jaffar al-Afghani of the Islamist guerrilla leaders in Algeria had been previously involved in the Afghan jihad. Switching from the remote jihad against a foreign enemy to the jihad within dar al-islam against a Muslim ruler, they considered that the conquest of Cairo and Algiers was a prerequisite for the ‘liberation' ofJerusalem.1^{^[183]} It is however obvious that, whatever their feelings about their regimes may have been, these societies did not support military jihadism, and followed the medieval legist al-Mawardi's (Alboacen) teaching: ‘a thousand years of tyranny is better than one minute of discord'.

Islamist violence of this decade should also be analysed in relation to post- infitah economic policies.^{^[184]} Islamism was the language that gave to dislocated youth a sense that the social, political, cultural and economic world had been ‘corrupted' and proposed an alternative to it. It is obvious that during this decade the informal mechanisms of social control and traditional solidarity networks ceased to be effective,^{^[185]} ^{^[186]} and could no longer contain the radicalism of their client groups. The hijra ‘paradigm',1⁸ which allowed the exportation of Arab radicalisms to a remote jihad-front such as Afghanistan as in the 1980s, was no longer an alternative after the Soviet withdrawal, the civil war of the ‘war lords' and the ascent of the Taliban.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

The Conflicts of the 1990s

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