Written by Hilary Barnes
The government of Algeria’s President Boutaflika faces a constant battle with clans fighting to capture the hydrocarbon rent, which may help to explain how the terrorists managed to carry out the attack on the In Amenas gas facility, says Tunisian analyst Mehdi Taje at Paris newspaper La Tribune here (Jan 22).
Algeria is supposed to have locked down its frontier and stepped up the military presence to secure its oil and gas installations. Either the security services are incompetent, which Mehdi Taje does not believe, or there was support from some one high up in the hierarchy of power in Algeria.
He thinks that the government probably bet on a negotiated settlement in Mali, but when it became obvious that an armed intervention was inevitable, various interests (in Algeria and elsewhere) concluded that after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt and Gadaffi in Libya, the time had come to launch as assault on the final citadel Algeria.
Conscious of this internal struggle for power, the French, Americans and the British moderated their response to the Algerian army’s approach to solving the hostage situation in order not to contribute to the forces destabilising Boutaflika. Japan, less well informed, did not. Nevertheless, the terrorist attack and the decision to allow French military aircraft to overfly Algeria has weakened Boutaflika’s position, said the analyst.
Mehdi Taje points out that in Mali and the rest of west and central Africa, France the other Europeans powers and the USA all have a joint interest in securing the energy resources of the Sahel, as well as uranium, iron, phosphates and rare earths, against the competition from China, Russia and also such countries as India and Brazil. China has in the course of only a year and a half enabled Niger to become an oil producer and is negotiating with the government of Niger over uranium, which weakens the position of the French state-owned energy group Areva with uranium mining interests there. And, he notes, there is as much uranium in northern Mali as there is in Niger.
For France the trick is to secure these resources without rousing a reaction against supposed neo-colonialism. This means Africanising as much as Europeanising the security situation in order to hold the Chinese in check. Unfortunately this delicate operation was thrown off balance by the jihadist advance towards Mali’s capital Bamako.
