Nation Topics - Algiers | The Nation

The article contains news and commentary briefs. Recently the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 "The Battle of Algiers" for a group of forty officers and civilian experts, on the theory that the film's highly praised quasi-documentary realism would help them understand urban guerrilla warfare in Iraq. A better analogy to the situation in today's Iraq is Israel's predicament in southern Lebanon in 1982. But even if the The Battle of Algiers analogy isn't perfect, it's still worth contemplating. Senator Edward Kennedy charged that a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office showed only about $2.5 billion of the $4 billion now being spent monthly on the Iraq occupation could be accounted for. For daring to criticize the President, Kennedy came under fire from a well-drilled squad of GOP senators, but his office has already released figures showing how foreign aid is being used to attract support for the occupation, including troop contributions present and future, by countries like Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Pakistan. Senator Kennedy's interview, cited above--in which he also called the war in Iraq a" fraud" cooked up in Texas for political advantage--outraged House majority leader Tom DeLay. As he puts it, "It's disturbing that Democrats have spewed more hateful rhetoric at President Bush than they ever did at Saddam Hussein." A group of twenty-seven active reserve pilots and former pilots in the Israeli Air Force have signed an open letter declaring that they will no longer take part in the assassination campaign in the occupied territories. The move, taken by a group regarded as the elite of the military, should give new encouragement to a refusenik movement that has fallen out of the headlines in recent months.

Fundamentalism is spreading westward, now it has invaded the Maghreb. Results of Algeria's June 12, 1990 local elections, in which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won more than half of the country's town halls, including Algiers, Oran and all the other big cities, were stunning but not really surprising. The National Liberation Front, which has run the country for the twenty eight years since independence, is falling apart like regimes of Eastern Europe. The FIS has no economic solutions to offer beyond liberalism.

The article focuses on the nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council session, also held in Algeria had just had its own brutally suppressed intifada, so the presence of several hundred Palestinians and at least 1,200 members of the press was not especially welcomed by the Benjedid government, which paradoxically needed the event to restore some of its tarnished revolutionary luster. None of the approximately 380 members came to Algiers with any illusion that Palestinians could again get away simply with creative ambiguity or solid affirmations of the need to struggle.

The article focuses on political and social issues of the world. It states that from Algeria came reports of the Palestine National Council's rousing declarations. A peace panic is gripping many supporters of Israel in the U.S. Aghast on the morrow of news from Algiers, they cried "nothing new" had happened. But there is something new and they know it. The intifada has changed forever the political perspectives of Palestinians in occupied territories and across the world. It also states that day-by-day the press shows evidence of willful or reflexive ignorance and racism in its coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. No better testimony to this fact can be found than writings of journalist Thomas Friedman.

Focuses on the prevalent political conditions in the U.S. in 1973, during the reign of U.S. President Richard Nixon. Questions on President Nixon's finances; Information on the Senate Watergate Committee affairs; Reference to the summit conference of nonaligned nations held in Algiers, Algeria.