Algeria president plays down rebel attacks
Reuters, 15 march 2007
MADRID, March 15 (Reuters) – Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika played down recent rebel attacks targeting the country’s key energy sector, saying in remarks published on Thursday the security situation was under control.
« The phenomenon of terrorism is retreating. Security among companies in the oil sector is complete, as it is in other sectors, » he said in an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC.
Islamist rebels, stepping up a campaign of bombings, have attacked foreigners working in the oil and gas exporting nation’s lifeline energy sector twice in the last three months.
In the first attack, on Dec. 10, insurgents set off a roadside bomb on the outskirts of Algiers beside a bus carrying Western oil workers, including Americans and Britons, killing an Algerian and a Lebanese and wounding four others.
The second attack, on March 3, 130 km (80 miles) southwest of Algiers, on a bus carrying workers for a Russian gas pipeline construction firm, killed three Algerians and a Russian.
« Foreigners work in Algeria with complete normality. Evidently, we will continue to combat terrorist groups who occasionally appear in some regions with the utmost firmness, » Bouteflika added.
The attacks were claimed by the al Qaeda Organisation of the Islamic Maghreb, a group of Algerian Islamist rebels formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) who adopted the new name in January to deepen ties to al Qaeda.
The attacks on foreigners, plus a spate of other bombings in urban areas, have been a marked change from the GSPC’s habitual small-scale kidnappings, ambushes, fake roadblocks and assassinations in remote rural areas.
Maghreb states are stepping up security cooperation to try to stifle apparent attempts by the region’s Islamist groups to coordinate attacks on targets in both North Africa and Europe.
Asked about fears expressed by Western countries about rebel attacks in the Maghreb and Africa’s Sahel region, Bouteflika replied: « No region in the world can escape the terrorist threat. We have to be more vigilant than ever, without showing exaggerated alarm. »
Founded in 1998, the GSPC began as an offshoot of another armed group that was waging an armed revolt against the government to establish an Islamic state.
The GSPC shared the overall aims of that revolt, which began in 1992 after the then military-backed authorities, fearing an Iran-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election that an Islamist political party was set to win.
Up to 200,000 people were killed in the ensuing bloodshed.
