Algeria: From Barbary Pirates to World Intermediary

In 1785, in what would become the first U.S. hostage crisis, Algerian corsairs seized two American merchant ships off the Barbary Coast and held their crews for a ransom that, after years of secret negotiations, was finally paid by a humiliated President George Washington.

Nearly two centuries later, Algeria again was involved in a U.S. hostage crisis, but this time it was as the intermediary that helped negotiate the release of the 52 American hostages in Iran.

The central but almost opposite roles played by Algeria in the two incidents show how much its foreign policy has mellowed.

This has been especially true in recent years. From a radical maverick in the 1960s and 1970s, willing to support almost any leftist cause, Algeria has moved into a position much closer to its professed nonalignment, diplomats in the Algerian capital say.

Algeria is still a socialist country, with a one-party state and close ties to the Soviet Union, but it has veered sharply away from the Soviet sphere of influence as it seeks to improve its relations with fellow Arab and African countries and with the West.

Most analysts give credit for this transformation to President Chadli Bendjedid, a former army colonel who came to power in 1978 after the death of President Houari Boumedienne.

Under Bendjedid, a pragmatist whose policies have been motivated by economic necessity, Algeria has carved out a role for itself as a skillful mediator in both regional and world affairs. This, in turn, has earned it considerable respect, and in some cases financial help, from a number of grateful countries.

Algerian mediation was the key to the release of the U.S. hostages from Iran in January, 1981. And when a TWA jetliner was hijacked by Shia Muslim extremists in the summer of 1985, it was to Algeria that the United States again turned for help in trying to persuade the hijackers to surrender.

Mediation Efforts

More recently, Algeria has stepped up its efforts to mediate various inter-Arab disputes and played a pivotal role in reconciling radical and moderate factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which signed a unity agreement at a PLO conference in Algiers last month.

“The Algerians see their main role in the world today as being that of a moderator, and they’ve been extraordinarily good at it,” a Western diplomat said. “They’ve also been very smart. It’s won them a lot of points and they now have a lot of people indebted to them for their services.”

Algeria’s success as a mediator stems in part from the credibility that it enjoys among other Third World countries and national liberation groups as a result of its own long and bloody war of independence from France. More than a million people died in the eight-year-long conflict that forged Algeria’s socialist outlook.

The French ruled Algeria for more than 130 years. In 1827, so the story goes, the Arab governor of Algiers called the French consul a “wicked, faithless, idol-worshiping rascal” and slapped him across the face with a fly-swatter. This gave the French, who had been eyeing Algeria for some time, the pretext to invade three years later.

Relations with Paris are good today--France is Algeria’s largest Western trading partner--but relations with the United States have had their ups and downs.

Ties Broken in ’67

President Boumedienne broke relations with Washington at the time of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, and diplomatic ties were not formally restored until November, 1974.

Since Bendjedid came to power, relations have gradually improved. In 1985, Bendjedid became the first Algerian head of state to pay an official visit to Washington, where economic and cultural exchange agreements were signed. Although the visit did not live up to the heady expectations of some U.S. officials, it laid the groundwork for what has been a slow but steady warming of relations.

“Bendjedid’s visit didn’t produce as much as quickly as some people had expected, but then the expectations may have been unrealistic to begin with,” a Western diplomat said. “I wouldn’t characterize relations today as being all that close, but I’d say they’re correct and improving.”

Apart from fostering ties with other countries that can help it with its economic development, Algeria’s main foreign policy priority now appears to be an easing of tension with neighboring Morocco over the issue of the Western Sahara, diplomats said.

Algeria has long been a staunch supporter of the Polisario Front, which has waged from Algerian territory a 10-year-long war with Morocco for control of the former Spanish colony.

But this support, according to Western diplomats, costs Algeria an estimated $1 million a day--a substantial sum for a country whose foreign exchange earnings amount to no more than about $6 billion a year. Given Algeria’s own serious economic problems, which include declining revenues, 20% unemployment and unrestrained population growth, the Sahara war is becoming “a burden that Bendjedid would like to unshoulder if he can,” one diplomat said.

Toward this end, Algeria has not been averse to accepting a little mediation itself. With the help of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, Bendjedid met Morocco’s King Hassan II at a frontier town earlier this month to discuss the war and the easing of border tension.

Earlier efforts to settle the dispute, including a previous summit meeting, had all failed, and it is not clear that any progress was made this time. But a statement issued after the meeting said the two sides had agreed to continue talking in an effort to find a “pragmatic approach” to ending the conflict.