COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : Our Love for Democracy Is Selective : In the face of Algeria’s anti-Islamic coup, we mumbles

Amid the general clamor of celebration of the universal triumph of Western democratic values, the Arab world has been a notable absentee--the last region, as it were, to climb aboard the train of history. But that appeared, slowly, to be changing. From Yemen to Tunisia, pressure from the streets was forcing a degree of liberal reform from one authoritarian regime after another.

The process seemed most promising in Algeria. After the trauma of 1988, when the army gunned down hundreds of peaceful teen-age demonstrators, the country embarked on a path of electoral reform. When the first round of national elections was held at the end of last month, the opposition Islamic Salvation Front won a sweeping victory; the second round was scheduled for Jan. 16.

But last Sunday, the army decided things had gone too far. A military-controlled State Security Council obliged President Chadli Bendjedid to resign, canceled the second round of elections and annulled the first. It was the clearest textbook example one could wish of a military coup derailing a free, democratic election.

One would imagine that this would cause apoplexy in the State Department. Not so. Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler expressed “concern,” but said she thought the army’s action was “constitutional.” By Tuesday, the line had changed: “We are not going to take sides.” No condemnation of the coup, no call for the elections to be reinstated.

To be sure, there is nothing very pretty about the front. It had promised an Islamic state within a year, and a two-thirds majority last Thursday would have given it the power to alter the constitution. Not that it showed much concern for such niceties; it is guided by the slogan, “No constitution and no laws. The only rule is the Koran and the law of God.”

The easy conclusion to draw from all of this is that the United States faces a unique dilemma in the Arab world, where the democratic ideal conflicts with the threat of anti-Western fundamentalism sweeping through North Africa from its forward bases in Iran and Sudan. But the Algerian conundrum is only part of the story.

In the post-Cold War world, problematic election results are going to appear at every turn. As the army was seizing power in Algiers, Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was vowing a comeback. The former dissident and political prisoner was elected president last May with more than 85% of the vote. Yet Washington has said not a word about his overthrow in an armed revolt that left Tbilisi in ruins.

Was the sacred principle of democracy at stake in Georgia? Is it at stake in Haiti?

Alvin P. Adams, the U.S. ambassador in Port-au-Prince, found himself in the odd position this week of promoting a lifelong pro-Moscow Communist, Rene Theodore, as Haiti’s interim president. Theodore regards the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as a “dictator.” (Aristide, it will be recalled, was packed off into exile by the army last September.)

The countries most eagerly encouraged to embark on a democratic transition are precisely those that lack a democratic history. It is, as a Central American friend once put it, rather like trying to put the roof on the house before the walls and foundations are built, and the results are entirely predictable.

In Haiti, a destitute and brutalized people voted en masse for a charismatic man of religion who offered them a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Georgians, suffocated by decades of totalitarian rule, turned to a nationalist hero who quickly turned out to be a neo-Fascist thug. And despairing young Algerians glimpsed the future in the Islamists’ promises of egalitarianism--which is something rather different from democracy.

The crisis in Algeria is still delicately poised. The coup-makers could still back down, as in Russia last August. If the putsch stands, on the other hand, it could enter the history books as the modern equivalent of the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran, which planted the seeds of catastrophes to come. Until Jan. 12, a strong current in the Islamic front favored the politics of consensus. But now the call for armed insurrection fills the mosques, and the fundamentalists will remember where the United States stood.

In 1963, after President John F. Kennedy had approved an army coup to prevent the election of a Social Democrat in Guatemala, the independent journalist I.F. Stone remarked, “Free elections are stopped without protest from us, if not with our connivance, where we fear the results.” In those days, the excuse was communism; now, the reasons lie elsewhere--in the fear of Islam or in the United States’ general loss of its bearings in a world without the hammer and sickle. But Izzy Stone’s words are still very much on the mark.