ALGERIA:With elections coming up in May, Algeria could be slipping back to its horrific past, writes Lara Marlowe
The explosions that killed at least 24 people and wounded 222 others in Algiers yesterday prompted Algerians to ask whether the nightmare of the 1990s is about to start over again.
It was also a reminder that Islamist groups struck France in the 1990s, and more recently Madrid and London. The wave of chaos is again frighteningly close to Europe, which imports much of its gas and petrol from Algeria.
The attacks were claimed by al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, formerly the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), founded in Algeria in 1998.
Salafists are fundamentalist Sunnis who believe Muslims should live as they did at the time of the Prophet. Last September, the GSPC announced it had changed its name. It has since stepped up activity, killing some 75 people around the country in the two months preceding yesterday's attacks.
The choice of targets yesterday was highly symbolic. The Palais du Gouvernement, which was left with a gaping hole in its facade, is a massive, 1950s French-built seat of government overlooking the bay of Algiers.
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the entry to the building, killing at least 12 people and wounding over 100 others in the very heart of the capital.
The other attack was staged at Bab Ezzouar, to the east of the capital on the way to the international airport, near one of the country's main universities and next to a police commissariat.
Three car-bombs exploded, killing at least 11 and wounding over 50. Though many miles apart, the two attacks were synchronised almost to the second, a hallmark of al-Qaeda.
For the past 20 days, thousands of troops and government-backed militias have attempted to hunt down about 100 members of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb near the town of Bejaia, in the Kabylie region east of Algiers.
Nine Algerian soldiers were killed in fighting with the group at Ain Defla, south of Algiers, six days ago. The army is using helicopter gunships against the militants, as it did in the 1990s.
And the government is using the same vocabulary. Yesterday's attacks were "criminal and cowardly", the prime minister said. The interior minister last month called increased activity by al-Qaeda in the Maghreb "residual terrorism" - the words constantly used to describe the horrors of the 1990s.
In January 1992, the military-backed government cancelled Algeria's first ever free elections, because the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win them. Algeria descended into a horrific spiral of kidnapping, rape, assassinations and bombings.
Dozens of foreigners were murdered. The killers often left severed heads behind - a practice now common in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The security forces engaged in systematic torture and were suspected of involvement in massacres in which entire villages were wiped out overnight.
Some 200,000 people are believed to have died in that war. About 15,000 disappeared, never to be seen again. A million were displaced.
Yet when the Iraqi insurgency began to gather momentum in 2004, experts cited Algeria and Egypt as examples of Arab countries who had successfully defeated Islamist rebellions.
Algerians and Egyptians, including Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, joined up with bin Laden when he was still fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But it is unlikely that groups like al-Qaeda in the Maghreb communicate with bin Laden.
Rather they are believed to work in isolated cells, motivated by a shared ideology and imitating each others' attacks.
Islamist groups fought running battles with security forces in the suburbs of Tunis in December. They have staged numerous suicide attacks in Morocco in the past four years.
Only this week, four suicide bombers and a policeman were killed in Casablanca.
When it claimed responsibility for an attack on a gas company bus that killed a Russian engineer and three Algerians last month, al-Qaeda in the Maghreb described it as "a modest gift for our Muslim brothers in Chechnya" and warned Algerians to "stay away from apostates and tyrants" if they did not want to be caught in future operations.
The poverty and lack of political participation that fed the 1990s revolt have only worsened.
The National Liberation Front, which has misruled Algeria since independence in 1962, is still in power.
The possibility of emigration to Europe, which acted as a sort of pressure valve, has been all but shut off.
Algeria will hold legislative elections on May 17th. The regime has allowed "tame" Islamist parties to stand for elections, on condition they remain too small to take power.
On Tuesday, Algiers banned Sheikh Abdallah Djaballah's El Islah party from participating in the May vote, on the pretext that it has not held a party congress.
El Islah has grown to be the main opposition party. "When you prevent Djaballah from any political activity, you are sending a signal that there is no hope of changing things through peaceful political activity," the Sheikh said.