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Founded in 2007 in London by five Algerian activists opposed to the current government, Rachad is an Algerian political movement that desires to radically change the post-colonial political regime of Algeria.
According to the group’s founders, its goal is to establish democracy, the rule of law, and good governance through peaceful means and the inclusion of all components of the Algerian population in the country’s political process.
The name of the movement is Arabic for “the well guided.” In Islam, it is inspired by the divine name of God, Ar-Rachid, which signifies that it is God who guides us to the right path. In Algeria’s current political context, the name is meant to refer to good governance.
But the Algerian politico-military establishment has dismissed the group’s pro-democracy activism by accusing it of terrorism.
These accusations mainly stem from the alleged support and links to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an old Algerian Islamist political party whose main goal was to establish an Islamic state in Algeria.
The party was banned in 1992 for being a main actor of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Because some founders of the Rachad movement are former FIS activists, the Algerian government has delegitimized their recent pro-democracy activism by equating it to the FIS’ anti-establishment dream of creating an Algerian Islamic republic.
Some observers have understandably criticized the movement for not being more critical of the involvement of FIS in the Algerian civil war.
Nevertheless, Rachad denies adhering to the approach of FIS which contradicts their peaceful design.
Resilience in diversity
Learning from the lessons of the 1990s war, the Algerian security services resurrected the divide and rule tactic by identifying fault lines in the ideologies of Algerian society.
It has employed a considerable propaganda apparatus to hamper the Rachad movement and other anti-establishment groups by labelling them as foreign-funded “terrorist groups” who want to destabilize Algeria.
However, the diversity within the movement’s founders, who include Islamists, progressive leftists, and liberals has made it difficult for the government to effectively weaken the movement through diabolization.
Moreover, with the Algerian regime’s well-documented reputation for silencing opposition forces through co-optation or repression, most opposition voices abroad have been actively resisting the regime’s campaign by highlighting its history of containing dissent through labelling and unjustified invocations of national security.
While Rachad have made headlines in recent weeks amid escalating tensions between Algeria and Morocco, the group has long been on the radars of the Algerian government.
For example, right after the movement was launched in 2007, the government shut down its website in Algeria and launched a vigorous propaganda campaign against its leadership.
The campaign, accompanied by continuous charges of treason and “conspiracy against Algeria” against Rachad leaders, was meant to lead to the death knell of the movement.
One other reason that contributed to strengthening the movement despite the government’s demonization campaign is the qualifications of its leaders. Many of them are mainly scientists and academics who made use of their extensive academic network to document the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Algerian regime since the 1990s.
They have published several academic books and studies on the 1990s conflict, which have become scholarly references in North Africa and conflict resolution studies departments at many universities.
For instance, Abbas Aroua, one of the founders of the Hoggar Institute, a research institution that publishes works related to Algerian politics and history and the human rights abuses by the government during the civil war, is a co-author of An Inquiry into the Algerian Massacres, which is a required reading for political science students at Exeter, SOAS, and LSE, and several other universities in the UK.
Rachad and the Algerian Hirak
After dictating the bulk of Algerian political life throughout 2019 and culminating in the ousting of the recently deceased Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the Algerian Hirak was weakened during the current pandemic. Not only did the COVI as the protests diminished due to sanitary restrictions.
Ammar Belhimer, Algeria’s Communication Minister and government spokesperson, has said for example that Hirak reached its goals with Bouteflika’s forced resignation.
For him, the groups that continue to protest against Algeria’s post-Bouteflika authorities are foreign-funded have another agenda: destabilizing Algeria and undermining its ongoing and promising democratization under the guise of demanding democratic reforms.
“The Hirak ended its mission with the presidential elections. What happened afterwards is what I call the neo-Hirak. An outgrowth of the original Hirak that is completely taken over by the terrorist movements, and this neo-Hirak is doomed to disappear as such,” he said.
The Hirak has also known rising polarization as the ideological debate between conservative and progressive activists within the movement grew tenser. Journalists and experts compared this debate to the divisions that marked the Algerian civil war.
For example, with self-described progressive Hirak activists accusing right-leaning Rachad of supporting dictatorship and the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Algeria.
Saïd Sadi, the former president of the Algerian party Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), has criticized “the fundamentalist movement, represented by Rachad” for equating “universal principles with ‘Western depravity.’” According to Sadi, like other Islamists, Rachad’s “This camp won’t hesitate to crush all hopes of democratic change in Algeria.”
In response, a Rachad spokesperson has called out the former president of RCD for being a mouthpiece and “pawn” of the Algerian political establishment. As far as Rachad is concerned, the demonization campaign is based on unfounded allegations and aims at
The Morocco factor
Having relatively failed to totally weaken Rachad’s anti-establishment activism and popular appeal with largely unproven accusations of terrorism or the wornout allegation of “conspirracy against Algeria,” the Algerian government upped its finger-pointing game this year when a wave of devastating wildfires hit the country’s Kabylie region in early August.
With mounting popular indignation after the colossal human and material losses many parts of the Kabylie region in northern Algeria endured as a result of the forest fires, Algerian authorities were quick to appease anti-government discontent by identifying the perpetrators of the lethal fires.
Not surprisingly, the government pointed to Rachad and MAK – two movements it has long wanted to make irrelevant or repress – as the main culprits. It helped, too, as far as the Algerian regime was concerned, that the forest fires coincided with escalating tensions with Morocco.
And so, despite ample evidence to the contrary, the Algerian regime has claimed that Morocco, the regime’s go-to scapegoat, was the main foreing sponsor of Rachad’s and MAK’s plot to sabotage Algeria democracy.
In justifying Algeria’s decisiont cut diplomatic ties with Morocco, the country’s High Council of Security (HCS) accused MAK and Rachad o being “terrorist gornizations” who have received “support and help from foreign parties, especially from Morocco and the Zionist entity.”
But given the Algerian regime’s long history of manufacturing or unilaterally escalating hostilities with Morocco to galvanize nationalisitc sentiments or discourage intense scrutiny of political failures at home, the mobilization of the “Moroccan collusion” card has not been as convincing as the Algerian government had hoped.
For its part, the Rachad leadership has seized on the tenuous claims of Moroccan-Israeli conspiracy against Algeria to dismiss all the “politically motivated and unproven allegations” it has faced in recent weeks.
