The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002, by Hugh Roberts

Algerians have hit the headlines recently for all the wrong reasons: ricin in London and the fatal stabbing of a police officer in Manchester. For 11 years, their land has suffered one of the most brutal conflicts on earth. Army-backed vigilantes confront jihadi rebels, drunk on misguided piety. Some 120,000, mostly innocent, bystanders have been killed; many others have been raped, orphaned or wounded for life.

Now we have been jolted out of our apathy, the publication of The Battlefield seems especially timely. The Algeria expert Hugh Roberts blames the West's simplistic analysis of secularism versus fundamentalism for fostering the crisis and delaying its solution.

He lists so many villains, one might imagine a Maghrebi "Who killed Cock Robin?". There are interfering outsiders such as the Saudis, whose alien dogmas overwhelmed the rich Maliki Muslim traditions of Algeria; French politicians imposed their secularist fantasies on a former colony; European leftists championed Algeria's struggle with the Gallic empire and then lost interest; anthropologists ruinously misread the country's peculiarities; and "economic determinists" felt money could solve everything.

Nor are Algerians guiltless. Roberts puts the blame for Algeria's befuddled identity on the "unhistorical" outlook of its myriad factions, whether Berber separatists, uncompromising secularists, self-righteous Islamists or purveyors of a nebulous Arabism. The worst culprit, though, is the "military-technocratic oligarchy", intellectually prostrate before Western thinkers and "intent on dividing, disorienting and bludgeoning the population".

Much debate centres on the military's abrupt cancellation in 1992 of the electoral victory by the Islamist FIS party. One camp welcomed a rescue from "fanaticism", the other cursed the generals for flouting popular will. The reality, claims Roberts, is muddier and more interesting. FIS saw itself as the natural successor of Algeria's founding FLN, not its enemy. Far from being theocratic maniacs, FIS supported economic liberalisation. Yet President Bendjedid manipulated both parties, sinking his career and national stability.

Algeria's descent into nihilism makes little sense unless one considers the past: 130 years of myopic French rule, a million or more perishing during the independence struggle of 1954-1962, debilitating reversals of economic policy, the end of the Cold War. Roberts argues that IMF-enforced frugality won't magically create a lean, mean industrial machine. Crucially, military leaders ruled, yet they never really governed. Lacking a rule of law, Algeria, paradoxically, reduced political accountability by introducing multi-party pluralism.

Algeria may bewilder the untutored spectator. Luckily, Roberts is the perfect guide, and The Battlefield makes an ideal compendium. He has visited nearly every quarter of Algeria, so even if his writing is dense (he is a senior researcher at the London School of Economics), it evinces an unaffectedly intimate tone.

Though pessimistic, Roberts muses that the May 2002 elections suggest a way out. At last Algeria gained a proper opposition, when a moderate Islamist and a reborn socialist party refused to be corralled into government. The country's challenge is no less than reconstituting a state, without outside interference. Unfashionably, Roberts favours a return to nationalism. Algerian politics may be confusing, contradictory and often genuinely tragic, but, through this lens, it is never dull.