confidentially speaking
The Africa Confidential Blog
Je suis Charlie
Blue Lines
As shock-waves spread after the murderous attack on staff at the
Paris weekly Charlie Hebdo on
7 January, African security officials are weighing the implications for
their own countries. Given the global coverage earned by the attacks in Paris and on the Westgate Mall in Kenya in September 2013, some
Islamists see such armed assault as a means to bludgeon opponents,
divide communities and step up
recruitment. Even in remote areas of north-east Nigeria, the repeated
attacks by Boko Haram on
schools – with a far higher death toll than
the 141 children killed in December’s jihadist attack on the military
school in Peshawar, Pakistan –
has won the group the notoriety it sought.
Some, like the Emir of Kano, Sanusi
Lamido Sanusi, are bold
enough to speak out against the Islamists, while others have been
cowed. Some of Africa’s foremost intellectuals have fallen in these
battles. Libyan human rights
lawyer Salwa Bughaigis, who
campaigned against Colonel Moammar el
Gadaffi’s
brutal secularist regime and then against Islamist repression, was
murdered in Benghazi in June. At the
start of this cycle of confrontation, the left-wing Algerian
intellectual Salah Chouaki was
shot dead in September 1994 after a succession of threats from the Groupe
islamique armé. That was in the early stages of the war between Algeria’s
security state and its Islamist opponents. An unrelenting opponent of
Islamism but a doughty
defender of religious freedom for all, Chouaki wrote: ‘The best way to
defend Islam is to put it out of the reach of all political
manipulation’.
