The French military cannot seem to stay away from Africa. Two years ago, French helicopter gunships entered the standoff in Ivory Coast and French aircraft pummelled the Libyan army.

“In other days France was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the name of a nervous disease.”

-- Jean Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.

Military intervention in foreign countries always leads to unintended consequences.

Algeria is coming under significant foreign pressure as it is pushed toward military intervention in North Mali in an attempt to eliminate religious movements seeking to turn the area into an Islamic Salafi emirate. These movements have begun imposing their version of Islamic Sharia rules against “the disobedient" and destroying all religious shrines they deem as blasphemous to the one God.

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.  Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S.

Samia Zennadi, a writer and an activist discusses the political situation in Algeria with Newsclick. While agreeing that the events in the Arab world and pro-democracy movements will have an impact on Algeria as well, she also focuses on the past suchmovements. She discusses the weakness of the secular and left forces in Algeria and contrasts it with the kind of grass-root support that Islamist forces are able to generate.