Some thoughts on an Algerian grandfather's suicide bombing

Rabah Bechla a 63 year old grandfather rammed his explosive packed lorry into a UN's office in Algiers on 17 December 2007. Bechla was a firm supporter of the FIS [Front islamique du Salut]since it began a civil and now guerrilla warfare against the Algerian state, since the beginning. He went underground in 1995. Yet everyone is scratching his head as to why such a 'shibani', an old man, should sacrifice himself in a terrorist bombing. Even the 'New York Times' Katrin Bennhold who filed her story from Algiers. The key is found in her own article.
Algeria once a beacon of hope and change in post colonial Africa denegerated quickly into cliques, croneyism, mass corruption, and was run as though it were an East European dictatorship. With oil, it squandered its wealth for the benefit of a jaded ruling class. The cloak of socialism that they wore slipped badly. Any centre or centre left movement that challenged their power they supressed violently. Popular discontent boiled underneath, and the military and civilian mafia holding the supreme power of a one party state encouraged the rise of an Islamic party which eventually formed the FIS. The Islamist had won elections in 1992 but the army intervened and civil war broke out;carnage, brutality, murder, and the violence that Franz Fanon called for in his 'les damnes de la terre' raged. Eventually the army and the long years of exhaustion won out but they didn't still the hand of Islamic terrorism which now has allied itself with Al Queda. Yet the reasons for this terrorism is Algerian and the corruption, the poverty, the discontent remain and the state acts like Bourbon kings of yore who remembered nothing and learnt nothing, to solve deep social, economic, and political problems. For a quick primer on why Bechla saddled himself with explosives read Yasmina Khadra's 'de quoi revent les loups?' It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find the root cause of the matter, and yet for the chattering classes they discover something that was very visible but they chose not to see nor understand, and so like Columbus they discover the world anew when forced to. Bechla's death will not further a whit the Al Queda quest for power. Look at the Philippines there the Moros or Filipino Muslims have been fighting a rear guard action which goes back even to the early years of the American occuption of the islands during the Spanish American war. The problems are out there for everyone to see and to solve but force remains majeur and the la guerre d'usure goes on without end.