Algeria should serve as lesson for Turkey

The journalist Victoria Brittain detects echos of Algeria's history in Turkey's current crisis with the army threatening to intervene against the mildly Islamist government run by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party. She warns that "the use of military action to curtail the growth of political Islam has only brought catastrophe. ... Fifteen years ago a struggle for power between new forces of political Islam and a military establishment took place in Algeria, paralleling to an alarming degree what is happening in Turkey. This struggle ended in a military coup that plunged Algeria into a cycle of violence ... How could such a catastrophe have overtaken a country and political leaders whose prestige reached across the third world in the 1960s and 70s ? Algeria is a warning to Turkey that even the towering legacy of Ataturk cannot protect it for ever."

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