ABSTRACT
Cynics (realists) among both the Tuareg and others of the local populace of Algeria’s extreme south, that is the wilayat1 of Tamanrasset and Illizi, say that the region has only two industries, tourism and smuggling (banditry), and that the latter is doing the better of the two. Until March 2003, these two ‘industries’ were neither mutually exclusive nor in competition with each other. On the contrary, the redevelopment of tourism in the Algerian Sahara over the last four years, from the autumn of 1999 to the spring of 2003, following the effective closure of the Algerian Sahara in the wake of the violence that engulfed Algeria after the army’s annulment of the 1992 general election, was more or less oblivious of and inconsequential to the expansion of the trans-Saharan smuggling business over this same period. During the course of this three-four year period, the main issue for many of the Tuareg involved in the tourism business has been the struggle between the increasing number of them who fear an imminent environmental catastrophe throughout much of the Central Sahara and the various and predominantly external interests that have wanted to expand the tourism business regardless of its impact on the environment and the region’s rich cultural heritage. The former, whom I refer to as the ‘environmentalists’, are struggling to develop an alternative and more environmentally sustainable form of tourism. This struggle, which I shall describe and analyse in detail presently, is what I once described as the ‘the last significant battle of the Central Sahara’.2 If this article had been written a few months earlier, it would have described the political ascendancy of the ‘environmentalists’ in what might have been the determining moment in this struggle, namely their highly successful intervention in a governmentorganised conference in Djanet in March 2003. Four months further on (July 2003), following the kidnapping of 32 tourists in the wilayat of Tamanrasset and Illizi, both tourism and smuggling, as well as the role and effectiveness of ‘the state’ in the Central Sahara, and in the Algerian Sahara especially, are in a state of crisis. But this is a crisis that presents the Tuareg, along with other elements of the local populace, with their best and perhaps final opportunity to take control of the management of the Sahara’s tourism industry and so develop a form of environmentally sustainable tourism that will safeguard both their heritage and their future livelihoods. It also presents the Algerian state with an opportunity to reestablish itself in a far more positive, constructive and mutually respectful partnership with the local peoples of the extreme south.3
