Publics, Politics and Participation

Hadj-Moussa 273

not supposed to see that France has captured certain people

[terrorists and their supporters]. They want us blind and deaf,

they want us to seal our borders.... But they have [video]

cassettes.

nother participant explained to me that “the current system put in A
place by the governing powers is so absurd, so immoral, so boring” that it
did not represent a serious contender for the Islamists. Once the govern-
ing powers, lacking any credibility, are eliminated, there remain two types
of social directions, says Omar, a young economist:

Either the direction of the Islamists—and they were spread-

ing propaganda in the mosques, in the neighborhoods, where

they organized everything—or it is the direction of Western

culture which comes to Algerians via satellite dishes. Thus, if

you wish, in parentheses, the number one enemy to defeat is

the satellite dish. Which amounts to cutting off entire sections

of Algerian society [from Western influence]. It is above all

youth [who are targeted by this strategy]. They are not inter-

ested by my mother nor me for that matter. It is mainly the

age group of 18-to-25-year-olds who are hesitating between

embracing the culture of the Islamists or that served up by

television on a daily basis. It is truly a war and the stakes are

very important to the Islamists. They needed to cut that line.

Obviously they need to demonize the dish.

From the moment that it was authorized, satellite television became
the technological medium at the center of the struggles between the
state and the Islamists, with the viewers in the middle. However, the vast
majority of Algerian viewers understood it as a means to escape both la
langue de bois^25 of the regime and the authoritarianism of the Islamists.
Satellite television permitted Algerians to negotiate their modernity. This
fait accompli—the de facto access to international television programs—
and the even greater capacity for Algerians to distance themselves from
the dominant discourses, leads not only to the possibility of redefining the
public sphere, but also to the interrogation of the notion of the political
f/act.