Editorial of Conspiracy Hate and Insecurity: The Algerian Military Magazine ‘El-Djeich’ as a Case

AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021) Andalas International Journal of Socio-Humanities ISSN: 2715-601X (Online) Available at: http://aijosh.lppm.unand.ac.id/index.php/aijosh/index DOI: https://doi.org/10.25077/aijosh.v3i2.23 Article Editorial of Conspiracy Hate and Insecurity The Algerian Military Magazine ‘El-Djeich’ as a Case Mohamed Mliless*1 & Handoko2 1 Discourse Analysis, Morocco Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Andalas, Indonesia 2 Article Information Abstract Received : October 20, 2021 This research critically analyzes 10 editorials written in French that the Algerian army magazine (El-Djeich) published from January 2021 to October 2021, a peak time for the army to reinforce its threatening discourse against Morocco (the classical enemy of Algeria). It attempts to explore how the editorials employ a conspiracy narrative to represent Morocco as a country that has been waging wars and threatening its stability. The editorials aim to construct an ‘outer enemy’ to shift the public opinion from political, social, and economic problems that the appointed political leadership fails to solve. More than that, the editorials try to reestablish the image of the army underestimated by the social protestation Hirak which claims a ‘civil and not a military state’. Since the 16th of February 2019, the Hirak has been claiming that the army should return to its barracks and take care of the security of the country's borders instead of interfering in social, political, and economic affairs. The theoretical framework of this study was based on van Dijk’s model (van Dijk, 1985, 1989, 1993, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2004, 2006) to treat the texts as a voice of the Algerian army that violently attacks Morocco, amidst high tensions between the two countries, accusing the kingdom of instrumentalizing ‘conspiracies’ and waging ‘cyber-attacks' against Algeria. Relying on critical discourse analysis (CDA), the many linguistic constructions identified in the editorials reflect that the stand of the army and the political leadership towards Morocco are unfounded and fallacious. For instance, the findings of this research identified a pattern of argumentation based on erroneous allegations that the magazine of the army attributed to Morocco. Devoid of any proofs, the editorials have portrayed Morocco as a ‘threat to the country’. As a matter of fact, the study assumes that the magazine of the army uses editorials to rally the population against an external enemy and to divert the attention of the Algerian population from real internal problems. Indeed, the challenge for the Algerian military leadership is to convince the Hirak partisans, who strongly denounce the interference of the army in Algerians life, that the national army is the only institution that can stop an external enemy (Morocco) which threatens their well-being than do internal economic, political and security challenges. Revised : December 23, 2021 Accepted : January 3, 2022 Published : January 20, 2022 Keywords agenda setting; conspiracy; discource analysis; military editorial *Correspondence INTRODUCTION The military magazine El Djeich devotes a part of its issues to attack Morocco. A very interesting analogy is made in El Ouardighi (2021) who wonders if the magazine of the French 106 AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021) armies reserves its pages to attack Germany or Italy, as nations, countries, and leaders, accusing them, for example, of having a history and psychology of traitors. This would be inconceivable, says El Ouardighi, and would be astonishing and pathetic. However, this is happening with the Algerian army magazine, El Djeich (literally: The Army) which shows unquenchable hatred towards Morocco. Apart from El Ouardighi (2021), this study could not find any scientific accounts that clarify or examine the discourse of the magazine towards Morocco though we believe that it is not different from the Algerian political, media, and academic classes (Mliless, 2020, 2021). More than that, little is known about the argumentative patterns it develops when it comes to the image it creates about Morocco despite the role that the editorials have in shaping public opinion. In fact, the very concise and superficial study by El Ouardighi (2021) revealed that across 68 pages of the July issue, Morocco was cited and insulted 34 times by the editorial. That is to say, the magazine attacks Morocco every two pages where half of the content is devoted to inveighing the country’s western neighbor. When examining editorials, researchers tend to focus on those produced by newspapers and tend to ignore the importance of editorials that army magazines write to give a particular stand about issues related to war, security, and conflicts. To fill this gap, the present study investigates the content of 10 editorials published in the Algerian army magazine (El-Djeich) from January 2021 to October 2021, a peak time for media coverage of events that marked the relationship between Morocco and Algeria. This study sharply focuses the way editorials build the image of the Algerian army as an advanced guard institution that protects the country against foreign enemies and local traitors. In this way, the army thinks that it can eradicate an ongoing political and social refutation of the role of the army that penetrates all aspects of the Algerian society. Against all democratic norms, it has been always the army that appoints presidents. It is mentioned in Serrano (2021) that the power ‘le pouvoir’, an opaque collection of army generals that includes secret services chiefs, and aged politicians, had chosen every president of Algeria since independence. After Boumédiène died in office in 1978, the army opted for another candidate, Chadli Bendjedid. In 1990, the ‘Fort Islamic du Salut’ party known briefly as FIS was about to win the local and parliamentary elections. Immediately the army canceled the election and Algeria submerged in violent armed conflicts between state forces and armed militants (Serrano, 2021). The civil war took a decade and caused the death of 150,000 to 200,000 Algerians, and thousands more were disappeared by the state. For Gèze (2005), the ‘black decade’ of the nineties was characterized by a “state terrorism in a largely unprecedented form” (p.192). Many truths about the reality of this secret "dirty war" are now known, notably through the testimony of many books, but also through the thousands of witnesses whose testimonies have brought to the front the atrocities committed by the army at that time (Souaïdia, 2001; Samraoui, 2003). In this horrifying context, Gèze (2005) gives a detailed account of the thirteen years of civil war because of which 150,000 to 200,000 died, 18,000 disappeared, turned hu (...truncated)