CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This thief who slinks along walls in the night to go home, he’s the one. This father who warns his children not to talk about the wicked job he does, he’s the one.
This evil citizen who hangs about in courtrooms, waiting for judgement, he’s the one. This individual caught in a neighbourhood raid, whom a rifle butt pushes to the back of the truck, he’s the one. He’s the one who goes out of his house in the morning unsure whether he’ll make it to the office. And he’s the one who leaves work in the evening, uncertain he’ll arrive home.
. . . This man who makes a wish not to die with his throat cut, he’s the one. This body on which they sew back a severed head, he’s the one. He’s the one whose hands know no other skill, only his meagre writing . . .
He is all of these, and a journalist only.
—Saïd Mekbel, “The Rusty Nail,” Le Matin, 1994
ROGER TARTOUCHE GRINS at visitors from beneath his steel French army helmet, head turned slightly to the left, his battledress buttoned up to the neck. “Died for France, December 4th, 1960,” it says above his grave. The photograph printed onto the marble headstone shows such a confident young man, aware at the moment of his death, no doubt, that in just five days Charles de Gaulle would arrive in Algiers to assure the future of Algérie française. “Me today, you tomorrow” is inscribed over the iron gates of the old French cemetery at St. Eugène. Algerians outside the graveyard wall would do well to visit this monument to pride and tragedy. So might other Arabs—and the Jews of Israel.
They are all here, the Spahis and Zouaves, the forgotten cavalry of la grande armée, the schoolteachers and engineers who believed Algeria was for ever French, professors and civil servants along with their matronly wives from Metz, Lille and Rouen, their portraits—in some they smile, in others they think of mortality—pathetic in the most literal sense of the word; dead rulers in their Sunday best. Still untouched by vandals who might soon have good cause to desecrate his eternal resting place, Colonel d’État-Major Alexandre Edouard Constant Fourchauld (born Orléans, 19 August 1817) lies beneath a heavy marble stone commemorating his subjugation of the Muslims who dared to oppose French rule. His bronze bust depicts a frightening, high-cheekboned man with a bushy moustache,
a military képi pushed rakishly to the side of his head, his campaigns listed beneath: “Grand Kabyle 1854, Djudjura 1857, Marocco 1859, Alma Palestro 1871, El Amra 1876 . . . ” Hero of Sevastopol and the Franco-Prussian War, he died in his country, France, in a city called Algiers.
From this same city, Fourchauld’s fellow countrymen went to die on other French soil. René and Edgar Guidicelli were both cut down on the Western Front, René while charging German trenches on the Marne on 25 September 1915, Edgar by shellfire on the same battlefield almost exactly three years later. Both men stare shyly from their photographs, both in dress uniform, “for ever remembered by their mother and father.” The French embassy pays for a gardien at St. Eugène, just as it does for the neighbouring non-Christian cemetery, for the graves not of Muslims but of thousands of French citizens of the Jewish faith who also believed that Algeria belonged to France, their memorials—in Hebrew as well as French—still undamaged and protected in this Arab, Muslim, capital.
How many catastrophes lie in this little plot of land? William Lévy “died for France, June 16th, 1940, at Arpajon (Seine-et-Oise) at the age of 30,” presumably facing Hitler’s last assault on the wreckage of the French army. He has humorous eyes in his photograph, the confident expression of a man who thought he would live into old age. A tiny synagogue “dedicated by the Israelite community of Algiers to their children who died on the field of honour” contains dozens of photographs of desperately young men in French uniform, most of them killed before they knew how disgracefully their country would treat their fellow Jews.
Down a narrow path, history comes closer to the visitor. “Here lies Jules Roger Lévy, victim of terrorism, June 3rd, 1957, aged 34” . . . “here lies Albert Sarfati, victim of terrorism, February 20th, 1962, at the age of 42 . . . ” Most poignant of all, “here lies Josette Smaja, aged 24, near her fiancé Paul Perez, knifed to death [assassiné par arme blanche], June 9th, 1957.” Citizens of la France d’Outre-Mer, they counted themselves among the pieds noirs.116 It is a cold, blustery January in 1992. Their graves are a terrible warning for the Algeria whose authorities and army officers are as adamant now in opposing an Islamic republic as were the French in opposing a liberated Algeria.
The gaunt nineteenth-century Eglise de Notre Dame de la Mer stands on a hill above the cemeteries, its bronze statue of Christ—Christus Resurgens—torn down and smashed before Christmas 1991. On the mosaic above the altar is written a revealing, quasi-colonial prayer. “Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and the Muslims.” A French priest from Montpellier ministers to the three hundred or so ancient Catholic pieds noirs who never left. At the tiny chapel of Ste. Thérèse in the Bab el-Oued district of Algiers, fifteen of them gather each Saturday, receiving communion, assuring each other that they will never leave.
A woman of sixty-nine from Saumur—“because I live here, you must not know my name”—accepts history with fatalism. She is small, with a round face and fluffy, curly white hair. “De Gaulle was not a bad man,” she says. “He first of all said he ‘understood’ us and I think he meant that Algeria would stay French. But when he toured the area and saw the situation with his own eyes, he realised France could not stay here. He did not betray us. He just changed his mind. My husband and I stayed because it was our home. He died three years after independence but Algiers was still my home, its harbour and sea and hills which I love. My daughter Josette married an Algerian and converted to Islam. Now she has a Muslim name, Zaiya. Yes, I am happy in my old age. I have many friends, even in the Islamic Salvation Front I have friends.” She smiles warmly, without the anxiety or fear which I now catch on Algerian faces. Then she says, very gently: “To each person, their destiny.” This is a woman who is living on the cusp of a fearful tragedy. An orgy of throat-cutting and terror, a civil war that will cull 150,000 lives, is waiting for her and every foreigner in Algeria and then every journalist, every government official, every Islamist, every policeman, every shopkeeper, every husband, wife and child.
The lady from Saumur lived through the last years of France’s colonial dream-turned-nightmare, though the dream lasted well over a hundred years. It lives on, even now, in the antiquarian bookshops of Paris. Here you can buy postcards of nineteenth-century Algeria in which French bungalows nestle behind beech trees on streets filled with French girls in long dresses and young Frenchmen in straw hats. A coloured card shows an épicerie in the town of Souk-Ahras where French citizens stroll in the rue Victor Hugo. There are dull and overbearing French churches in tiny towns and square stone fountains and pretty French trains gliding into ornate French railway stations. In many of the cards, the little French towns of Algeria appear empty, their chapels and mairies and offices part of a stage-set in which the actors have yet to appear. When Algerians are in the photograph, they usually stand or sit to the side of the camera lens, long-bearded or wearing headscarves, a romantic part of the scenery, like the palm trees and the usually distant mosques. A magnificent photograph taken in Oran in 1910 shows more than a hundred French men, women and children sitting and standing on the terrasse of the “Grand Café Continental”; only one figure—apparently a tea-boy on the far left of the picture—might be Algerian. In that year, Algeria’s population included 400,000 French, 200,000 other foreigners (most of them Spanish, Maltese and Italians) and 4,500,000 Algerian Muslims. On each postcard, there is a fivecentime French stamp bearing the image of Marianne, that governessy old mother of the French nation.
In Paris today, you can buy a glossy monthly magazine produced for the pieds noirs and their families—originally founded with the support of the putschist French general Edmond Jouhaud and that eloquent proponent of Algérie française, Jacques Soustelle—whose pages are filled with photographs of the neat, orderly cities the French built across the tenth-largest country in the world which they believed to be part of France. The magazine is dedicated to the “pieds noirs of yesterday and today” and to “the Harkis and their friends.”117 Flicking through page after melancholy page, it is not difficult to grasp the schizophrenic nature of French Algeria. In Sidi Bel Abbès, for example, the quarters of the city included Alexandre Dumas, Bonnier, Les Trembles, Deligny and Boulet—but also Oued Imbert, Oued Sefioun, Tessalah and Sidi Yacoub. In Biskra, a vast statue of Monseigneur Charles Lavigerie stood in the city centre in honour of the bishop of Algiers who tried to evangelise Algeria and founded the order of the Pères Blancs. For although France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830 was intended to distract attention from the domestic problems of the Bourbons and avenge a slight to the French consul—the reigning Dey of Algiers struck him in the face with a fly-whisk and called him “a wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal”—it quickly became a Christian crusade.
The pieds noirs would later come to believe that their mission in Algeria was to “civilise” an otherwise barbarous land; hence the constant emphasis on administration, justice, education and modern technology. But contemporary evidence and the literature published in the early years of the French conquest tell a different story. For when the Comte de Bourmont, the lieutenant general commanding the French expeditionary force to Algeria, arrived off the North African coast with forty-two destroyers, frigates and corvettes and sixty other vessels in May 1830, he issued a proclamation of almost wearying familiarity:
Soldiers, civilised nations of both [new and old] worlds are watching you; their thoughts are with you; the cause of France is the cause of humanity; show that you are worthy of this noble mission. Let no excess tarnish the banner of your exploits; merciless in combat, you must be compassionate and magnanimous after victory; this is in your interest as much as it is your duty. So long oppressed by a rapacious and brutal soldiery, the Arab will see you as liberators; he will beg to be our ally . . .
Eighty-seven years before General Maude’s proclamation to the people of Baghdad, insisting that the British army had invaded Iraq as liberators rather than conquerors, and 173 years before President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair invaded the same country with the same excuses—and the firm belief that they would be welcomed by the local Arab population—the French poured ashore in the gentle, sheltered bay of Sidi Fredj with identical illusions to commence the long and sombre history of colonial Algeria. The French army would spend the next fifty years suppressing an insurgency; fifteen of them would be spent fighting the brilliant, tough young Algerian resistance leader Abdelkader. Both sides committed atrocities and even French society was shocked to learn that its troops had asphyxiated 500 Algerian men, women and children by lighting a fire at the mouth of the cave in which they had taken refuge—a horrible prelude to the same fate which was visited by the Turks upon thousands of Armenians during the 1915 genocide. Between 1831 and 1839, the French lost 1,412 soldiers in battle in Algeria; a nightmare portrait of the land came from a French diplomat in 1841:
The country is without commerce; the circulation of the caravans is suspended . . . the plough is forsaking the fields . . . the Arabs, bent on deeds of blood and decapitation, approach even the gates of Algiers.
Was it through self-delusion or false optimism that Léon Galibert, writing a history of Algeria only three years later, could describe with admiration the missionary works of the French Catholic Church—“because they strongly emphasise the consolidation of our authority in Algeria”—and its desire to conquer Islam:
On December 24th 1832, one of the most beautiful mosques of Algiers, situated in Divan Street, was consecrated to the Catholic faith. Religious services began with the heavenly solemnity of a midnight mass . . . Here a new era starts for the Church of Africa. Not only have the ceremonial pomp and magnificence of the Catholic church made the natives realise that their conqueror believes in God and has a religion; the church’s growing benevolent activities, from which they benefit, has made them understand that this religion is eminently merciful and the friend of man . . . Cardinal Pacca, in his journal dedicated to the Catholic world, makes a point of giving due praise to the efforts that France has made to spread Christianity throughout its possessions. “I saw on the coasts of Africa . . . the spirited French nation restoring the banner of the crucifix, reinstating the altars, converting infidel mosques in temples consecrated to the Almighty, and building new churches. Moreover, I saw on the coasts of Africa a holy priest followed by zealous followers, not only being welcomed by acclamations and shouts of glory on the part of the Catholics, but also respected and venerated by the infidels, Arabs and Bedouins . . . In Constantine, where we can already find 5,000 Catholics . . . a beautiful mosque was transformed into a Church, and renamed Our Lady of Sorrows . . . thanks to the French intervention, Christianity is reconquering in this part of Africa the power that it had acquired in the early age of the Church.”
The Church regarded this proselytism as a re-establishment of Christianity in a country where St. Vincent de Paul’s Catholic mission had first been established in 1646. Less Christian sentiments, however, applied to the territory which the French intended to settle. Typical was Saïd Bugeaud’s statement before the National Assembly in 1840: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate the colons , without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.” France’s own progress as a democracy shaped and reshaped its policies in Algeria, its imperial status constantly challenged by its own liberalism. If Algerians did not have a vote in the parliament of the mother country, however, they were expected to bear an equal sacrifice in the face of France’s enemies; it was not only the pieds noirs who went to fight and die on the Western Front in the First World War. In the vast war cemeteries of northern France, Algerian tombstones bearing the half-moon of Islam can be found in their thousands, usually separated from the French dead but within the same cemetery enclosure. Their fate provoked widespread unrest in Algeria, although this went largely unreported at the time. Indeed, one has to search through French monographs of the postwar period to find any serious examination of this insurgency. “Despite the [1914] victory of the Marne, worries and prejudices magnified into terrible stories of the battle of Charleroi,” one author wrote on the centenary of the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.
In particular, it was said that we had sacrificed our Muslim troops; that we did not have any more soldiers in Algeria; that our capacity for troop reinforcements had vanished and that the conscripts would be sent under fire as soon as they were drafted. Incidents of resistance mushroomed in three areas, and at the beginning of October, in the mixed commune of Mascara, there occurred the rebellion of the Beni Chougrane [tribe] which occurred some days after demonstrations by the people of Sidi Daho . . . emphasising the region’s hostility to recruitment.
Algerians, it seemed, were worthy of dying for France, but not of participating in its democracy, a view expressed without much subtlety by one of France’s most experienced governor generals in 1926:
There’s no doubt that to give everyone the right to vote—for which few actually care—would not in itself resolve the native problem. It’s perfectly commendable for those who are already 20th-century men to claim this right, but we have to be aware that the rest, who choose to maintain respectable traditions, barely achieve the level of maturity [réalisent à peine] of the 13th century . . .
Cruelty and oppression marked the last years of French rule. Around the walls of the “Museum of the Martyrs” in Algiers today, beneath the massive concrete wings of the memorial to well over a million Algerians killed in the 1954–62 war of independence against the French, the visitor can see all he wants of this terrible struggle. The museum curator plays Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Brahms’s Violin Concerto in C over the audio system as if it is necessary to soften the evidence of barbarity. There are French military documents demanding the arrest of guerrilla leaders. There are shackles, whips and guns. Forty-three-year-old posters, printed in secret by the National Liberation Front—the FLN— inform the resistance movement that it is “the beacon of African socialism.” There are monochrome photographs of Algerian “martyrs” and tortured men, their faces shattered or running with blood at the hands of General Jacques Massu’s 10th Parachute Division. And there is a showcase filled with the paraphernalia of the French military police, of bullets and cartridges and a small metal object in the shape of a pineapple, labelled: “U.S. Mark 2 Defensive Fragmentation Grenade.”
Most historians agree that the massacre at Sétif in 1945—when European settlers and French gendarmerie and troops slaughtered around 6,000 Muslims in revenge for the Muslim murder of 103 Europeans—helped to provoke the original struggle for independence. They also agree that France’s subsequent attempts to introduce reforms came too late; not least because “democratic” elections were so flagrantly rigged by the French authorities that Muslims could never achieve equality with French Algerians. Once the FLN declared war in 1954, “moderate” Muslim Algerians were silenced by their nationalist opponents, including a largely forgotten Islamic independence movement, the “Association of Ulemas,” which saw the struggle as religious rather than political. The first FLN attacks were puny. A French gendarme would be murdered in the outback, the bled—from balad, the Arabic for a village—or in the mountains of Kabylie. The FLN began a campaign of cutting down telegraph poles and setting off small bombs in post, airline and government offices. As the war intensified, up to 500,000 French troops were fighting in the cities and mountains, especially in Lakhdaria, east of Algiers, using air strikes and employing helicopters to hunt down guerrilla bands. Sometimes the guerrillas were successful—the wreckage of a French helicopter shot down in the bled is today on display in the “Museum of the Martyrs.”
Some Algerians claim that in fact a million and a half Algerians may have been killed in the eight-year war that ended in 1962, albeit that 500,000 of these may have been slaughtered by their own comrades in internecine fighting. The conflict was one of betrayal of Muslim Algerians by each other, of French Algerians by their own government, specifically—in the minds of so many pieds noirs—by de Gaulle. The guerrillas murdered, raped and mutilated captured French soldiers and civilians. The French army murdered prisoners and massacred the population of entire villages. They, too, raped.
The war of independence became the foundation of modern Algerian politics, a source of violent reference for both its supposedly socialist and corrupt pouvoir and those opposed to the government. The war was dirty but could always be called upon as a purifying factor in Algerian life. The revolutionary government of Algiers commissioned Gillo Pontecorvo to make a film of the initial 1954–57 uprising and The Battle of Algiers remains one of the classic movies of guerrilla struggle and sacrifice. There is a dramatic moment when Colonel Mathieu, a thin disguise for the real-life General Massu, leads the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi into a press conference at which a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?” the reporter asks. Ben M’Hidi replies: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims . . . Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.” Mathieu is publicly unrepentant at using torture during interrogation. “Should we remain in Algeria?” he asks. “If you answer yes, then you must accept all the necessary consequences.” The film contains many lessons for the American and British occupiers of Iraq; nor was it surprising when in early 2004 the Pentagon organised a screening for military and civilian experts in Washington who were invited by a flier that read: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.”
If the war was a constantly revived theme for Algerians, however, it was for almost three decades wiped from the French collective memory. For years, The Battle of Algiers was banned in France, and when it was eventually shown, cinemas were fire-bombed. It took thirty years before a French film director interviewed the forgotten conscripts of the conflict in which 27,000 French soldiers died. Bertrand Tavernier’s La Guerre sans nom showed the veterans breaking down in tears as they expressed their sorrow at killing Algerians. In the same year, 1992, the Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine held its first exhibition on the war and published a 320-page guide that did not attempt to hide the war’s brutality. In 2000, President Jacques Chirac rejected calls for a formal apology for the use of torture by French soldiers during the war. When long-retired General Paul Aussaresses, who was coordinator of French intelligence in Algiers in 1957, published his memoirs in 2001 and boasted of the Algerians he had personally executed, Amnesty International demanded an investigation by the French government. Aussaresses claimed that François Mitterrand, who was Socialist minister of the interior at the time, was fully aware of the tortures and executions being carried out by French forces in Algeria. But the contemporary Algerian government maintained what an Algerian journalist called “a cowardly silence” over Aussaresses’s revelations, not least because its own security services had long practised the same tortures on their own people which Aussaresses and his henchmen had visited upon Algerians. Even in Paris, Algerians died by the hundreds when they protested in October 1961 against a night curfew imposed on them by the police. French cops ferociously assaulted the demonstrators and as many as 300 may have been murdered, their corpses washed up next day in the Seine. To this day, the authorities have not opened all their archives on this massacre, even though the prefect of police responsible for the repression was Maurice Papon, who was convicted in April 1998 for crimes against humanity during the German occupation.
Just as the original French claim to have invaded Algeria to “liberate” its people has a painfully contemporary ring, so too do the appeals for support advanced by the French government to the U.S. administration during the Algerian war of independence. France, the Americans were told, was fighting to defend the West against jihad, against “Middle Eastern Islamic fanaticism.” This, the French claimed, was a clash of civilisations. They were wrong, of course— the French were fighting a nationalist insurgency in Algeria, just as the Americans found themselves fighting a national insurgency in Iraq—but the Islamic content of the 1954–62 independence struggle has long been ignored, not least by the Algerian government that found itself fighting an Islamist enemy in the 1990s.
MOHAMED BOUYALI HELD OUT to me the snapshot of his dead brother. “It was taken when Mustafa was already on the run. The government never got a picture of him wearing his beard. This is a historic photograph.” Algeria was already collapsing into a terrifying new war as we spoke in July 1992, a conflict so fearful that the picture he handed me was never given back to him. When I returned to Algeria, Mohamed Bouyali’s home was in an area controlled by the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA—Islamic Armed Group) and even my Algerian driver refused to visit the house. So Mustafa Bouyali’s snapshot lies on my desk as I write these words. It is a grainy but powerful print, because he has a big face and a thick beard and his eyes are boring hard and suspiciously into the camera, the eyes of a wanted man. In 1992, his brother and I were sitting in his high, bright airy home in the Algerian village of Ashour from which Mustafa Bouyali had fled just over ten years earlier, never to return.
The picture is slightly out of focus, the paper on which it is printed creased and grubby. It must have been shown many times to trusted family friends, the image of an honoured “martyr” since that rain-drenched night of 3 January 1987 when the Algerian army ambushed Bouyali on the Larba road and a soldier shot him in the head. It is a poor snapshot, unframed, though it would be difficult to overestimate the effect this man has had on Algeria’s modern history.
His story has rarely been told in the West, let alone publicly discussed in Algeria. Yet he was the man who provided the inspiration for the armed groups that would assault Algeria’s government in the 1990s. He was the catalyst behind the Islamic guerrilla movement that was then assassinating police officers across Algeria, 120 in the previous six months alone. Here in the village of Ashour, in the breezy house with its hot, synthetic velvet sofa and vinyl-covered table and peach trees outside the back door, was the missing historical link between Algeria’s savage war of independence and the increasingly merciless civil war of the 1990s, a reference point for Algeria’s betrayal and the continuity of its tragedy. Because Bouyali was both a loyal guerrilla fighter for the FLN against France and an Islamic guerrilla fighter against the FLN government that replaced French rule, his activities call into question the meaning of Algerian history. How could a man imprisoned by the French, a maquisard in the FLN’s National Liberation Army, have chosen to lead another, Islamic maquis against his former comrades?
Mustafa Bouyali was born in Ashour on 27 January 1940, and joined the FLN at the age of sixteen, collecting funds for the nationalist guerrilla movement in his own village, part of the 6th zone of the FLN’s Wilaya 4 district. In 1958 he was arrested by the French police at the little house in Ashour and imprisoned for two years. On his release, the French tried to force him into their army, but after three months he escaped from their barracks at Blida and was appointed an FLN officer in Algiers. His old wartime comrade Abdul-Hadi Sayah, who was arrested by the French at the same time, remembers Bouyali, even then, as an “Islamic militant.” According to Sayah, Bouyali found within the FLN “a way to make jihad against the French—he held this Islamic view even when he was in the FLN.”
His brother Mohamed agrees, although when he produces another, older photograph of his brother it shows Bouyali in FLN guerrilla uniform, dressed in a camouflage tunic, a poncho hat and army boots, posing melodramatically as if about to attack an enemy, holding an old breech-loading rifle in front of him. The picture has been painted in the manner of the time, the uniform a bright green, the sky a clear blue, the face an unhealthy yellow. The glass on the picture is cracked. There were other equally unknown FLN sympathisers at this time. One of them, who conspired to blow up a French government building, was called Abassi Madani. He spent most of the war in prison.
There was no doubting the bitterness that the war engendered. To their horror, the French discovered that hundreds of their own “loyal” Muslim troops were defecting to the FLN side, taking their weapons with them. French prisoners of the FLN were found with their eyes gouged out and their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths. The French responded with mass arrest operations, interning thousands of Algerian men in desert camps without trial. Death sentences were imposed on captured guerrillas; the condemned were usually guillotined, unless it became politically expedient to impose lighter sentences. After de Gaulle returned to office from his exile in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, he arrived in Algeria to give apparent support to the pieds noirs—Je vous ai compris, he told them—and then proceeded to negotiate with the FLN and to turn against the French army which had helped to bring him back to power. In 1960, de Gaulle negotiated, in person, with three leaders from the FLN’s Wilaya 4 district—Bouyali’s sector— and most of the subsequent assassination attempts against de Gaulle, a total of twenty-four in three years, were made by Frenchmen, some from within the security forces.
The historical similarities are uncanny, for all but one of these incidents were repeated in some form in Algeria in the first seven months of 1990. Over and over, the Algerian government followed the tragic path of the old French administrations. Nor was this by chance. The French, after all, had taught the Algerians that elections could be rigged. The French historian Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer has described how “we really contaminated the Algerians. We taught them that they could play with democracy, cheat democracy . . . We were first-rate professors of anti-democracy.” And while the Algerian authorities played the role of their former French governors, the Islamist opponents of the Algerian regime mimicked, over and over again, the activities of the old FLN.
Algerians were cheated of the fruits of independence by their wartime leaders. In the last months before liberation, the maquis of the “interior”—the men who had to fight the most ruthless French paratroop units—objected to the way in which the “exterior” leadership in Tunis and then in Tripoli—men like Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne—tried to impose policy upon the future Algerian state. The quixotic three-year post-independence rule of Ben Bella angered Bouyali, now an FLN functionary who worked in the national Algerian electronics company SONALEC. “Mustafa’s first dispute was over the ‘exterior’ men’s right to decide Algeria’s future,” Mohamed Bouyali said. “It was his first disagreement with the system. He didn’t want to obey the Tripoli ‘charter’—he wanted a congress of the FLN inside Algeria.” At the end of 1963, he took up with the maquis again, along with the Front des Forces Socialistes, the FFS, with Hocine Aït Ahmed, Mohand Oul-Hadj and Krim Belkacem; but after six months of fighting, Ben Bella promised them there would be a fair representation inside the government, of both “interior” and “exterior” men. By 1992, Hocine Aït Ahmed was leader of the FFS. Oul-Hadj, a Kabyle veteran, avoided the fate of his colleague Belkacem, who was later strangled in a Frankfurt hotel, apparently on Boumedienne’s orders.
Bouyali returned to civilian life, holding an FLN political post in the Algiers Casbah—until Boumedienne’s coup d’état against Ben Bella in 1965. According to his wartime friend and colleague Sayah, Bouyali refused to send the ritual telegram of congratulations to Boumedienne’s new “revolutionary council.” “He said he refused to support a coup d’état. But the FLN supported the coup. I agreed with my friend Mustafa Bouyali. We both thought that the Algerian revolution was over. We thought the Algerian people had suffered enough. It was time for everyone in Algeria to be consulted about their future. We wanted democracy.”
Sayah recalls how Bouyali and other old FLN comrades who objected to Boumedienne’s dictatorship met secretly in private homes—sometimes in Sayah’s own bungalow on the outskirts of Algiers—to discuss a future Algeria and the possibility of an Islamic state. Sayah, who was recovering from pleurisy when I met him and spoke in short, breathless sentences, was still emotional about that time. “You must see that what’s happening now in Algeria is the direct result of the opposition that Bouyali started in 1965. Our opposition wanted to work for a future, a democratic future, without bloodshed. Islam was a fundamental part of our belief—even when we fought the French. In our case, our nationalist feelings were not as strong as our Islamic feelings. The French came [in 1830] and destroyed our mosques and prevented us from speaking our language freely, the language of the Koran. Now again, under Boumedienne, we had no freedom. Our meetings were religious, yes. Our conversations in secret always started with readings from the Koran and we said Allahu akbar as we did when we went into battle during the war with the French. The Islamic trend was very strong in us . . . We purposely didn’t give our movement a name because Boumedienne’s military security apparatus was very strong and it would have been easier for them to arrest us if they could identify us all in one way.”
Sheikh Mahfouz Nahnah, who in 1992 led the Hamas party (no relation to its Palestinian namesake), Sheikh Ahmed Sahnoun, the last survivor of the old “Association of Ulemas” who was now the imam of the Cité de la Concorde mosque outside Algiers, and two religious figures who were to die under house arrest—Abdul Latif Soltani and Sheikh Mousbah—were Bouyali’s associates in these secret meetings, although they soon gave their movement a name, the “Group of Values” (al-kiam). The Algerian government banned the movement when it publicly opposed Nasser’s execution of the Islamic theologian Saïd Qotb in Egypt—a condemnation which embarrassed Boumedienne’s regime.
According to Mohamed Bouyali, his brother also began lecturing to Muslims in his local mosque in Ashour, assisted by a more senior figure, Abdul-Hadi Doudi, who was in 1992 the imam of the Marseille mosque. “Mustafa talked about Islam as a system of government—so this meant he talked about politics. His speeches were about political education in Islam. He denounced corruption and even used to cite the names of corrupt people in the regime . . . The whole village would be closed on Fridays because so many people came to hear Mustafa and Abdul-Hadi.”
In December 1978, Boumedienne died, to be succeeded by Chadli Bendjedid, whose rule was equally dictatorial and more openly corrupt than his predecessor’s. The police began to keep watch on Bouyali. “Government men turned up at the mosque and started taking down car registration numbers, to intimidate the people who were listening to Mustafa,” Mohamed Bouyali says. “They filmed the crowd. They repeatedly asked Mustafa to go to the police station for interrogation. They did this every day—until 3 October 1981. When he went in to work that day, plainclothes policemen tried to kidnap him, and his fellow workers rescued him. Mustafa fled to his grandfather’s house. He was sure the police wanted to abduct him and that he would ‘disappear.’ ”
Friends later acted as intermediaries to arrange a meeting between the police and Bouyali. He was told that the incident had been a “mistake.” According to his brother, the head of the Algerian national security police warned Mustafa Bouyali that he was “getting involved in politics.” “Mustafa replied: ‘But for me, the whole of life is politics. When you breathe, when you eat—that’s politics.’ ” In February 1982, according to the Bouyali family, Mustafa’s file was transferred from the security police to Algerian military intelligence, an ominous sign. On 28 April, he escaped over the wall of his home in Ashour while armed plain-clothes men waited at his front gate to arrest him as he left to lead dawn prayers at the mosque.
“Now he was really on the run and he started making contacts for military action,” Mohamed Bouyali recalls. “He spoke to most of the scholars—to Sheikh Nahnah, Ali Belhaj, Sheikh Ahmed Sahnoun, Abassi Madani. He said that he would take up military action, that they should speak in the mosques. He found his old maquis friends in the mountains, hundreds of them, and formed armed groups. Mustafa contacted the youth of Bab el-Oued and started making bombs.” Nahnah played no military role and Sahnoun was elderly, but Belhaj and Madani were to become leaders of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS—Islamic Salvation Front).
In late 1982, Bouyali shot and wounded a police officer at a road checkpoint, and the government struck against all his supporters; 47 were arrested between mid-December and early January 1983, another 103 by May. In the years to come, he would stage robberies to raise funds. His group attacked the police academy for weapons. Sayah, who sorrowfully left Bouyali when his friend turned to armed insurrection, claims that the police had much earlier taken their revenge on Bouyali by shooting dead one of his brothers in front of the man’s children—and that it was this that drove Bouyali to abandon dialogue in favour of war. “He took to the mountains . . . in the Mitidja, in Medea, in Lakhdaria, across the country, even to Sétif. There were pitched battles, a real war.”
It was a secret war that the world never heard of. There were more government ambushes. One of Bouyali’s principal lieutenants, Abdelkader Chebouti, was captured and condemned to death—but he was reprieved by Chadli Bendjedid and returned to fight with Bouyali’s maquis after his leader’s demise. Dozens of Bouyali’s comrades were fighting an “Islamic war” against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, where they came to admire Abdullah Azzam, an Islamic Palestinian guerrilla leader who was assassinated by a car bomb in 1989. Another of their heroes in Afghanistan was an Egyptian fighter named Shawki el-Islambouli, the brother of the man who assassinated President Sadat of Egypt in October 1981.
When Bouyali was finally run to ground, the Algerian newspapers recorded only the death of a “terrorist.” “His driver gave him away,” Mohamed Bouyali says. “Mustafa was travelling in the mountains near Larba, late at night in a rain storm. His driver had been arrested and then released some days before—usually Mustafa stayed away from people who had been detained in case they had been turned against him. The driver had been tortured. They were going down this road when Mustafa noticed the driver switching his lights onto high beam and down again and his friends heard him shout: ‘Traitor!’ At that moment, bullets were fired from both sides of the road and Mustafa was killed along with five of his men.” According to Sayah, Mustafa Bouyali’s last earthly act was to execute his driver by shooting him in the head, seconds before he himself was hit in the forehead by a bullet.
But Bouyali’s posthumous legacy was far more violent. When Chadli Bendjedid’s troops killed up to 500 demonstrators who were demanding democracy in Algiers in 1988, the event helped to give birth to the FIS, among whose leadership were Madani and Belhaj, Bouyali’s old associates. The event was, in its way, as cataclysmic as that long-ago massacre at Sétif. President Bendjedid found himself facing pressure for reform, not unlike the French authorities before the independence war. When the military cancelled the second round of national elections in 1992—after a first round which showed that the FIS would win—this suppression of democracy was every bit as cynical as the French rigging of their own elections in Algeria. Bendjedid was fired by the generals. The FIS was banned and a guerrilla war of growing intensity began.
These “new” maquisards of 1992 were initially men who had fought with Bouyali in the mountains, and they used the same methods as the old FLN against the French. They cut down telephone and electricity poles and planted bombs in post, airline and government offices. They assassinated policemen. The government responded—as the French had done in the face of the FLN—by calling their enemies “terrorists.” Thousands of Algerian troops, including paratroopers— many of them trained by their old colonial masters in France—began hunting down Bouyali’s old comrades and young disciples in Lakhdaria, Djemila, Sidi Bel-Abbès and Jijel, just as the French Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes hunted the FLN in these same locations more than three decades earlier. During these operations, which received virtually no publicity in or outside Algeria, dozens of soldiers defected to the Islamic “resistance” along with their rifles, just as the French Tirailleurs Algériens once crossed to the FLN.
Thus had the betrayal of the revolution against France led to a historical repetition. As the FLN’s dictators corrupted their country, so their original victory came to be seen as a betrayal, their francophone, Western (if originally Soviet-style) clique a poor copy of the old French colonial regime. Their French culture— what Algerians refer to as “the damned inheritance”—suggested that nothing had changed. Algeria’s unemployed young grew tired of the false promises of the independence war, sick of hearing about the revolution, weary of remembering dead heroes who brought them only destitution and homelessness. By 1992, more than 75 per cent of the Algerian population had been born after the independence war. Was it therefore any surprise that among the first targets of the Islamists were the ageing survivors of that war? Every day in the Algerian press there were death notices for the old mujahedin of 1954–62, anciens combattants who had been found with their throats slit in the towns and villages in which, for more than thirty years, they had been honoured as old soldiers. The fury of the young was even vented on their graves; to their shock, the Algerian government found the tombs of FLN “martyrs” torn open, their bones—smashed by French bullets three decades earlier—now broken to pieces with stones by Algerians who were supposed to honour their memories.
It was not surprising that future Algerian governments were forced to acknowledge the extent of the threat that now faced them. When the Algerian prime minister Mokdad Sifi asked me in 1995 if I knew who Bouyali was, it was a kind of watershed, an understanding of Bouyali’s historical role, of the connections that bound him to the past as well as the present. The 1954–62 conflict was a civil war as well as an independence war against the French; afterwards, Algeria was locked into a steel corset by years of postwar dictatorship, just as Tito locked Yugoslavia into his iron embrace after the Second World War. When the iron rusts, history picks up where it left off. Hence both the Algerian government and its armed opponents looked backwards rather than forwards. The authorities made Boumedienne-like promises of future prosperity, democracy and popular support. The Islamists assaulted culture and the arts and talked of a caliphate. Even Hassan Turabi, the Sudanese prelate who, so the Algerian government claimed, had most seriously influenced the Islamists, admitted to me in 1992 that he could not understand the Muslim leadership in Algeria. “They will not talk about the future,” he lamented. “I spoke to Abbas Madani before the elections . . . And I asked him: ‘What’s your programme like? What are you going to do after the elections? Have you started a dialogue with the French? . . .’ And he just said: ‘No, no, we just want to win the elections.’ ”
Within months of the latest insurgency, the Algerian government, in effect run by a coterie of privileged and immensely powerful army officers, cast around the Middle East for inspiration in their struggle against “fundamentalist terrorism.” They produced books and pamphlets on the roots of Islamic revivalism in an effort to persuade diplomats and foreign journalists that the roots of Algeria’s “terrorism” lay in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia. In 1995, the interior minister even claimed that the Lebanese Hizballah, the Iranians and the Palestinian Hamas movement had made contact with the Algerian GIA at a meeting in Tripoli in northern Lebanon. The story was the fantasy of a French novelist—who alleged “Syrian intelligence” as his source—which had been recycled in a New York Times story out of Paris. The Algerians searched everywhere— anywhere—for some way of proving that the Algerian insurgency was not Algerian. Like the Americans in Iraq ten years later, their enemies had to be foreigners, aliens, dark figures who had crossed the frontiers to fight the forces of democracy.
Both sides had complementary illusions. Many Frenchmen had thought they were fighting communism in Algeria when they were in fact fighting nationalism—or Islam, if Bouyali’s comrades and the French propagandists of the time are to be believed. The Islamic “resistance” now believed the independence war had been partly a religious jihad which—given the weight of documentary evidence to the contrary—it clearly was not for most of the participants. Bouyali’s former supporters—those who left him when he went into the mountains—still believe that if only successive Algerian governments had talked to their opponents rather than imprisoned them, the crisis could have been resolved. Instead, those who chose to fight with weapons turned the memory of Mustafa Bouyali into an inspiration for further struggle. His brother Mohamed has one other photograph of him. It is a coloured snapshot of Bouyali in his last months, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a mountain cave, reading a Koran that lies open in front of him—with a French sub-machine gun propped against the wall on his right. And of course, today I remember another armed Islamist who sits on the floor of a cave and reads a Koran with a gun beside him.
Did Bouyali doom his people to re-enact the dreadful war that ended in 1962? In July 1992, Bouyali’s old comrade Abdelkader Chebouti was captured again, along with another former Bouyali supporter, Mansouri Meliani, after a gun battle in Ashour. They were caught only a few hundred metres from Bouyali’s unmarked grave.
“Democracy”—which in the Algerian context must always, like “Palestine,” be used in quotation marks—came to an end on 12 January 1992, when the government effectively introduced martial law and stripped the FIS of its democratic election victory by cancelling the second round of the poll due to be held four days later. I had arrived in Algiers with a visa to cover the election that was no longer going to take place. Thus having been encouraged to witness Algeria’s “experiment in democracy,” I checked into the old French Hôtel Saint Georges, once Second World War headquarters to General Dwight D. Eisenhower—now the Hôtel el-Djezair—only to find Chadli Bendjedid announcing his resignation on the old and flickering television set in the hotel bar. Government “minders” who had been groomed to extol to us the wonders of Algerian “democracy” had suddenly to be reprogrammed to explain how “democracy” could only be protected by suspending “democracy.” This was hard work. To destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it was one thing. To destroy democracy in order to save it, quite another.
The army had pushed Chadli Bendjedid from the presidency and a five-man “Council of State”—including Algeria’s most powerful general, Khaled Nezzar— soon announced it would run the country. Although it appeared to have no constitutional legality, this “Council” needed a symbolic figure to sit on its throne; in desperation, the authorities called in a hero of the past, a man of destiny who would return from exile to lead Algeria in its hour of need. Just as de Gaulle had returned from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, so Mohamed Boudiaf, veteran of the 1954–62 war and one of the founders of the FLN, must come back to Algeria. He told his people he understood their needs, just as de Gaulle said he understood the French Algerians. There would be no Islamic republic in Algeria.
Algeria’s Islamist leaders—stunned to find the army in control of the country they thought they were about to rule—warned that they would not tolerate any attempt to cancel the second round of elections. But a quiet coup d’état had left the generals rather than the politicans in charge of the army, and paramilitary police checkpoints had now been set up on all main roads into the capital. Troops and armoured personnel carriers were positioned around government buildings—the prime minister’s office, the foreign ministry, the post office, the treasury and radio station—and Algerian commandos with fixed bayonets patrolled the southern streets of the capital. The acting leader of the FIS, Sheikh Abdelkader Hachani, denounced the country’s new rulers as thieves who had “stolen the liberty of the Algerian people.” The army, he said, “must side with the people.” Even Sheikh Nahnah, whose moderate plumage ensured his freedom from arrest, felt it necessary to say that “the greatest violence is done when a state attacks its own people.” The new regime, he said, was a “dictocracy.”
I took one of Algiers’ yellow-painted taxis downtown that first morning of “dictocracy,” to a shabby ground-floor room in rue Larbi Ben M’Hidi where an exhibition every bit as distressing as the “Museum of the Martyrs” was showing to a packed house. Here Beethoven and Brahms were replaced by a grotesquely amplified voice reciting verses from the Koran. Yet this display of much more recent history provided by the FIS contained some grim parallels with the other museum on the hill. Here again were the broken faces of dead and beaten men—in colour this time—yet they were not the victims of the 1954–62 war against the French but the dozens of Algerians who were shot down in the streets of Algiers by Algerian troops in the 1988 riots. There was even a showcase—ironically of the same size and layout as the case in the “Museum of Martyrs”—containing bullets and cartridges fired by the Algerian army. One of the cartridges was clearly marked: “Federal Laboratories Inc. Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681 U.S.A.”
It was not the Western provenance of these weapons that was important— though the anti-Western resentment within the FIS had been growing daily—but the pattern of repression which they represented. It was as if French colonial rule bequeathed not freedom but military force to the Algerians. Under the FLN’s post-independence dictatorship, the Algerian security services practised many of the same tortures as their French predecessors—“electricity with oriental refinements,” as one victim put it to me—and the French had themselves learned how to make men and women talk in the dungeons of the Gestapo during the Second World War. It was a genealogy of horror, one that would be expanded if Algeria were to be faced with an Islamist uprising.
FIS supporters could explain their anger very simply. They had been encouraged to participate in these elections. The West had repeatedly said that power should come through the ballot box rather than through revolution—Islamist or otherwise—and the FIS had dutifully played the democratic card. The FIS abided by the rules—and made the mistake of winning the election. This was not what the pouvoir, or its Western supporters, intended. France was happy to avoid the nightmare of an Islamic “catastrophe” on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The Americans did not want another Islamic revolution along the lines of Iran. So much for democracy.
Of course, it was not that simple. The FIS sought power without responsibility. Their repeated demands for an Islamic republic alienated the 26 million other Algerians whom they would have to represent once they achieved power. And their assumption of “rightness”—their unquestionable faith in their own Islamic path with all its social sharia laws—could be breathtaking. So could their grasp of history. “All our martyrs against the French died for Islam,” a young FIS acolyte told me outside the Bab el-Oued mosque. “The independence war was an Islamic struggle.” This was the Bouyali doctrine.
In reality, the body politic of Algeria was not threatened in the way that Chadli Bendjedid’s pitiful television appearance suggested. The Algerian constitution was so cleverly devised that even if the FIS had dominated parliament, it would not have been able to take over the government. For it was the president who chose ministers—and ministers who drew up the political programme. If that programme was twice rejected by parliament, there had to be new general elections. In other words, the government itself—for which, read the army—would continue to control Algeria. Once again, however, the authorities did not want to talk to the opposition. They did not want a democracy unless they could be the winners. They wanted to lock their opponents up. And within three days of the declaration of martial law, the FIS announced that fifty-three of its members—including three who gained seats in the first round of elections—had been arrested by the army.
Hachani shrewdly adopted the role of a constitutionalist, suggesting that all 231 deputies—including 188 FIS members—elected in the December first round should form a “parallel” parliament. “A political process has to be resumed,” he said, although Hachani’s words were diminished by the appearance at his press conference of Amar Bramia, the coach to Algeria’s national athletic team, who gave an unpleasant account of his arrest and ill-treatment at the hands of the army on 13 January. He said he had been taken to the Ministry of Defence in Algiers because he had been identified at a FIS rally, and had been forced to remove his trousers before being severely beaten. “They threatened to rape my wife if I told anyone what happened,” he said. “I am . . . telling this to the press so that the Algerian people should know what sort of people are in power.”
But what sort of people supported the FIS? From outside, the apartment blocks of Bab el-Oued are pigeon lofts, tiny rectangular windows stuffed with drying bedclothes and tired mattresses, the flats eight storeys high, thirty abreast, the exterior walls streaked with grime, more than three and a half thousand souls sleeping ten to a room. Walk the gaunt, grey corridors, deafening with the shriek of children, and you can see bunks, floor to ceiling, in each room as if the inhabitants live in a barracks. Which, in a sense, they do. Modern police stations have been erected on the roads above Bab el-Oued, the security forces a permanent army of occupation. No wonder the people there never regarded the Popular Democratic Republic of Algeria as either popular or democratic. The acronym “FIS,” that cold, wet January of 1992, was on every wall.
“Why are you foreigners so surprised we voted for the FIS?” The thirty-nine-year-old shopkeeper, unshaven, in an old grey sweater and worn shoes—anonymous in these days of ghostly martial law—pointed eastwards in the direction of Algiers airport, where Mohamed Boudiaf, the grand old man of the independence war, was about to land after twenty-eight years of exile in Morocco. “If I was at the airport and had a gun, I’d shoot Boudiaf. How dare they impose this old man on us after our election victory? What has he got to do with us? I had never heard of him until they said he would be the new leader of Algeria.” Nor could the shopkeeper be expected to know of Boudiaf. He was only nine years old when the French left Algeria and freed Boudiaf from prison. With 70 per cent of Algeria’s 26 million people under the age of thirty-five—44 per cent were under fourteen—only a quarter could remember the guerrilla war with France.
But Algeria’s “conversion” to Islam was ambiguous. The Algerian flag bears the half-moon of Islam. The first words of the Koran are printed above Article One of the Algerian constitution. Article Two declares that “Islam is the state religion.” But the theological renaissance that millions of Algerians experienced over the previous decade bore no resemblance to the ruling FLN’s formal adherence to the faith. FIS members recalled that they began to follow Islam in earnest around ten years earlier—in 1982, when Bouyali went on the run and started his guerrilla campaign, when a new group of young preachers appeared in the Algiers mosques, men who refused to maintain political discretion in the face of the government’s economic mismanagement. In retrospect, the collapse of oil prices and the further impoverishment of Algeria’s youth guaranteed the rise of fundamentalism—though the FIS rejected the word “fundamentalism” as a Western invention.
Akli, for example, worshipped at the Kabul mosque in Belcourt—the attendance of ex-guerrillas who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan gave the building its name—and remembered when his religion began to dominate his life. “The discussion of Islam started around the end of the Seventies, in cafés, in the streets— yes, even in bars. It filled a void in Algerian society. Our people were growing poorer. I had always thought of an Islamic republic as a dream, but for me it became a reality. The West tells us that the problems of the Third World are economic, but I came to realise through Islam that this is untrue, that in fact it is the people who must change.”
Akli is a biologist, and a fascination with science characterised much of the FIS’s thinking. Educated FIS supporters almost invariably turned out to be skilled engineers or communications technicians. Without exception, every bookshop in Algiers now displayed a special section on Islamic literature. Alongside each section were shelves of scientific works. All twenty-two of the FIS’s candidates in the December parliamentary elections were graduates, fifteen of them scientists. In an Algerian Islamic republic, the government was more likely to be led by technocrats than by mullahs. Party supporters claimed that Islam and science were not only compatible but complementary, that both involved absolute truth and understanding.
Science could also be used to mislead. In July 1991 the FIS smuggled a laser device into Algeria in the diplomatic bag of an Arab embassy and at a night-time open-air rally at Bab el-Oued wrote the word Allah on the clouds above the city. Many of those present claimed they had witnessed a miracle. But the FIS was no party of ignorance. Another Bab el-Oued man—unemployed and again anonymous, since he rightly expected a civil war and mass arrests—could not suppress his rage at the attempts by ex-presidents Boumedienne and Bendjedid to repress the depth of religious feeling. “They thought they could keep our allegiance by building mosques—dozens of mosques all over Algeria, even Islamic universities in Algiers and Oran,” he said. “Bendjedid’s wife started appearing in photographs wearing the hidjab covering before she disappeared from public view. But you don’t love Islam by building mosques. We have to practise our religion in our lives. We were inspired when a preacher, a militant preacher, came forward and abandoned discretion in the Eighties. His name was Mustafa Bouyali. He was shot by the police.”
Bouyali. This was long before I had met Bouyali’s family or researched his life. It was one of the first times I had heard his name. The FIS denied a military role, although already there were reports that several armed cells existed like satellites around the movement. One such group was said to be made up of “Kabulis,” who had fought in Afghanistan. Another was believed to be called the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Brigade. But the FIS would not speak of this.
“Don’t provoke anyone, stay calm. There must be no violence.” There were perhaps 30,000 Muslim worshippers in the narrow, broken streets around the breeze-block Sunna mosque, and they obeyed the instruction so literally that they scarcely spoke to each other when they completed their Friday prayers. Sheikh Abdelkader Hachani told his congregation—thousands of them kneeling on prayer mats on the very roads and pavements of Bab el-Oued—that at least 500 young men had already been arrested by the police and army. The riot police along the seafront, visors up, night-sticks in their hands, had been picking them out for four hours already.
I saw one of them, a youth of maybe fifteen, unshaven, shouting in protest as he was dragged by the collar across the highway outside the headquarters of the security police, his expression both pleading and angry. A paramilitary cop pushed him into a mini-bus already filled with young bearded men. It looked as if the police were trying to provoke the massive crowd. But for Hachani to have abandoned his address would have conceded victory to Mohamed Boudiaf. Although still in Morocco, he had been installed as head of Algeria’s “Council of State,” declaring that he would not allow anyone “to use Islam to take over the country.” In the event, Hachani—his voice blasting from dozens of loudspeakers through the cramped streets—repeated his contention that Boudiaf was an unconstitutional leader, claiming that the spokeswoman of the U.S. State Department had given her approval to the new Algerian regime.
It must have been the first time in history that the name of Margaret Tutweiler had echoed forth from an Algerian mosque. George Bush’s post–Gulf War “New World Order” had devised Boudiaf’s coup d’état in order to prevent the creation of an Islamic republic, Hachani insisted. The multitude, cross-legged on their crimson and blue mats, listened in absolute silence, with such rapt attention that between Hachani’s words it was possible to hear the chanting of other prayers from other mosques floating over the city. Watching those thousands of faces with their intense eyes, and the tears—real tears—that literally dripped from their faces as they prayed, one could only ask if old Boudiaf could stand up to this total, frightening, sense of purpose.
“Algeria is threatened,” Boudiaf had told his countrymen a few hours earlier. “I will do everything I can to resolve the problems of Algeria’s youth . . . Islam in this country belongs to everyone, not just to a few . . . I pray God he will unite us to bring us out of this crisis.” But at the Sunna mosque, Hachani’s audience were muttering equally fervent prayers. “Islam will conquer,” one of the FIS supporters whispered as he surveyed the riot police at the bottom of the street. “Boudiaf and these government people will die—and they will go to hell.” It was not said as a turn of phrase but with determination, as if he could actually ensure the destination of those he wished to doom.
Not all those in the streets of Bab el-Oued were FIS supporters. On some of the wrought-iron balconies were young women without scarves, long hair over their shoulders, a hint of jewellery showing on their wrists. They were courageous women, refusing to accept what so many of the men in their streets would no doubt demand of them in an Islamic republic. They were ignored by the thousands of FIS men who chose not to look up at the balconies; nor, when they left, did the worshippers even deign to glance at the soldiers in helmets, riot shields in front of them, who stood beside the iron dragon’s-teeth checkpoints. Bab el-Oued had been cordoned off by Boudiaf’s troops and policemen. “Besieged Bab el-Oued,” Hachani called it, although it did seem as if it was Boudiaf’s absent authority that might be under siege.
Algiers. Alger la Blanche. If its white walls were now stained with damp, it exerted an unusual magnetism over all who arrived in the city. It was like a place you knew from a previous life, whose hilly streets and shuttered villas and trees— even the smell of fish at la pêcherie at the end of the old French naval pier—had been waiting all along for your visit. “Sire, there is a war with Algiers,” the French minister for war wrote to his emperor on 14 October 1827, after the fly-whisk assault on France’s consul. “How can it end in a manner that is useful and glorious for France?” Algiers was always a city to be captured rather than loved by those who did not possess her. After Ben Bella’s victorious guerrilla army took control in 1962, they attacked the heart of this soft Mediterranean city by erecting brown concrete monuments to socialism amid the Haussmanlike boulevards of the old town, vast offices that mocked the petit Paris which the French had cultivated for 132 years.
Wandering around Algiers reminded me of that first visit to France with Bill and Peggy in 1956. The still-proud nineteenth-century streets, the bumpy roads, the dented cars, the faulty plumbing and stinking drains, the railway stations with their cut stone walls and steeply sloping roofs, even the cheap, unpainted railway carriages with their corrugated silver steel sides, were a mirror image of French provincial cities in the late 1950s, embellished only by the shoddy postwar housing of the Fourth Republic. It was almost as if time stopped when Algeria’s million pieds noirs went flocking aboard the hastily commandeered transatlantic liners that took them “home” to metropolitan France three decades before. At the Saint George Hotel, the waiter would arrive each morning with a classic French breakfast; orange juice, croissants and a silver pot of coffee. Yet the juice came not from the country’s orchards but from a tin of Italian substitute, the croissants tasted like cardboard, the coffee had no taste at all.
Perhaps that is what happens when the culture of one country becomes fossilised into the fabric of a city it no longer owns. The bookshops still sold the works of Zola, Gide and Camus, himself a pied noir, whose masterpiece L’Etranger is set in Algeria. Some of the finest Algerian authors still wrote in French; typically, one of the country’s most admired writers, Rachid Mimouni, had written his most recent novel, Une peine à vivre, in self-imposed exile in France. It was about dictatorship, the love of power and the power of love.
Drop by Le Restaurant Béarnais in rue Burdeau and you would find the customers discussing their horror of theocracy and their fears for their broken-backed democracy in Parisian French. The menu is in French not Arabic, the plat du jour is steak au poivre, the favourite wine a fine Algerian claret whose name, Cuvée du Président , had taken on new meaning since Bendjedid’s resignation. Journalists from Algérie Actualité, one of the country’s seventy-three new newspapers—all printed on a government press and thus easy to close down—are crowded round a corner table, smoking and sipping beer. They regard the threat of the FIS with the fascination of intellectuals. One of the ironies of the FIS is that the party itself uses the acronym for its own name in French, the Front Islamique du Salut.
“There is one thing you must understand about the FIS,” the paper’s editor, Zouaoui Benamadi, says. “Only Islamic movements are capable of breaking the government systems that exist in the Arab world. But who are these people? What are these strange clothes they wear? They have beards and wear white caps and shortened trousers to show their allegiance to the FIS. But we have beautiful national clothes in Algeria. We have the burnous, a big woollen robe. Where does it come from, this curious dress of theirs?” Benamadi, a small, brown-haired man with large glasses—clean-shaven, in a sports jacket and tie, he looks like a French socialist—returns to his editorial office in a nineteenth-century apartment building a hundred metres from the restaurant. Its high ceilings, glossy yellow paint and broken mosaic floor exude a kind of poor elegance. A sub-editor brings in the printer’s proof of the next day’s editorial and Benamadi examines it with a priest’s concentration. “From one day to the next, rural Algeria—the Anti-Berber Algeria—is supposed to become Afghan,” he has written. “ . . . to change our clothes, to change our eating habits, to change our customs, including the very way we bury our dead . . . the result: the desertion en masse of the middle classes, of our vitality, of those who do greatest service to our national life.”
I visit the Kouba mosque at Friday prayers and find the answers to some of Benamadi’s questions. True, the FIS is against alcohol, against singing at weddings, against mourners eating special meals on the first, seventh and fortieth days after death, against spoken prayers at funerals. True, the FIS has developed a “uniform” of beards and shortened trousers. The latter are supposed to symbolise a good Muslim’s desire to wash before prayers without allowing water to touch the bottom of his clothes. But among the worshippers’ heads as they rise and fall to their prayers are hundreds of Afghan hats, the rolled cloth head covering of the mujahedin guerrillas. For the Afghan connection—noticed but not sufficiently recognised by other Algerians—is vital to an understanding of the Islamists.
Pick up a taxi in Bab el-Oued and its significance becomes clear. The driver and his friend both have beards. Their impromptu conversation tells the story. “We wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight,” the driver says. “They are mostly Sunni not Shia Muslims there. They fight communism. More important, they want an Islamic republic. The Hezb Islami is very good. We want to fight for them. Many hundreds of our friends went to Afghanistan to fight. Now our government tries to stop them. Two Algerians and three Palestinians returning to Algiers from Afghanistan were arrested at the airport when they got here. It is easy to go to Afghanistan. We go over to that building for visas.” We are on the avenue Souidani Boudjema, passing an ill-painted office with an unpolished brass plaque which says: “Embassy of Pakistan.”
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb Islami, has complained about the Algerian government’s sudden lack of enthusiasm for his movement, but the real danger of the FIS’s war in Afghanistan is not religious. It is in learning about the potential Islamic republic. Much more seriously, its young men are learning how to fight. In Afghanistan, they are taught how to use Kalashnikovs, mortars, even tanks—they can learn to drive T-55s and T-62s, exactly the same kind of tanks that the Algerian army uses.
“Fascists,” the old FLN man cries. A gentle, kindly man, he has no doubt about the necessity of depriving the FIS of its hard-earned, genuinely democratic victory in the first round of elections. We are sitting at a dinner table, talking to men who have no moral qualms about switching off the engine of democracy in the interests of public order. We sip red wine, they have orange juice. The food—Algerian soup, langoustine , ossobuco—is served by liveried waiters. Our hosts speak impeccable French, their words uttered more slowly as they become more angry. “You people want to talk about democracy,” the old FLN man says—he was a student at the start of the war of independence—“but this is not a philosophy lesson for us. If the FIS came to power, there would be a civil war in Algeria. There would be terrible bloodshed. We are having to deal with a real problem. How wonderful it would be, you might think, to have an Islamic republic in Algeria. How democratic of you! But we cannot allow a civil war to take place. We have a responsibility to our country, to our people.”
His younger companion runs through the equations of this morality. Out of 26 million Algerians, the FIS gained only 3.2 million votes in December 1991. One million voting cards were spoiled, another million failed to reach the electorate. In the 1990 municipal elections, the FIS gained 4.3 million votes. Could we not therefore see how their support was declining? Out of 13 million eligible voters, the FIS’s December victory represented only 23 per cent of the population. How could they have been permitted to win a second round of elections? “These people really want an Islamic republic and our people will not accept this. The FIS will be dictators. They use the system of the Nazis.”
It was a supreme and terrible irony that in the rest of the Arab world, the situation is reversed. In Egypt, in Jordan, in Syria, it is the liberal, democratic elite who bemoan the lack of democracy in their countries, and the vast toiling mass of Muslims who suffer its consequences in silence. In Algeria in 1992, it was a popular Islamic movement that demanded democracy while the middle-class intelligentsia produced convoluted reasons for its postponement. The tragedy was that Boudiaf might have been right. The FIS had shown no urge to tolerate the millions of Algerians who did not want an Islamic republic, for the Francophile, middle-class Algerians, many of whom could not even speak Arabic fluently, for the liberated female population of the cities, for the Muslim Berber community—25 per cent of the population—who speak Tamazirte and who are not Arabs.
On 23 January, Algeria’s Channel Three pop radio gave a fair reflection of the government’s policy. The first item on its hourly news broadcast was the prime minister’s international appeal for $8 billion in loans to ease the country’s 20 per cent unemployment and supplement food supplies. Then, almost as an afterthought, came a brief report on the arrest of Abdelkader Hachani. The government’s plan was obvious: encourage the people with talk of good economic times to come and treat the suppression of the FIS as of secondary importance, an unhappy but necessary result of the party’s foolishness in winning 188 of the seats in the first election. Hachani had anyway been detained on the orders of General Khaled Nezzar, the defence minister, for calling upon the Algerian army to rebel against the government.
Hachani had done just that. Two days before his arrest, I had been given a copy of his cyclostyled appeal, addressed to the “Popular National Army” and signed in Hachani’s own handwriting. For good measure, police and troops moved into the offices of the daily Al-Khabar, which had printed the desertion appeal, and arrested the journalists working on the newspaper. Hachani himself was stopped by plain-clothes police while driving in his own car in the Belcourt district of Algiers and taken off to Blida prison to join Abassi Madani and Ali Belhaj, the two principal leaders of the FIS. At the very same hour, the prime minister, Sid-Ahmed Ghozali, announced that no speeches “of a political nature” would in future be allowed in the country’s mosques and that no demonstrations would be permitted in the vicinity of mosques. As usual, there were historical precedents behind the latest arrests. In 1930, the French dissolved Algeria’s first twentieth-century independence group—the “North African Star”—whose leader, Messali Hadj, called himself an “Islamo-nationalist” and ran a newspaper called El-Umma which celebrated “the revival of Islam.” Hadj was imprisoned for trying to reconstitute a dissolved association and later condemned to a year in a French prison for “provoking soldiers to disobey orders with the intention of creating anarchy.”
Algerian government spokesmen talked each day about calme et sérénité. In the streets, the shopkeepers talked about the “explosion” to come. We all felt it, the absolute certainty that you couldn’t obstruct democracy without creating violence. On 20 January a brigadier in the Algerian gendarmerie was shot dead. Forty-three-year-old Amari Aïssa was married with four children. Crowds of youths had thrown stones at military checkpoints outside Algiers and soldiers had to fire warning shots in the air to disperse them. “Anyone can kill a policeman,” an official commented offhandedly when I asked for some indication of the government’s concern. “People kill policemen from New York to Nepal. It is a criminal act and will anyway reflect badly on the FIS. Every time a policeman is killed, his village turns out for the funeral and the people turn against the FIS.” Only a criminal matter. Nothing that couldn’t happen in the United States. But no one suspends elections in America. And Brigadier Aïssa wasn’t murdered by the mafia. Within three weeks, seven days of rioting between police and FIS supporters—in which at least 50 people were believed to have been killed and 200 wounded— prompted Boudiaf’s military-controlled “Council” to proclaim a state of emergency. In the slums of Algiers there were clandestine calls for a “holy war” against Boudiaf’s authorities. Almost the entire FIS leadership was already under arrest, the party’s head office in Algiers had been closed down and sixty imams had been detained.
The meltdown comes faster than we expected. The Casbah, Algiers, 15 February 1992. Somewhere amid Bouznad Hadi’s scorched home—around the charred bedclothes, the burned electrical wiring, the blackened stone staircase—lies the Truth. The veiled Algerian women crying in the tight alleyways outside the house are sure they knew what that is. So is Bouznad Hadi’s cousin, holding a generator lamp in his right hand as he tells how four of the innocent inhabitants were incinerated by Algerian army rocket fire. So is the Algerian government, which states that its soldiers only attacked the house because shots had been fired at them from the building. You can witness the same scenes in Belfast or in the West Bank. But in the Algiers Casbah, its implications are far more serious. For the difference between truths here symbolises the gulf between the people and a government fearful of civil war. Are the people going to believe that Bouznad Hadi and his friends were “martyrs” or “terrorists”?
The fruit merchant’s home lies in the very heart of the Casbah, where winding stone steps meander between wooden and mud-baked walls, where even narrower alleyways lead to old domed houses so buried in layers of habitation that they are almost underground. No one disputes that five men were in the house in the early hours of the previous day. Nor does anyone dispute that Algerian army paratroopers—neighbours saw their red berets in the semi-darkness—surrounded Bouznad Hadi’s tiny dwelling some time between 2 and 3 a.m.
This, however, is where truth becomes a little slippery. The government says the soldiers came under fire from the building; but the doorway is too low to be seen from the nearest pathway and there are no windows facing the only alleyway down which the soldiers could have been walking. There is a hole above the door, apparently caused by a rocket-propelled grenade, and the authorities are content to let it be known that five militants of the FIS were killed inside.
Claw your way in darkness up the stone stairs of the interior and, in a room containing several charred beds, you will find Bouznad Hadi’s cousin. No names are forthcoming, least of all for the bearded, thoughtful young man who will arrive during the morning. “They were all innocent,” says the cousin. “There had been no shooting. The men were asleep. My cousin had only married recently—his wife is four months pregnant. When we found the dead, they were unrecognisable. They had been totally burned.” There is a French woman radio reporter on the landing, thrusting her microphone into the cousin’s face. “Are you telling the truth?” she snaps. I’m not sure he is, but this is no way to treat a man who has just lost his relative; this is not the time to practise the art of tough investigative journalist, here in this house of the dead.
But no one can explain why the pregnant wife and other female relatives were not in the house at the time. Another man arrives, a brother-in-law of Hadi. “The authorities could have taken them alive,” he says. “The house was surrounded. But the soldiers burst in, they shot dead a man in the corridor and then fired a grenade into this room. Two of the dead men were lying on the ground. They had been wounded earlier.”
Wounded earlier? Could these two men have been among the attackers who murdered six policemen in the Casbah a week ago, at least one of whom was wounded when he made his escape? “Definitely not!” the brother-in-law says at once. “They were shot during street demonstrations.” But the soldiers obviously knew the wounded men were there. They had been betrayed; even the brother-in-law admitted ruefully that “someone told the soldiers the wounded men were here.” Then the bearded man arrives. “It was revenge by the army,” he says in a soft, dangerous voice. “When they came into the house, one of the soldiers shouted: ‘We will do to you what you did to us at Guemmar.’ ” Guemmar is the border post where Muslim gunmen shot dead as many as fifteen Algerian soldiers in 1991. For the bearded man, standing in the semi-darkness, muttering “revenge” again and again, the matter is clear cut. “Of course they could have taken them alive. But they wanted to kill them all, including the wounded. We can’t take wounded men with beards to hospital because they are then arrested and tortured. So they were sheltering here.”
Outside in the alleyways, more women have gathered, weeping quietly, joined by dozens of watchful young men. History shoulders its way gently towards us, as it always seems to in Algeria. One of the men asks if we know the significance of the house only 300 metres up the same claustrophobic street, another “martyrs” house. It was in this other building that FLN guerrillas—including the fugitive Ali La Pointe, the “hero” of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers—and some of their children preferred to be blown to pieces by French paratroopers rather than surrender. Early on the morning of 14 February 1992, “Paras” of a different nationality returned to the Casbah, and another legend was born.
No one ever discovered how many angels could dance on the end of a pin. But an even more pressing theological question weighed heavily upon FIS supporters the day Boudiaf came home: how long does it take to shave off a man’s beard? Down at Ali’s coiffeur on the end of Rahmouni al-Tayeb Street, they could hack off an Islamic beard in about five minutes. But as the seventy-five-year-old proprietor tells us, FIS men sometimes talk a lot during their necessary shave. This can prolong the process by ten minutes but will still cost only 15 Algerian dinars, a mere 60 U.S. cents, and is well worth the price to avoid summary arrest and imprisonment. Which was why, in the streets of Algiers, only brave men and fools now sported the long, pointed Muslim beards which were, until a week earlier, the symbol of the FIS. The tonsorial change therefore had grave political—even military—implications for the Algerian government. By shaving off their beards, the Islamists had gone underground.
The proof lay all over Ali’s floor, a mass of thick brown and black hair, a carpet of human fur, which he swiftly dispatched into the garbage with a stout industrial broom. Ali was too frightened to give his family name but far too proud to resist advertising his craft as he squatted on his doorstep where two sleek grey cats were purring in the sunshine. Never before had his profession played so prominent a role in Algerian politics. “Shaving a beard is like flying an aircraft,” he said. “Or . . . ”—and here there was a combination of cynicism as well as mischief in his smile—“it is like writing an article. The skill is in your hands. I get around five beards a day to shave although I couldn’t open last Friday because of the shooting. But most of these people shave off their beards at home.” Wisely so. For the Algerian intelligence services, however, the disappearance of the beard created another problem; in order to mingle in the streets, many of their agents had adorned their own cautious faces with a full growth of poorly groomed hair. Less than a week earlier, one such bearded security operative, dressed in a long khamis shirt, was known to have seized an imam near the Bab el-Oued mosque. In the local police station, the agent dutifully shaved off the right half of the imam’s beard, adding—according to the preacher—“We will get all of you in the end.” An ambitious undertaking now that the barbers of Algiers had made their extra profits.
The people of Algiers were asked to give a tumultuous welcome to the returning prodigal. But when Mohamed Boudiaf, tall, frail, his features thin and elderly, arrived at the airport that bears the name of his late and hated rival, Houari Boumedienne, only a few taxi-drivers, porters, journalists and FLN functionaries were there to greet him. The only sign of enthusiasm came from three groups of Berbers in traditional brown robes who stood near the arrivals lounge and thumped away joylessly on high-pitched drums under the eyes of secret policemen. Boudiaf was driven through empty streets to the office of the vacated presidency where, with his hand on the Koran, he accepted the unconstitutional office of leader of the “Council of State.” He promised to continue what he called “the democratic process” without explaining how he could do this when the democratic process—like the president and parliament—no longer existed.
For the press to be let loose on a seventy-two-year-old pensioner who was until a month ago the owner of a Moroccan brick factory should have been a trial for a man who was supposed to lead Algeria to its salvation. But for all of two hours, Mohamed Boudiaf proved to be a hard, almost aquiline man, soaking up the camera flashes like sunlight, reproving journalists who dared to talk of “repression,” appealing to Western nations to help Algeria in its hour of need. He condemned his predecessors in government. He demanded obedience to the law. He admitted the incarceration of at least 6,000 young Algerians in desert prison camps—another copy-cat act of imprisonment from French colonial days—and claimed that “respect for democracy must not lead to the destruction of democracy.”118
In just four days, another fifty Muslim demonstrators were killed by police in Algerian cities. Abdelkader Moghni, the most important of the FIS candidates to be elected in December and the one man who might have been able to renegotiate its position within the political establishment—even talk to the government—was imprisoned. But Boudiaf did not want to talk to the FIS. There was a growing suspicion in Algeria that the “Council of State” would prefer to provoke the FIS into armed insurrection—and thus “prove” that the party was never interested in constitutional politics, that the annulment of the January elections prevented a coup d’état by the Islamists rather than by the army. Certainly, more groupuscules of armed men began to emerge. An organisation naming itself “Faithful to the Promise” called for a jihad, claiming that this was a continuation à la Bouyali of the independence war. Boudiaf concentrated his anger on two targets: the FIS, and the corruption which had driven so many Algerians to despair of the democracy they had been promised. The first of his targets would despise him. The second would kill him.
And the moment Boudiaf died, on 29 June 1992, we all got it wrong. I was in Moscow, sitting in a hotel room that overlooked the Kremlin wall after returning from the Nagorno-Karabakh war on the edge of Armenia, when the phone rang and Harvey Morris, still my foreign news editor, came on the line from London. “They’ve topped Boudiaf,” he said with his usual sensitivity. “Looks like your Islamic mates have done ’im in.” And I believed him. In fact, we all thought, when we heard that three bullets had cut Boudiaf down while he addressed a public meeting in the eastern Algerian city of Annaba, that the FIS—or some armed group sympathetic to the movement—had carried out the death threat uttered by so many Islamists. At least one organisation, Islamic Jihad, had promised that an “all-out war” against the Algerian government would start on 30 June. They had promised to kill “a thousand” policemen and soldiers but—so I portentously announced in The Independent—“they struck a day early and decapitated instead the entire structure of government authority which had been created to destroy them.”
I didn’t have any doubts about who “they” were, didn’t ask myself why we had never heard before from an Algerian Islamic Jihad, even though its name had been used by other groups in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. I couldn’t go back through my Algerian reporting notebooks—because they were in Beirut and I was in Moscow—in which I might have traced some antagonism towards Boudiaf, not just from the FIS but from wealthy members of the pouvoir, even among the military, who feared his anti-corruption campaign. Only when I returned to Algiers two weeks later did I discover that there was growing evidence that the old president might not, after all, have been killed by Islamists. In the weeks before his death, Boudiaf made powerful secular enemies inside Algeria—at least one of them reportedly linked to ex-President Chadli Bendjedid—and even Boudiaf’s widow now said that she did not believe that the FIS committed the crime. Less than three weeks after the murder, the interior minister, General Larbi Belkheir—who with General Nezzar had formed the most powerful duo in Boudiaf’s “Council”—was sacked by the new prime minister, Belaïd Abdesselam, for a “lapse” in security. Some lapse.
Boudiaf was killed by one of his own bodyguards, Second Lieutenant Lembarek Boumarafi. State television cameras were taping the president’s address at the moment of his death and Belkheir announced that Boumarafi had acted alone. He had fired two bullets into Boudiaf’s head and a third into his back. What was not known at the time was that the president’s anti-corruption campaign had already netted a retired Algerian army major-general and a prominent businessman and associate of Chadli Bendjedid in the southern city of Tamanrasset. And only days before Boudiaf was assassinated, a senior officer responsible for one of the investigations was himself mysteriously murdered. There were also rumours that Boudiaf—following the precedent set by de Gaulle of negotiating with the FLN—was trying to open a private dialogue with moderate FIS officials.
A quiet visit to an acquaintance in Algerian state television proved that some of the videotape of Boudiaf’s killing had been suppressed by the authorities. Eyewitnesses in Annaba claimed that four separate television cameras taped the scene at the moment of the assassination. The footage shown around the world, in which Boudiaf could be seen uttering his last words and then lying dead on the ground with blood on his chest, was censored. My source was explicit:
The cameras filmed the actual moment of the killing and they censored the scene when the bullets hit Boudiaf. The tape showed his brain exploding when the bullets hit him in the head—you cannot show something so terrible on television. There is another tape which shows the arrest of Boumarafi. In this, Boumarafi says on camera: “I killed Boudiaf, knowing of his heroic past and that he was a good man. But he didn’t do enough against the mafia. And he opposed the choice of the people. I belong to no political party but I belong to the Islamic movement.” Boumarafi was so self-confident, so sure of himself—he spoke so well and was so charismatic—that the authorities feared he would become a hero if the tape was shown on television.
If this account was correct, then Boudiaf’s murder might indeed have involved Islamists. But the events surrounding Boumarafi’s arrest were extremely puzzling—especially if the authorities really believed him to be a fundamentalist murderer. One account said that he had been able to escape from the Annaba conference hall but later surrendered peacefully to the police. Curiously, the army—which tried the leaders of the FIS in a well-publicised military court hearing in Blida two weeks later—refused to take responsibility for Boumarafi, claiming instead that he must be tried by a civilian court. Boumarafi was now incarcerated in the civilian prison at Annaba—by chance, the home town of Chadli Bendjedid—while local journalists were able to find out little about his life. He was twenty-six and, so it was rumoured, used to be a bodyguard for President Bendjedid. He was trained for his job in the presidential security unit by Italian Carabinieri.
It was Boudiaf’s actions in the months before his assassination, however, that showed he was not afraid of being unpopular. Perhaps to the surprise of the old FLN and army hands who originally supported him, Boudiaf had in May ordered the arrest of retired Major-General Mustafa Beloucif, who was charged before a military tribunal at Blida with misuse of state funds. Boudiaf also ordered the arrest of a prominent businessman on corruption charges; the man was allegedly involved in the illegal sale of subsidised food and smuggling. One of the officers dispatched to conduct this investigation was a lieutenant in the security forces; only days before Boudiaf’s murder, he was assassinated in an Algiers street.
Already one Algerian newspaper columnist had dubbed Boudiaf’s assassination “Algeria-gate” and hinted that details of his death might be covered up like the murders of FLN dissidents Mohamed Kider, shot in a Madrid street in 1967, and Krim Belkacem, the 1970 Frankfurt strangulation victim. In the daily El Watan , Laïd Zaghlani recalled that details of the death of Algerian foreign minister Mohamed Benyahyia—shot down along with his delegation over the Iran–Iraq frontier in 1982 during an attempt to end the war—were kept secret “to protect the nation’s supreme interests.” More likely, this was done to protect Saddam Hussein—but that is another story.
It was now popular in Algeria to attribute Boudiaf’s assassination to the “mafia,” an opaque term used to indicate the social and political class that enriched itself at the expense of the country during Chadli Bendjedid’s twelve-year rule. Former prime minister Abdel-Hamid Brahimi’s claim that bribes of $28 billion— the equivalent of Algeria’s foreign debt—were paid to government officials over a decade had entered popular folklore. Boudiaf’s supporters even claimed that there was an alliance between the “mafia” and the Islamist movements. The one thing they wanted, however, they most certainly would not get.
“We demand to know the whole truth about the assassination of our martyr Mohamed Boudiaf—raise your hands with me and say you want the truth.” The words drifted over the pile of brown clay and dying wreaths under which lay the last, bullet-cracked remains of the assassinated president. And Boudiaf’s anciens combattants comrades—the gunmen and bombers and couriers who more than thirty years earlier had freed their land from Massu’s paras—raised their right hands by the grave and said, firmly and loudly: “I do.”
Age confers dignity and gentleness upon the most ruthless of men and women. White-haired, head bowed in homage to his dead leader, Omar Boudaoud looked like just another old soldier, the kind of stooped figure you might see by an English war memorial any Remembrance Sunday. Yet Boudaoud was the man who led the FLN inside France, who organised the blowing up of fuel dumps, the derailment of a train at Cagnes-sur-Mer, the killing of four gendarmes in Lyon, the attempted assassination of Algerian governor-general Jacques Soustelle. Can men with so bloody an inheritance expect the truth? There was Abu Bakr Belkaïd, for example, freedom fighter, fellow inmate with Boudiaf at Fresnes prison in 1956, mourning the lost opportunities of Algeria. “Things are more serious now,” he said. “President Boudiaf was clean—he had been in exile, far from the establishment, before he became our leader. He came here to modernise our country, to give us a clear path. Yes, I hope we will know the truth about his martyrdom. But will we? Do we know who killed Kennedy? Do we?”
Madame Boudiaf was there; she who said that she did not think “for a single moment” that the FIS had murdered her husband. Cloaked in green and white, face hidden behind sunglasses, she stood before the pile of earth, then embraced Belkaïd and sobbed in his arms, ignoring the marble catafalque next to her husband’s grave. “Houari Boumedienne, 1932–1978,” it said. Boudiaf had turned down Boumedienne’s offer to be president after the 1962 liberation because he did not want to be a figurehead; he opposed Boumedienne from his Moroccan exile. There were other, identical, catafalques in the same row as Boudiaf’s grave, each containing an honoured warrior, their names inscribed on each without comment or verbal homage; you needed memory and a history book to understand their meaning. There was Larbi Ben M’Hidi (murdered by French paratroopers in March 1957). There was Ferhat Abbas (exiled by his own FLN). There was Abane Ramdane (brutally murdered—probably strangled—in 1957 by his FLN colleagues near Tangiers). There was Belkacem, the Frankfurt murder victim, and Aït Hamouda Amirouche and Sid el-Hawass (FLN leaders of Wilaya 4—Bouyali’s sector—both killed by the French in 1959). With so many bullet-smashed bones and broken necks inside these graves, could anyone expect to learn the truth about the cemetery’s newest “martyr”?
Such was the demand for truth, light and discovery in the humid graveyard of El-Alia. No one pointed the finger, of course. No one blamed Islamists or the “mafia” or the old FLN. Behind the gravestones stood a bunch of soldiers, a few blue-uniformed policemen and a scattering of unshaven young men in jeans holding sub-machine guns, ammunition clips in their trouser belts. For security, of course. Just like the bodyguards who protected Mohamed Boudiaf in Annaba, one of whom shot him in the head and back.
Boudiaf’s death was the moment when Algeria’s war turned savage. The BBC, when it wished to air atrocity film, would give due warning to viewers of what it called “a nervous disposition.” Readers are thus duly given the same warning before they wade through the following blood-drenched pages of this book. For within two years, a largely unreported tragedy was unfolding across Algeria, its nature—an insurrection by Muslim militants denied an election victory—well known, but its dimensions growing daily more fearful with bloodletting on a scale unknown since independence from France. By 1994, up to 4,000 violent deaths had been officially recorded and large areas of Algeria were falling each night under the control of an increasingly cohesive military organisation, the “Armed Islamic Movement.” If the previous two years were a playback of Algeria’s “savage war of peace” with France, the bloodbath now unleashed held terrible precedents for the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq a decade later.
The families of security forces personnel—and in some cases the officers themselves—were now forced to retreat each night into government compounds for their own protection. Despite full-scale battles with the Islamists, the Algerian army and paramilitary police were unable to protect the growing number of victims cut down so brutally. The word “cut” was all too accurate. Many of those assassinated by “Islamists” were dispatched with knives, left on garbage tips or roadsides with their heads almost severed from their bodies. Professors and journalists, soldiers and Muslim militants, policemen and local government officials were slaughtered daily. The notebooks of my frightening visits to Algeria were now filling up with details of these gruesome, wanton killings. On 27 January 1994, a twenty-four-year-old unemployed man in the village of Kasr el-Boukhari was totally decapitated and his head left on the steps of a disused cinema. “An example,” his murderers said in a fly-sheet pasted on village walls, “to all those who violate the morality of Islam.” On the eve of a “national conference” of political parties—the FIS, needless to say, was excluded—a policeman was stabbed to death in front of a group of children in Annaba. On the night the conference ended, Islamists assassinated seven civilians in Djidjel province, one of them Dr. Ferhat Chibout, a professor of history, who was shot down in front of his parents, his wife and two children.
As usual, the outside world cared more about foreign than domestic victims of the war, a fact shrewdly grasped by the killers. Their promise to “execute” all citizens of “Crusader states” culminated in early January 1994 in the murder of the twenty-sixth Westerner in Algeria, a female French consular official whose death led at once to the suspension of all visas to France. Monique Afri’s murder was followed by the killing of Raymond Louzoum, a sixty-two-year-old Tunisian-born Jew who had been living in Algiers for thirty years. An optician who had married a Muslim woman and was seeking Algerian citizenship, he played French officers in a series of films about the independence war. Two bullets were fired into Louzoum’s head in Didouche Mourad Street in the very centre of Algiers city.
Not that the Muslim insurrection had a monopoly on killing. It was in late 1993 that an Algerian human rights group first claimed that the government was using death squads in its struggle with the Islamists. A French intelligence intercept of an Algerian police assault on a Muslim stronghold provided clear evidence of an officer ordering his men to take no prisoners. In December 1993, “Islamists”—and at this point, we should perhaps start putting quotation marks around that word— killed twelve army recruits in their camp near Sidi Bel-Abbès. In early January 1994, a soldier was stopped at a routine police checkpoint outside Algiers. He showed his army pass—and immediately had his throat cut. The checkpoint was false; the “policemen” were gunmen in police uniform. Or were they? These faux barrages were becoming ever more frequent and creeping closer to the capital each week. It soon became all too obvious to the few journalists still travelling to Algiers that in many cases the killers were real policemen—working for the government by day and the insurrection by night.
Already the army was using tanks and helicopters against “Islamist” units in the mountains of Lakhdaria. It had little choice, because the insurgents were now moving across Algeria in company strength. When a dozen Croat guest workers had their throats cut in December 1993, they had no chance of escape; their executioners were among fifty armed men who stormed their accommodation shacks outside Oran. At times, Algeria’s cities were close to mass panic. Bread queues in Algiers were outnumbered only by the thousands of Algerians desperate to leave their country who stood outside the French embassy day and night until Monique Afri’s murder closed down the visa section. Nor did the authorities allow Algerians to forget what civil war would mean. Every day, state television repeated news film of the post-Soviet slaughter in Kabul, MiG jet fighters bombing the Afghan capital, corpses of women and children lying in the streets. If you do not remain united behind your government, the unspoken message went, then this will be Algiers and Oran and Constantine and all the other cities of Algeria. But how far could the authorities go in frightening a people into supporting a government?
Within a year, the government was sending a delegation of high-ranking Algerian army intelligence officers on a tour of Arab capitals, notably Cairo and Damascus, in the hope of learning how to combat “Islamist” guerrilla armies. In Egypt—where real Islamists had killed President Sadat—they learned how Egypt’s paramilitary police stormed the hideouts of armed insurgents in the sugar-cane fields around Assiout and Beni Suef before interrogating the survivors under torture or hanging them after sentences in military courts. In Damascus, they learned first-hand of how Syrian special forces with artillery and tanks killed thousands of Muslims in the rebellious city of Hama in 1982, pulverising its ancient streets and mosques. At the end of December 1994, the Algerian army staged an identical assault on the Muslim stronghold around Aïn Defla—about the same size as Hama—with artillery and tanks, and slaughtered up to 3,000 alleged GIA men. Again, there were no prisoners.
It would be intriguing to know how many times these Middle Eastern conflicts have been used as school classes for other, later military campaigns. During the 1954–62 Algerian war the French gave the Israeli government unprecedented access to their war against the FLN. Yitzhak Rabin, who was then Israeli army chief of staff, Uzi Narkiss, the Israeli military attaché in Paris, and Chaim Herzog, who was then director of Israeli military intelligence, were taken to visit a naval commando unit based in southern France, the French commando training centre in Corsica, and to Algeria itself where, according to Herzog, “we watched the bitter struggle against the FLN.” Forty years later, the Pentagon sent a delegation to Israel to study Israeli army tactics during the Palestinian intifada, so they could adopt these lessons in their own battle with Iraqi insurgents—which they did with predictably disastrous results. In some derivative and unconscious way, the Americans in Iraq may thus have been copying—at second hand—France’s equally deplorable tactics in the Algerian war of independence.
“The Plot,” so deeply buried in the psyche of all Algerians and all Arabs—and indeed, in the U.S. administration of George W. Bush since 2001—now took on a disturbing shape. The GIA convinced themselves that French military aid and political encouragement for the regime—most notably from the intrigue-loving and authoritarian French interior minister, Charles Pasqua—constituted a declaration of war against Algerian Muslims by the old “Crusader” states of Europe. The Algerian government persuaded themselves that the United States was now supporting the GIA. Why else, they asked, would Washington allow a spokesman for the FIS, Anwar Haddam, to run an office in Washington? Why else would the Americans urge “dialogue” with the Islamists, something they would never do with Israel’s Muslim enemies? Washington obviously wanted to create “moderate ” Islamic regimes in North Africa—rather than democracies which they would not be able to control. Or so read “The Plot.”
In Algeria itself, fear was becoming a disease. “I went to a relative’s funeral in Oran in December—he died a natural death—but in the funeral a sheikh mentioned an Algerian woman who had just been murdered along with her Belgian husband.” There was silence at the dinner table; this was not a moment to rattle our knives and forks over the hot spicy peppers and tomatoes. “The sheikh didn’t talk about the murdered Belgian—he ignored him. But of the woman, he said: ‘If she hadn’t married a foreigner, this wouldn’t have happened.’ ”
He paused for the horror of the statement to sink in. “How can we reason with people like this? How can we let people like this sheikh come to power? A lot of our problem here was our education system. The FLN taught children that history began in 1962, after the war of independence. They were not taught about Abdelkader, our warrior who fought the French. But the people rejected the FLN and their version of history. So the only thing that was true to them was the Koran— which gave the fundamentalist leaders increased power. They were like the sheikh in the Oran mosque; they could take any sentence from the Koran and light bonfires with it.”
The bonfires are everywhere. I do not tell our host that I have seen a post-mortem photograph of the Belgian man and his murdered wife. The Algerian government has issued a vile dossier of decapitated corpses, colour snapshot after colour snapshot of slit throats and bullet-punctured corpses from Algeria’s mortuaries. The grey-haired woman lies on a mortuary floor, a bullet hole on the right of her mouth, eyes partially opened, right breast exposed above a white shroud. Her husband, in only his underpants, has bullet holes in his chest, shoulder and face. His eyes are staring at the camera as they must have stared at the killers when they came to the family home at Bouira on 29 December 1993. Opposite them lies a young Frenchman, murdered at Bir Khadem on 23 March 1994, his short black hair still neatly parted, looking downwards at the two bullet holes in his chest. Is that, I ask myself, what he did at the moment of death? Did he feel the metal streaking into his chest and glance downwards in surprise to see what had smashed his heart?
Turn the pages and it gets worse. The Croat guest workers overwhelmed outside Oran had their throats cut. They are not neat little slits in the neck, an invisible razor blade that might have rendered death swift and merciful. Their throats have been hacked open, sawed through, the blood pouring over their chests. One of them, a young man, is grimacing in pain, his suffering written across his dead face, his lips pursed as he tries to cope with the pain. Whoever carved their way into his throat went on slicing away until they reached the top of his backbone. You can see the white of the bone at the back of his neck.
Other bodies are a butcher’s shop of blood and flesh, their faces hacked off, their arms stripped of flesh. In some cases, only the severed heads appear in the photographs. The left eye of Djillali Nouri, murdered on 28 August 1994 in Aïn Defla, is open wide, looking at the blanket upon which his head is resting, in horror, as he must have gazed upon the assassin’s knife. And after a while, this pornography of cruelty becomes banal. The head of Ahmed Haddad, murdered on 13 May 1994, is lying on a tiled shelf, blood dripping from the base of the skull, a human hand steadying the head with two fingers lest it roll off onto the floor. Halima Menad was a young woman, killed at Aïn Defla on 23 July 1994, her long dark hair and half-open eyes still containing a ghost of beauty, her ringlets bathed in the gore of her cut-open neck. Yamina Benamara, another young woman decapitated near Oran on 11 April 1994, was left lying on the floor of her home in her night-clothes. Her body lies on a cheap, orange and blue carpet, partially covered with a cushion. Her head, part of her neck still adhering to her chin, lies on another carpet, eyes closed. Other photographs record the burning of factories, the wreckage of schools, buses, trucks.
Everyone joins the porno market of death. In Middlesex, a FIS front organisation publishes its own grisly photos, a heavily bearded “Islamist” riddled with holes; “victim of torture,” it says in the caption, “whose body and neck were drilled with a sharp instrument. He sacrificed his life and everything dear to him.” The man’s eyes are open in a quite natural way, looking straight into the camera as if anxious to explain just how terrible his suffering must have been. There are carbonised corpses, a girl in her twenties bathed in blood, a bald man with a bullet hole in his cranium. Instead of wrecked factories, this booklet contains coloured photographs of the desert prison camps in which thousands of young Algerians are incarcerated, photographs of Algerian cops interrogating young men in the streets of Algiers. The government’s handbook of decapitation claims that 15,000 men and women have been murdered; most of them had their heads chopped off. The FIS pamphlet says that “since the Junta’s coup d’état, 60,000 Muslims have been killed.” Above the photograph of a young man lying in a halo of blood, it says: “As for those who are slain in God’s cause, never will he let their deeds go to waste . . . Holy Koran, 47, verse 4.”
It will be ten years before I see this kind of butchery again. For every one of these photographs could have been taken in the mortuaries of Iraq in and after 2003. So could the snapshots of burned trucks and destroyed factories.
And of course, before I start to ask just who carried out these crimes against humanity—for they cannot all be the work of the GIA or renegade FIS members— I ask myself a more prosaic, more obvious, more terrible question. What kind of man—for the killers are all men—could hold young Nabila Rezki, with her short frizzy hair and tip-tilted nose and lovely face, to the floor of her home in Aïn Defla on 23 July 1994, and carve open her neck as if she were a sheep or a chicken? What about the cries of horror, the shrieks of pain, the desperate, hopeless appeals for mercy that must have been uttered before the knife sank in? What about “the girl and the child and love”?
And after a few minutes, it dawns on me that the attention I pay to this horror, the detail I find in the photographs, makes me complicit in these crimes. I remember how the Iranian Revolutionary Guards would hand round photographs of the dead Airbus passengers in the refrigerated Bandar Abbas warehouse in 1988, studying the minutiae of suffering, the ant-tracks of blood on the bodies, the eyes still looking sightlessly from the faces. Again, they remind me of medieval paintings, of Hieronymus Bosch’s skewered corpses, of Goya’s raped and eviscerated victims of French cruelty, of praying, arrow-pierced saints. Once, in a Kosovo field, I found an Albanian man’s head lying in the grass, lopped off by an American air force bomb dropped on his refugee convoy, staring up at the sky; and I thought to myself, very coldly, that this must have been a common sight in Tudor England or anywhere in fifteenth-century Europe. Later, I met the young woman who had found the head and who had placed it on the grass because she thought that it would give the dead man more dignity if the face of his severed head was able to look at the sky.
We travel to Algeria now in fear, we few journalists. Lara Marlowe of Time magazine and I work out a routine. If we visit a shop, we must stay only four minutes to buy our fruit or teabags or books. Five minutes would give someone enough time to bring the killers. We hide our faces in newspapers when we are trapped in downtown traffic. We walk between the car and the front door of a family home with manic, Monty Python speed, the journalists of silly walks, characters in an old silent movie, our terror forcing us to move with high-speed normality. Ring the doorbell, watch the street in a casual, breathless way, curse the occupants for not answering the moment we ring. At dinner, we look at our watches. Curfew is at 11:30. The minute hand that creeps past eleven makes our smiles stiffen, our desire to flee all the greater. Cops want to escort us through the cities, policemen who sometimes wear hoods. “For your protection,” they say. Yes, but who wants to be seen travelling with a policeman wearing a balaclava, a cagoule, to be identified with the men who are arresting the young of Algiers and who are—the proof starts to mount in ever more horrifying evidence—tortured, quite often to death?
We travel to Blida, to the old French town in what we will soon call “the triangle of death.” Yes, we love these racy names. Ten years later, in Iraq, we would start talking about “the Sunni triangle”—which wasn’t all Sunni and wasn’t a triangle at all—and then, inevitably, we would create in our pages an Iraqi “triangle of death.” The Blida version took only half an hour to reach. On 30 January 1994, the policemen there wore hoods and carried automatic rifles. The walls were spray-painted “FIS.” And the body of Sheikh Mohamed Bouslimani—two months in a mountain grave before his corpse was discovered—reeked of formaldehyde as it lay, wrapped in a brown and yellow blanket, in the colonial town square beneath the Atlas Mountains.
Sitting on the floor of the single-storey family home, up in the foothills above the plain of the Mitidja, his eighty-four-year-old mother, Zohra, tears gleaming on wrinkled cheeks behind old spectacles, tried to understand why her son had been murdered. “Thank God I was able to see him in the hospital and able to kiss him,” she said. “I hope we will see him in paradise. He was an obedient son. It was God in his mercy who gave him to us and God in his mercy who took him away from me. I must accept this.”
In Algeria, acceptance—of kidnapping, murder, head-chopping, death—is now a way of life. But who did kill Bouslimani? Who would want to kidnap and then assassinate a professor of Arabic who was leader of Algeria’s “Guidance and Renewal” charity, who only a year before had travelled to Sarajevo and brought back dozens of wounded Bosnian Muslims to recover in Algeria? “The hand of traitors took him away,” was the explanation of Sheikh Mahfouz Nahnah, the leader of the Hamas party of which Bouslimani was a founding member, as he preached in that small colonial square, weeping before eight thousand mourners.
So who were the “traitors” here? The murderers, certainly: the four men who took the balding, bearded sheikh from his single-storey villa on 25 November 1993, and allowed him just one brief telephone call to his family a few days later before silencing him for ever. In the study of his home, we could see the religious books he was reading when called to the front door, and the telephone line—now reconnected with black masking tape—which the kidnappers cut before they took the sheikh away in his own battered Renault car. Just for a chat, a few words, nothing to worry about, they told his wife, Goussem. He would be back soon. The usual tale.
Amid the hundreds of white-scarved women who sat below the eucalyptus trees and the ramshackle slum in which Sheikh Bouslimani lived, an old friend recounted the inevitable. “They let him make just one telephone call. His family asked: ‘Who is holding you?’ and he was silent. Then they heard a voice in the background saying: ‘Tell them it’s the GIA.’ Then he said: ‘You heard.’ His family asked the sheikh how he was, and he replied: ‘Sometimes you have to thank God, even in the worst of situations.’ And that was the last anyone heard of him.”
But not the last that was seen. Ten days before a hopeless “national conference” on Algeria which was supposed to resolve the country’s crisis, a rumour spread that the sheikh’s body had been found high in the mountains, buried beside trees near a cemetery at El-Affroun. No more was said until the conference, which Hamas briefly attended but which was boycotted by all major political groups, came to an end. At which point the Algerian authorities suddenly announced that the sheikh’s remains had indeed been found on the mountainside. And, with almost the same breath, that two men suspected of his kidnapping—Guitoun Nacer and Rashid Zerani—had been arrested. Nacer and Zerani, it was said, had been ordered by Djafaar el-Afghani, a FIS member who allegedly played a leadership role in the GIA, to abduct the sheikh in order to persuade Hamas to boycott the conference.
The government was happy to blame the FIS for all the country’s miseries. Tens of thousands of Islamist militants—and members of the armed groups at war with the pouvoir—lived in Blida. That is why its walls were covered in FIS slogans and why the town’s young men watched foreigners with the deepest suspicion. That is why the paramilitary police, clad in dirty khaki and fingering their Kalashnikovs, stood in the streets around us wearing woollen hoods, sacks with slits just wide enough for eyes to observe and orders to be shouted.
But there were friends of the sheikh—schoolfriends from his days at the Blida lycée where he taught Arabic—who were suspicious of the story. “All of a sudden, the government finds the body and the culprits just after the conference ends,” a Hamas member said. “What am I supposed to think of this? Hamas is more moderate than the FIS, but there are sympathisers of the FIS in our party. So why should the FIS kill him? I don’t know—though I’d like to hear the FIS denounce this murder; I would like to hear them say it wasn’t them. But there are those who say that the government wants to kill off Hamas—he is the second leader to be murdered—so that they can have an open war between the army and the FIS. And there are other parties like the Culture and Democracy Party who don’t want to see any party like Hamas because it shows that Islam can be humane and moderate. My suspicion is simple: everyone was ready to see the sheikh killed.” People die when everyone finds that their death is in their interest. The FIS lost a moderate opponent, the authorities were able to blame the FIS, while those who have no truck with religion in Algerian politics no longer have the annoyingly popular Bouslimani to contend with.
And the sheikh was a popular man in Blida. His funeral in the shadow of the ice-sheathed mountains was a dolorous, dignified affair. Mourners in the square wept themselves into unconsciousness, swooning into the arms of their friends, as Sheikh Nahnah announced that Bouslimani “did everything for the soil of Algeria and now the soil of Algeria is taking him back.” Bouslimani had no children—his brother died in the war against the French in which the sheikh himself was imprisoned for five years—but he and Goussem had been bringing up a sister’s daughter as their own. Asma lay crying in front of her adopted mother, wringing her hands in grief as the body was taken for its final burial in the town below the family’s poor suburb of Sidi el-Kebir. The broken-down hamlet was named after the sixteenth-century founder of Blida, Ahmed el-Kebir, who brought with him from Spain the Arabs of Andalusia—irrigators of fields and planters of orange orchards—long before the French arrived in Algeria to colonise a nation whose tragedy had still not ended.
Algeria’s next president was a colourless ex-general who knew about anarchy long before this latest war. As ambassador to Romania, General Liamine Zeroual witnessed the chaos that followed the overthrow of President Ceauşescu. A former artillery commander at Sidi Bel-Abbès, commanding officer of the 6th Motorised Regiment at Tamanrasset, director of the Cherchell military academy, former minister of defence and now the country’s sixth post-independence president, Zeroual was to be the latest “last chance” for Algeria. In grey suit and dark tie, he marched into the “Club des Pins,” past the FLN nomenklatura, past the ranks of crimson-and-green uniformed Spahi warriors, a frozen smile on his face, nodding to the row of generals and admirals whose golden crossed swords and palm-leaf insignia twinkled under the television lights. No live coverage for this installation, I noticed. No more live television of a president after Boudiaf’s live-time demise. So we all listened in pin-dropping silence on 31 January 1994 as Zeroual placed his hand on the Koran and promised “to find a way out of the country’s crisis through dialogue.”
Did anyone believe this? As Zeroual entered the auditorium, he must have heard what had just happened. Only three and a half hours earlier, yet another politician had walked to his front door in Algiers to be confronted by a man who, with deadly efficiency, cut his throat, left him dead upon the pavement and—like almost all Algeria’s murderers—made good his escape. Rachid Tzigani, the national secretary of a minuscule right-wing party which had long called for an army takeover, was leaving his apartment block in Badjdera to drive to his office at the Ministry of Public Works when he came face to face with his assassin. There were, of course, no witnesses.
A day later, French television journalist Olivier Quemener is filming in the Casbah. A gunman assassinates him and he is found with his wounded reporter lying beside him in tears. At Zeroual’s installation, I had helped to carry Quemener’s camera legs. We had travelled back together on the same bus to Algiers, chatting about the difficulties of working in this “democratic” police state, of the dangers that awaited us. And now he was added to the list of murdered foreigners. “He didn’t take a police escort with him,” a cop said with near-contempt at the Hôtel el-Djezair. No of course not, Quemener was trying to do his job, bravely and unprotected in the heart of Algeria’s war.
Within the steel-grilled office of Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, in the centre of old Algiers, the statistics are pinned to the wall. A recent total shows 243 security forces dead, along with 881 “Islamists” and 335 civilians—with an overall official death toll of 3,000 that no one, except the government “minders,” believes.119 Government courts have condemned hundreds of “Islamists” to death: 212 in Algiers, 64 in Oran, 37 in Constantine. Penned in each day are those individual killings that agency journalists are able to keep track of. Assassinats, it says in red ink. “March 16th 1993, Djillali Liabès, former minister of education . . . shot outside his home in Kouba; March 17th 1993 . . . Laadi Flici, doctor, writer, member of national consultative council . . . December 28th 1993 . . . Yousef Sebti, poet, writer, francophone, professor, killed by unknown men . . . ” Even the vice president of the Algerian Judo Federation is the victim of what the papers call a “cowardly assassination.”
At dinner, a woman friend hands us a letter under the table, like someone offering pornographic literature. Why not, for the contents were obscene enough. “In the name of God, the most merciful,” the anonymous sender has written to her in spidery biro. “No more work. You are a whore. In the name of God, the most merciful, no more Police . . . God is great.” The woman is a dentist and among her patients are policemen. “What can I do?” she asks us. “I must go on working. Maybe I will leave Algeria.” The threat is in French, the Koranic verse in Arabic. I can’t help noticing that the writer’s French is better than his Arabic, a strange reflection on the hatred for the West so often expressed by “Islamists”— if they sent the letter. It has been franked at the Algiers railway station post office at a cost of 2 dinars. Terror by mail for 14 cents.
A former minister of education, a judo expert, a poet, a dentist, a journalist. One “Islamist” tract lists thirty Francophone journalists “sentenced to death”; nine have so far been murdered. In 1993, Tahar Djaout, the award-winning novelist and editor, a lover of French literature, is shot in the head outside his home and dies in a coma. In 1994, Saïd Mekbel, perhaps the finest Algerian journalist, whose column “Mesmar J’ha”—“The Rusty Nail”—appeared in the daily Le Matin, was assassinated by a well-dressed young man who walked into the pizzeria where he was taking lunch and shot him twice in the head. No one intercepted the killer because he was a regular client. One of the newspaper’s staff ran to the pizzeria:
In the back of the restaurant, sitting behind the table, still holding a knife and fork in his hands, his head leaning slightly forward, as if he were looking at the food on his plate, Saïd was still breathing. I told him, “Saïd, hold on. We’re taking you to the hospital.” I reached out to caress his hair but pulled my hand back, covered with blood.
Mekbel, whose paternal grandfather fought for France in both the First and the Second World Wars, left an unfinished article in his office in which he wrote: “I would really like to know who is going to kill me.”
Even the most innocent were “sentenced.” Twenty-year-old Karima Belhaj worked as a secretary at the Algiers police welfare organisation. A pretty woman who had just become engaged to a local bus-driver, she was betrayed for $18 by a boy who lived in the same block of slums in the suburb of Eucalyptus. As she was walking home one evening, a man grabbed her hair, pulled her backwards to the ground and fired a bullet into her abdomen. As she arched forward in agony, another bullet was fired into her brain. Her brother heard the shooting. Her last words to him were: “Take me to the hospital—I want to live.” Then she died.
It is important to know of these terrible deeds if we are to understand the ferocity with which the army and police responded. There was now powerful evidence that police in the Belcourt and Kouba districts of Algiers selected former prisoners for execution whenever a policeman was murdered. In three separate police stations in the capital, torture was now routine. The torture chambers were set up in underground air-raid shelters originally dug beneath French police stations by the Allied armies in 1942. There were persistent rumours that bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting were brought from these buildings during the hours of curfew for secret burial. Former inmates of Sekardji prison described months of solitary confinement in total darkness in rat-infested cells. One ex-prisoner I met described an inmate en route to his trial who “looked like a caveman,” with shoulder-length hair, inch-long nails, lice on his skin and pus oozing from his ears. When Sekardji prisoners went on hunger strike to protest against these conditions in the autumn of 1993, police fired tear gas into the jail, asphyxiating an inmate to death.
Human rights activists inside Algeria had more dreadful reports. On 15 January 1994, they claimed, an army ratissage in the town of Larba ended when soldiers read out a list of seven men—Tayeb Belarussi, Mahfoud Salami, Halim Djaidaoui, Azedin Guename, Mohamed Kader and two brothers called Medjadni—put them against a wall and shot them. Soldiers who returned to the town later in the day allegedly fired into a crowd, killing a two-year-old girl and her grandmother. On 23 January, according to the same sources, soldiers entered the town of Boudouaou, 35 kilometres from Algiers, selected four men—Mohamed Saïd Tigalmanin, Abdullah Lanaoni, Ali Borshentouf and Messaoud Boutiche— and executed them against a wall. Was it any surprise, therefore, that many Algerians now suspected the security authorities were themselves trying to create a climate of terror? And was it any surprise that the “Islamists” helped to spread such rumours?
As the years of blood went by, we would learn that the Algerian security forces were far more intimately involved in atrocities than we could have imagined, indeed had themselves instigated some of the various massacres that they blamed upon the “Islamists.” I still have my notes—from a 1995 interview with Algeria’s paramilitary police at the Haddad garde mobile station in Harrash—in which an officer who wisely asked for anonymity told me gloomily that
a classic guerrilla war like this will never work. It didn’t work for the French. It won’t work for us. The only solution is by infiltrating them, dressing like them, living with them, using their people.
In my notebook at the time, I underscored the last three words, adding my own reflection—“Ouch!”—in the margin.
All across Algeria were the signs of collapse. In the last two weeks of January 1994 alone, 116 policemen were believed to have been murdered, far more than officially admitted. Large areas of the country were effectively under the control of the insurgents. The government now had real control only in Algiers, Oran and Annaba. Even Constantine was in the hands of gunmen in the hours of darkness. On a 250-kilometre journey through the Kabyle Mountains, I discovered that the security authorities had retreated from the roads. Army and police checkpoints lay abandoned. The only policeman I saw between Algiers and Tizi-Ouzou stood with a machine gun behind a barricade of sandbags outside a bullet-spattered police station at Isser. In Tizi-Ouzou itself, I met frightened men and women who spoke of a “terrorist invasion” of the surrounding villages each night. On the drive back to Algiers, I came across only one military patrol, two armoured vehicles manned by helmeted and masked soldiers, their machine guns pointed at passing traffic. These were precisely the same scenes I was to witness ten years later on the highways south of Baghdad: the same loss of government control, the same abandonment, the same fear.
My own reports from Algeria now had a charnel-house quality about them: girls shot dead for refusing to wear the veil, sons beheaded because their parents were policemen and policewomen, women raped to death in police dungeons. When terrible reports came in from the Algerian countryside in November 1994— of two young women whose throats were cut because they refused to engage in “pleasure marriages” with Muslim fighters—there were many outside Algeria who refused to believe it. When I told local Hizballah officials in Beirut of this, they shook their heads in disbelief. “Truly, I think we are the most mature Islamic group,” one of them said—which, coming from the Hizballah, carried its own message.
A few years earlier, he might have claimed that all Muslim forces were united in one aim. Algeria’s war changed that. There was a time when the Algerian authorities would have tried to censor the atrocities being carried out by the “Islamists,” but the sheer cruelty with which the innocent were being exterminated forced them to change their policy; now they wished to médiatiser les atrocités. The two women did have their throats cut—their heads were afterwards torn from their bodies—because they refused “pleasure marriages.” One of them was twenty-five, the other twenty-one, and both had been kidnapped with other members of their family from their home in Blida. A defecting Algerian army officer spoke of 50,000 troops now engaged in the “anti-terrorist struggle” and of “secret liquidation” of many suspected “Islamists.”
MOHAMED USED TO ATTEND a Koranic school, a madrassa, and was preaching in a mosque in Algiers. He sits on a sofa in an Algiers “safe” house to which Lara Marlowe of Time and I have been invited. It is 3 February 1994, just four months after thirty ski-masked commandos came for him at his home at two in the morning. He is aged far beyond his nineteen years. He stares at a brass table top as he talks:
They hit my 48-year-old mother. They blindfolded me and drove me straight to a torture room. It was down three or four flights of stairs and it was very cold. They stripped me naked. There was a manhole in the floor, and they kept dunking my head in the sewage. They asked me over and over: “Where are the weapons?” I said I didn’t know. They kept insisting, because I preached in the mosque on Fridays. When they took off my blindfold, I saw they were all wearing blue police jumpsuits and hoods. There were about eighteen of them. I could hear other people screaming. There were very bright lights, and bloodstains on the walls. They tied me to a concrete bench and pinched my nostrils shut, then stuffed a rag soaked in water and bleach in my mouth. They poured more of the stuff through the rag, until my stomach filled with water and bleach, then they kicked my stomach until I vomited. This went on for three hours.
This young man was then taken to the basement of the Châteauneuf police school in the El Biar district. Mohamed points to dark purple scars on his feet. He was given electric shocks on his feet, he says, “with a thing that looked like a pistol. ” Ten days later, he was taken to the central commissariat near the Air France building in central Algiers:
The officers at the commissariat in charge of torture were called Kraa and Abdel-Samad . . . they tortured us in front of each other, for psychological effect. They showed us dead people hanging by handcuffs from the ceiling. These were people who had died from torture and starvation. They had been in cells with me. They were from Belcourt . . . I saw five dead people at the commissariat. Two hanging from the ceiling. The other three had been tortured and they were burned to death with blow torches. They threatened to bring my wife if I didn’t tell the truth. A man called Sid-Ahmed Shabla from Baraki was in prison with me. He told me they tortured his wife. They brought his mother and tortured and raped her in front of him. I was outside the room when they did this, and when his mother came out. She was naked and covered in blood. She was about fifty-five. She told us to be brave, to hang on. Sid-Ahmed was condemned to death. At the commissariat, I was tortured so badly that I condemned my own brother as being in the resistance. They tied my hands and feet and laid me on my stomach on the floor. They smashed my head against the floor until my teeth fell out.
Mohamed breaks down in tears. We sit and wait until he wants to talk again:
They brought my brother to the commissariat and put us face to face in a room. I told him: “It’s not true, I only said it because of the torture.” My brother was weeping and he said: “May God forgive you.” They broke his ribs and let him go . . . Under torture, I’d said I was collecting medicine and money for the resistance. It wasn’t true. I only said this because I wanted them to stop torturing me . . . I was barefoot in front of the [tribunal] judge and my body was still covered with marks. I cried in front of him and said I’d been tortured. He said: “Yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.” . . . At Sekardji, they put me in a narrow, wet cell underground for forty-five days . . . There was no light, and many rats. There I was tortured again, both by beating on my feet and the chiffon. They gave me one small bowl of soup full of cockroaches and one piece of bread every day.
He names his torturers as a Lieutenant Bouamra and Saïd Haddad; the prisoners called the latter “Hitler” because of his moustache. Mohamed was taken to court again and this time acquitted. He says the guards told him: “If you come back, we’ll finish you off.” Now he is in hiding “because death squads are going around killing everyone who comes out of prison.”
NOW A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNt of fraternal war, given to us by a man whom I called Lyes—for his safety—in my report:
Up the hill at Duc des Cars, there were two boys who went to school together and lived in the same building. One of them was a fundamentalist, the other a policeman. The fundamentalist was sent to a prison camp in the south. When he got out, he wanted revenge so he killed his school-friend, the policeman. So the policeman’s father killed the “Islamist.” Everyone in our neighbourhood knew them. If you go to a policeman’s funeral, the FIS say you’re with the government. And if you go to an “Islamist’s” funeral, the police come after you. So the people in our building paid condolences to both families.
Even ex-general Jacques Massu vouchsafed his advice to the embattled Algerian government. “The security forces have the principal responsibility for the future of their country,” the former commander of the brutal French Paras pompously announced. “With the West’s help, their power will inevitably be successful.”120 The Algerians never asked for Massu’s advice, but he would have approved of the elevation to corps commander of General Mohamed Lamari, leader of the Algerian army’s éradicateur faction. And he would have had no objection to Abderrahmane Meziane-Cherif as Algerian minister of the interior, one of that rare breed of Algerian muscle-men of whom all Algerians talk, who believe that only a military solution can bring peace to Algeria. So when he walked into his office on the second floor of the Palais du Gouvernement—well-cut blue suit, red tie, goatee beard and a massive Havana—I asked the fatal question. Who were the éradicateurs? And was he one of them?
Meziane-Cherif drew heavily on his cigar for a long time—a very long time indeed—before replying. And then he said:
A farmer can be an eradicator when he pulls weeds from the fields, sometimes a man has to purify water and cleanse things of insects and bugs. There is an extreme situation of violence and terrorism in Algeria. Do you call a law-enforcement officer who does his job an eradicator? . . . People usually call those who will commit treason and escape “conciliators.” If I have to choose between the two, I will do everything to ensure Algeria remains a modern society.
In other words, Meziane-Cherif was an “eradicator,” prepared to fight to the end against “terrorists,” “criminals,” the “virus”—his word, along with the Saddamite “insects”—that threatened the country. He was one of the hard men, sentenced to death by the French in the war of independence, a former governor of Jelfa, Nijaya, Gelba, Aïn Defla and Algiers, the kind of guy whose jails would not have air conditioning. When I ask if it was fair to condemn a recent Western initiative in Rome in which Algerians—including the FIS—called for peace and condemned violence, the minister’s aide, a bruiser of a man with close-cropped hair and a handshake as fierce as a lobster’s claw, mutters: “It condemned violence in a philosophical way.” So much for conciliation.
The Algerian war had slipped into a system of self-provocation in which every atrocity would be avenged fourfold. In January 1995 the “Islamic Salvation Army,” widely regarded as the military wing of the FIS, had announced that they would launch a bloody offensive to coincide with Ramadan in which they would intensify their attacks against “apostates and their henchmen.” A few days earlier, issue No. 33 of the “Islamic Salvation Army” broadsheet El-Feth el-Moubine— “Brilliant Victory”—promised that the group’s operations would “affect the capital.” Sure enough, a car bomb in the centre of Algiers killed 38 people and left 256 wounded. This was precisely what Iraq’s insurgents would do a decade later, by marking Ramadan as a month of military offensive—and then assaulting their American occupiers and their Iraqi police auxiliaries without any heed to the innocents who would die. The Algiers bomb had been set off outside the police headquarters in Amrouche Street—a gaunt, four-storey building in whose dungeons many Islamists claimed to have been tortured—and exploded at a time when Algerians were buying food before the start of the month of fasting. Many of the 256 wounded lost limbs.
The most vulnerable of the innocent were, increasingly, the victims of the most ruthless attacks. In January 1995, gunmen came to the home of Salah Zoubar, an independence war veteran, near Chlef in western Algeria, kidnapped his twenty-four-year-old daughter and three sons—the youngest only thirteen—and shot all of them in the head. In February, the “Islamists” murdered Azzedine Medjoubi, the director of the Algerian national theatre. A popular film actor with a comical drooping moustache—he was well known in Algiers for his adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire—he was walking out of his theatre after organising a children’s performance when two men in their twenties fired several bullets into his head.121
Events now moved so fast in Algeria that even those of us travelling regularly to the country could scarcely keep pace. In February, a prison riot at the Sekardji jail—the old French Barberousse prison in central Algiers where the guillotine once fell on the necks of FLN captives—ended with ninety-nine inmates dead, among them two senior officials of the FIS. Algerian paramilitary police had surrounded the prison after four of the guards, according to the authorities, had their throats cut. No one knew if they were trying to break out—as 900 “Islamists” did from Tazult-Lambese jail the previous year—or whether the bloodbath was, as the FIS would later claim, a deliberate massacre by the authorities. Two Algerian newspapers reported that fourteen prisoners had been murdered by their own cell-mates. At first, it was said that Lembarek Boumarafi—accused of Boudiaf’s murder—was among the dead. But then he suddenly surfaced on television screens with nothing more than a wounded knee, sporting a new moustache, smiling slightly and greeting viewers of his videotape with the words: “It’s me, Boumarafi, and I’m alive.” Then the rumour spread that it was not Boumarafi on the tape.
The Algerian war was being fought in the shadows. Both sides wished this darkness to envelop their struggle, although the results were always ghoulishly publicised. I spent several days with the Algerian garde mobile , transformed into paramilitary units for the duration, watching the hooded, masked cops hauling young men from the slums for interrogation. We would snake through the poverty of Algiers in a convoy of green-and-white Land Cruisers, Kalashnikovs pointing from the doors of the rear vehicles, between crowds of men who stood in the ordure and garbage that lay piled along the tracks through Château Rouge, Cherarba, Gaid Gassem, Eucalyptus, Houaoura. Sometimes we broke into open country, the gendarmes in their green uniforms running into the orange orchards around Blida to search youths whose hands were held high, their faces filled with terror, the muzzles of the cops’ Kalashnikovs caressing the backs of their necks. What happened, I kept asking myself, when we journalists were not travelling with the police?
Commandant Mohamed—I knew his family name but promised never to reveal it—would become an inverted tourist guide, pointing out places of dangerous attraction: two gutted supermarkets, a burned-out gas factory, a row of carbonised trucks belonging to a government cooperative, a wrecked school with shattered windows. Once we passed an entire railway train, its row of silver carriages burned and twisted in a siding. Noting their hoods and ski-masks, the people of Algiers had long ago nicknamed the cops Ninjas , a title they were happy to adopt. Each time we passed a road, we could see young men at the other end, running for cover into shops and laneways. The youths who did not run looked at us with such hatred that their gaze went right through us, as if they had already defeated the government which the commandant’s men represented. But the facts came pouring forth from Mohamed. Almost all the armed “Islamists” carried Czech or Israeli weapons—“Skorpions or Uzis,” he said—he thought they had been smuggled across Algeria’s borders with Morocco, Libya, Tunisia or Mali. They were making bombs with butane gas bottles filled with explosives, glass, acetylene, sulphur and iron filings, buried in the roads and detonated with batteries.
“They are organised,” he said. “There is a ‘brain’ behind them. These are people who evolve with the situation. They change. They used to use stolen hunting rifles. Now they use automatic weapons and explosives. They strike wherever they want and they have the initiative. They have ‘spotters’ and they have a method. The leaders know each other but those who make the attacks don’t know each other. It’s a pyramid structure.” The Islamists had shaved their beards, donned djellaba robes, sometimes pretended to be fruit-pickers, rifles at their side in the orange groves, resting in the slums at night, walking out through the suburban wadis by the sewage overflows at dawn. “In Algiers, the GIA are much more numerous than the FIS’s armed movement,” Commandant Mohamed confided to us as he relaxed in his office in Harrash, an old Rolling Stones 33 rpm long-playing record track—“Street-Fighting Man”—on the turntable. “When you fight with them, they fight to the end. They never surrender.” Six years later, that is what the U.S. Special Forces officers would say about the al-Qaeda men whom they fought in western Afghanistan.
In Bab el-Oued, the hardest of all the “Islamist” strongholds in any Algerian city, Commandant Mohamed and his fifteen men strung themselves along the pavement, watched by perhaps a thousand young men, so I could take photographs. “It’s swarming with ‘spotters,’ ” he murmured. “Look at the way they look at us.” The cops pointed their rifles at the roofs and balconies as the crowds grew thicker, more disturbed. Then suddenly, Mohamed wanted to leave. We had been here just two minutes. “We should go,” he snapped. “Now.” How many new GIA recruits had his men just created? Support for authority does not come from a rifle at the neck. Almost every street through which we passed had effectively been lost to government control. There were, to be sure, no “no-go” areas in Algiers. But there were no safe areas either.
I liked travelling with these men and they liked the company of Westerners for the false sense of protection it gave them. It was false. I knew if I stuck with them long enough, I would see the war; I knew that as the days passed, there would be a shooting, an ambush which I would see with my own eyes rather than report at second hand hours or days later. But I never believed it would come so quickly.
THE PINE TREES SWAYED in the early morning light, the orange orchards gleamed gold, the fields of yellow rape seed stretched to a grey curtain of mountains. You couldn’t find a more sleepy laneway, meandering through cypress trees past streams flooded by the night showers. This is how they used to illustrate paradise in children’s books.
Chaibia was a one-street town, some broken old French villas and a row of cheap cement houses. The shutters were open. In fact, the windows were open on this brisk, cold morning. There were no people on the streets. And somewhere inside my head—and I was in the heated cocoon of Commandant Mohamed’s Land Cruiser—part of my brain was asking another part of my brain a question. It must be cold outside. The people were at home. But why had they all opened their windows? What a very odd thing to do . . .
That’s when we were ambushed. I don’t like the “we.” But you can’t stick a journalist’s flag on top of an Algerian police vehicle; besides, the bombers would have been more than happy to know that they had a foreigner as well as sixteen gendarmes as their target. And when the first bomb went off, it sounded, inside our leading armoured vehicle, like a tyre bursting behind us. The cops in their ski masks knew what it was and the second bomb went off 100 metres away as I opened the rear door, a wall of sound and a sheet of concrete and smoke behind the second police van.
I pulled up my camera and looked through the lens at the second car—to capture the smoke drifting behind it—when there was a third blast like someone bashing their hands over my ears and, through my telephoto lens, a curtain of roadway, grass, iron and muck streaming upwards in slow motion. A policeman ran in front of me, firing into the yellow-flowered field to the left, a woman came screaming out of a broken-down house—an old pied noir villa, I remember thinking—shrieking and imploring God and the police to stop the noise. A rain of stones and concrete thundered onto the roadway around us and the petrol cap of the third police van came bowling down the roadway and jumped past my face. That’s when the fourth bomb went off.
“Get down, get down, there may be another,” Commandant Mohamed shouted. I looked around. There was a sinister ditch beside me, a deserted barber’s shop on the other side of the road with Coi feur des Jeunes crudely painted on the glass door. So we were lying on the ground when the shrapnel came pattering down again, a mad rain on this beautiful spring morning in paradise. There was a silence broken only by the crying of the terrified woman and the sound of men breathing and coughing and a voice on the radio asking if anyone had been hurt and a policeman saying, very quietly: “God is Great.” At which point, the gendarmes began spraying the trees with bullets, the rounds hissing into the leaves, firing into the fields again, their bullets thwacking through undergrowth and howling towards a railway embankment. I had been reporting Algeria’s war second hand; not any more.
It was a perfect ambush. They—the GIA, no doubt, led by its new emir in the Blida Wilaya, Saïd Makhloufi—had set the roadside bombs 50 metres apart, four of them to hit the four vehicles of the patrol. “They were very professional,” Mohamed said. “They waited till we got out of our vehicles before they set off the fourth bomb, but our vans were spread out. Then they ran. They could be there . . . ” And he pointed to the oh-so-innocent village of Chaibia, deserted again, not a soul on its streets, all of its people forewarned by the GIA so that the bombs did not break the glass of their windows which is why—yes, my brain had not quite worked out the significance in time—they had opened those windows on this cold spring morning. “Or they could be there—or there,” Mohamed said, his finger sweeping across the horizon where the sunshine now splashed merrily on the walls of hamlets almost buried behind the trees.
We trudged into the fields, warily, the cops firing in front of them, looking for the wires, splashing through the soggy grass and stunted orchards. A railway train clicked past, the local diesel from Blida to Algiers, the passengers with their morning papers staring at us out of drowsy carriages as if we were on a lunatic field exercise. That’s when we found the electric detonator lines, four car batteries carelessly covered with earth, a series of broken lightbulbs for detonators, near the massive craters in the road. One of the police vehicles had its windscreen smashed, its door fittings ripped off, shrapnel gashes on the bodywork, no one hurt.
The electric leads ran across the fields and a police sergeant followed them, pulling them out of the mud and water like that scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness discovers that someone is planning to blow up his bridge. The wires sucked their way out of the mud, stretching to knot on a barbed wire fence from which a single thin green fishing line ran towards the railway. The line ended on the tracks. That’s where they had waited for us, three, maybe four of them, listening on their scanners—according to Commandant Mohamed—to the police radios. An old man was cutting grass in the corner of the fields. “There were some guys here this morning with hunting guns,” he said. “They were shooting birds.” But in truth everyone in Chaibia must have known what was going to happen. It must have taken hours to lay the butane gas bottles of explosives, the electric lines, the batteries and detonators. They may have lain there for days, just waiting for us.
When we left Chaibia, the people did not look at us, did not even glance at the bomb-damaged Toyota van; it was as if we did not exist, the fate that the GIA had intended for us. All that was wrong was the distance between the bombs. “Distance—keep your distance from each other,” Commandant Mohamed called into his radio. And then he said Allahu akbar—God is great—again. And the cop beside me muttered a prayer in Arabic and the words “Mohamed is the Prophet of God.” All the policemen said this. It intrigued me, this praying, in a way I did not at first understand. It went on and on, for minutes, for an hour after the ambush. The police were thanking God for his mercy. And I had no doubt that, on the other side of that railway embankment, the bombers must have used the very same words, seeking God’s grace and invoking the Prophet’s name in their endeavour to kill us all. It was Commandant Mohamed who turned to me on the road back to Algiers and said: “We had beautiful luck today.”
I had beautiful luck, too. I wanted to see the war and I had my first-hand report and I was back in the safety of the Hôtel el-Djezair, but at 5:38 next morning—I had formed the habit of checking my watch every time a bomb went off—there was a great thunderous roar and a mass of black smoke hanging over the police family residence in Kouba. Just before the explosion, the bombers had fled the scene shouting—oh, for the unity of Islam—Allahu akbar. God is great. And the cops would believe this doubly since the detonation that was supposed to bring down the entire building on the heads of their families only tore down the front wall. Most of the twenty-one wounded were women and children, the youngest a year-old baby. There used to be two police on guard duty outside. “But they were both assassinated last year,” an off-duty gendarme told me. “Since then, there hasn’t been a guard on our buildings.”
It was instructive to watch the Algerian security forces as they turned up at the bomb-site. There were gendarmerie men in green uniforms and ski masks and city traffic policemen in blue uniforms and white braids and another rarely seen species dressed all in black with crimson bandoliers and black hoods with slits for the eyes and mouth, who hung around the outside of the crowds, watching us all. Who were they?
“I’LL TURN THIS ON so they can’t hear us,” the young man says, and places a small transistor on the windowsill, its brassy music smothering any listening equipment the Algerian security men may have rigged up near the house. The story we listen to is one of secrecy and fear, of summary execution, of clandestine government death squads, of an “Islamist” leader shot dead “while trying to escape,” of mass graves and numbered corpses in plastic bags. The slaughter at Sekardji prison killed off 223 “cadres” of the FIS, according to the men in the room, all “murdered” in revenge for the bombing of the Algiers police commissariat.
There is not a hint of doubt among these men, not a moment’s hesitation in their story. For them, the GIA are not “terrorists” but the “armed opposition.” Ask about the claims—backed up by all-too-detailed evidence—that the GIA rape women, and one of the men replies: “This is just an attempt to discredit the resistance. ” Express incredulity at this answer, and the response is softened, the kind of grubby reply that governments give when called to account. “There are excesses by the GIA, of course.” Which is one way of saying that the GIA rape women.
But it is government excess of which they wish to speak, brutal, consistent, carried out with the help—so they claim in Algiers—of a special “anti-terrorist brigade” based at the Châteauneuf police station, the torture centre where women are still taken, according to these same men, for systematic rape and execution. Lawyers acting on behalf of FIS men say that in many cases the Algerian police no longer bother to torture prisoners for confessions before dragging them into court. They merely execute them.
An Algiers lawyer tries to explain. “In the last month and a half, there have been no more judicial hearings in Algiers—there have been no trials—but there have been thousands of arrests. The government set up special courts in Oran, Algiers and Constantine in September 1992, but they didn’t work because the lawyers wouldn’t cooperate. The government abolished special courts this year— and this was said to be a good, liberal thing. But there have been no court hearings since then, just the arrests.”
He mentions the cases of two “Islamist” physics teachers from Blida, Dr. Fouad Bouchlagem and Dr. Ahmed Noulaaresse. “Both were arrested by the Algiers police. One had a Ph.D. from Toulouse University, the other was trained at MIT. Then later, after their detention, the police just said that they were both ‘shot while trying to escape.’ What are we supposed to conclude from this?” More frightening still are the cases of Dr. Nourredine Ameur, head of the orthopaedic unit at the Harrash hospital in Algiers, and Dr. Cherif Belahrache, head of the rheumatology department at Constantine University. Taken from their hospitals by armed policemen in 1994, they have simply disappeared.
Then there is the case of Azedine Alwane, an accountant in the nationalised water company, SEDAC. “A cop had been killed last year and my client was accused of the crime,” a second lawyer says. “Alwane’s father was a moudjahed, a hero of the independence war against France. But in prison they tortured Alwane very badly and then they castrated him. His father intervened to try and get him out of prison and we got an acquittal in court—the other policemen in the courtroom were weeping when they heard the evidence of what had been done to him . . . His father even went to the minister of the interior, Meziane-Cherif, and asked for his help, but the minister told him that he couldn’t help because the men responsible were not under his orders.”
When I had interviewed the cigar-chomping éradicateur Meziane-Cherif, he had denied the existence of an “anti-terrorism brigade” but agreed that “we have organised groups within the army, the police and the gendarmerie” to counter “terrorism.” According to the men in the room, these “groups” were now 6,000 strong and worked out of police stations in the Algiers suburbs of Hussein Dey, Kouba, Ben Aknoun and Fontaine Fraiche as well as Châteauneuf. One of them said that a doctor at Sekardji prison told them that 230 inmates had been killed. “It was a liquidation. Among our cadres killed was Ikhlef Sherati, an imam and a professor at a small Koranic school . . . and Noureddin Harek, a professor of education . . . ” All the victims were buried in mass graves at the Al-Alia cemetery, thirty or forty in holes in the ground with numbers on the graves. The Algerian government announced an inquiry into the scandal. And who was appointed to head the investigation? Why, Meziane-Cherif, of course.
And all the while, the war becomes more atrocious, harder to report—not just because of its physical dangers but because its horrifying details disgust even those of us who must chronicle its bestialities. The Algerian newspapers do their best—with the government’s encouragement, of course—to terrify readers with photographs of these crimes against humanity. An Algerian schoolgirl, only fifteen years old, her throat slashed, lying on a mortuary slab at Blida, eyes open in accusation at the reader. Another photo shows her body, bathed in blood, hands tied with wire behind her school uniform. Pictures in another Algerian daily show the decapitated body of another young woman. The moment I open the papers each morning, I feel I must look over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching me. Merely to look at these terrible images is a criminal act. Can Algeria produce more horror?
It can. Fatima Ghodbane was wearing a veil in her classroom in the Mohamed Lazhar school when they came for her in March 1995, six men armed with hunting guns and pistols. According to her classmates, she cried and pleaded with the gunmen who took her to the school gate, where they tore off her veil, tied her hands, stabbed her in the face and then cut her throat. One witness said the gunmen placed her severed head outside the classroom door, where many of the other children became hysterical. Algerian police found several of them unconscious with terror. On one of Fatima’s hands, the men had scratched the letters “GIA.” Fatima Ghodbane’s father was a retired public works inspector, which hardly qualified him as a government agent. The newspaper El Watanconcluded that Fatima’s crime had been her beauty.
Two days before Fatima’s death, gunmen broke into the home of a farmer’s family at Reghaia at five in the morning, locked the youngest daughter in the bathroom and lined up her two sisters, Amal, aged eighteen, and Karima Geudjali, who was twenty-one—beside their father. Then they shot Amal in the head with two bullets and Karima in the heart with another. Amal had been engaged to marry an Algerian police officer. That same night, more armed men broke into a house in Tessala el-Mardja near Blida and shot Yamina Amrani, a nine-months-pregnant woman of twenty-six whose husband was away from the house. Three other women—two in their twenties—were also murdered near Blida in the same week; a few days later, two sisters aged sixteen and seventeen were taken by gunmen from their home in the Aurès mountains; their throats were cut 200 metres from their front door.
What primeval energy produces such sadism? Although the cost was terrible, the Algerians won their war against the French. They are all Muslims, all of the Sunni sect. Their huge land stands on billions of dollars’ worth of oil and natural gas deposits. Algeria is the world’s eighteenth-largest exporter of petrol, the seventh for gas. After France and Canada, it is the world’s third francophone country. It should be as wealthy as the Arab Gulf states, its people able to buy property and invest in Europe and America like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis. Yet it suffers 25 per cent unemployment, 47 per cent illiteracy and one of the world’s cruellest internal conflicts. At the Interior Ministry they now produce videotapes of the massacres, more revolting, more banal even than the government’s porno-picture books of death. Up to 200 men and women are now dying every week in the towns around Algiers; Algerian journalists privately suspect that up to 100,000 were now dying every day.
In many of the recent massacres, the GIA appeared to be taking revenge on those villages that had set up government-sponsored militias to fight them— another of Meziane-Cherif’s little initiatives. Trucks and buses were stopped outside these towns at the frightening faux barrages; their occupants—twenty or thirty at a time—had their throats cut. Near Laghaout in November 1996, an ambulance carrying a sick woman and her husband, along with a paramedic, stopped behind a bus at a “police” checkpoint. According to Liberté, perhaps the only reliable journalistic source left in this war, the “police”/gunmen cut the throats of the paramedic, the driver and the husband, leaving the sick woman alone in the vehicle. All the bus passengers in front are murdered in the same way. Several motorists queued up behind the ambulance until they realised what was happening, turned their cars round and drove for their lives to Laghaout.
At Sidi el-Kebir, there is no such escape. The village menfolk are in the hills above their homes on 6 November, searching for the “terrorists” against whom the government had armed them. Behind them, up to thirty GIA members enter Sidi el-Kebir and proceed, again systematically, to kill all whom they find in the village. A baby reportedly has its throat cut after a discussion among the intruders about the morality of killing children. At least ten women are égorgées. A newly married couple are “executed” in their home, the husband on the bed, the woman in the doorway of their bedroom, after reportedly—and inexplicably—being ordered to lay out her wedding trousseau. Their tiny baby is left tied up in the same room.
Gunmen arrive high in the Algerian mountains at the monastery of Tibherine. They take seven monks from the building. France is appalled. These kindly, spiritual men gave help even to wounded GIA men. Seven months later, I am sitting beside the little French Catholic chapel in Hydra in Algiers with the bespectacled figure of Monseigneur Henri Teissier, archbishop of Algiers, a sixty-seven-year-old French professor of Arabic who took Algerian nationality after independence. On 21 May 1996, he took a phone call which told him that all seven monks had been decapitated:
It is true that we found only their heads. Three of their heads were hanging from a tree near a petrol station. The other four heads were lying on the grass beneath. But it is marvellous that the families of those monks maintained their friendship for us and for all Algerians. They had visited the monastery. They had been able to accept the loss of their sons. They knew it was not all Algerians who did this thing.
So who did “this thing”? The GIA, said the Algerian government, led by a man called Sayah Attia; one of the Tibherine priests had recognised him—when he answered the door—from a newspaper photograph that identified Attia as the murderer of the Croats whose throats were slashed near the monastery.
So could the archbishop understand what happened in the minds of the killers when they took up their knives?
They will kill a boy of two or an old man of eighty-five. I think they are out of their consciences. They work under their understanding of Islamic law—“We have to kill the enemies of the Lord”—and it is finished. We think not only of our life but of the lives of all the people in Algeria . . . The most difficult thing is to know that every day some people die, mothers cry for their sons and daughters. We ourselves are not in the same situation as we were before this crisis. When you begin celebrating the Eucharist, you cannot help remembering that Jesus was murdered by human violence— and in the name of religion. Now we have to understand the risk in this society, that we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus. We cannot look at the cross of Jesus as we have done before. Before, it was an abstract thing. Now it is a daily reality.
The archbishop had just celebrated mass for six nuns and monks in Algiers, the priest reading from St. Matthew, chapter 25, verse 13. “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.” They had come to remember one of France’s first religious martyrs in Algeria, Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, the soldier-turned-priest who was assassinated by an Islamist in Tamanrasset in 1916 and whose murder set an awful precedent for the monks and nuns who still refused to leave Algeria. Early in 1996 the bishop of Oran, Monseigneur Pierre Claverie, died in a bomb explosion on the same day he had met the French foreign minister, Hervé de Charrette. “The bomb went off in the street,” Archbishop Teissier said. “He was crushed by the door of the chapel and his brains were found on the chapel floor. It was absurd, idiotic, unconscionable.”
HE WAS YOUNG, well-dressed, an expensive leather jacket over his shoulders. I had already received a contact call from Britain but never expected a representative of Algeria’s “Islamist” guerrilla force to turn up at my Algiers hotel with its heavy security guard, its armed cops in the front hall, its militiamen at the gates. “You can call me ‘Abu Mohamed,’ ” the young man said as we sat on the balcony of my room, the palm trees dipping in the wind behind us. Openly acknowledging his membership of the military wing of the FIS, he stated categorically that after months of internecine war, his own Islamic Salvation Army had united with the GIA. He was the mediator, he said, of the third meeting at Chlef at the beginning of October at which the final decision had been taken to combine the two commands.
But he claimed that the GIA had been deeply infiltrated by the Algerian military intelligence service. He even alleged that the worst atrocities of the war— especially the massacre of women and children in mountain villages—were carried out at the instigation of government agents. His words were ruthless and absolute. When I asked him why the Muslim groups cut the throats of their enemies, he replied:
It’s the best way to become closer to God, the best way to kill a taghout [enemy of God]. If you have someone who is capable of killing five-year-old children, what do you do with him? Kill him with bullets? Bullets are precious to us—they are very expensive. Take a 9-mm Kalash[nikov] bullet—it’s as if you are throwing it away. Anyone who tries to destroy Islam, to destroy the Good Lord, who takes the Lord’s name in vain, is a devil. You can do anything to wipe out a devil.
There was another of those inversions at work here. “Abu Mohamed” believed the police and government agents were child-killers. The police and government believed the GIA were child-killers. Or so they said. So who was killing the children? At one point, “Abu Mohamed” handed me an Islamic tract and a key chain with “Khaled” written on the handle. Khaled, he added, was the name of his local military leader or emir. He repeatedly referred to the need to “exterminate with God’s help” the Algerian government in order to set up a legitimate Islamic state, justifying his remarks by quoting the Koran in a state of near ecstasy.
“I’ve lost 200 friends, but it doesn’t matter because I know that one day we’ll see each other again,” he said. “For the 200 who were killed, another 600 or 700 have become moudjahedin.” He described how he had been arrested in January 1996—it was now December of the same year—and tortured by security men with electricity:
I thank God I gave no information. The moment you give one piece of information, you are finished because they will torture you for more information until you die . . . There have been many women who have secretly worked for the Islamists . . . Sometimes they contact the moudjahedin and tell them that their husbands work for the state. This happened to me, a woman came to me a year ago and denounced her husband and said he worked for military security. We had to follow it up to find the proof. The GIA killed him—the real GIA which is not infiltrated. The military security have captured women and tortured and raped them and thrown them into prison. Do you know what they are asking us? They are asking us to put a bomb in their prisons. Do you know why? Because they have suffered too much. They are living a nightmare. They are all pregnant.
There had been many consistent reports, gathered by The Independent as well as human rights groups, of the rape of women prisoners in Algeria.
“Abu Mohamed” was equally adamant in his view of other Arab states. “Muslims are everywhere, but all their presidents are devils. All Muslims are at war with the state—in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya. They say Sudan is a Muslim country but there are mistakes there. Iran is Shiite—they’re not really Muslim.” “Abu Mohamed” did not know that a bomb had just exploded on the Paris Métro, but his response was immediate. “It’s legitimate. France is the cause of everything that’s going on in Algeria. It helps the Algerian state . . . So why do you think they specifically choose France? You have to ask yourself that question.”
“Abu Mohamed” looked less like an “Islamist” than a playboy, with his leather jacket and his neatly shaved face and his overpowering aftershave. So his reflections on martyrdom seemed all the more bizarre. “The Koran promises us victory or martyrdom. It says real martyrs don’t bleed very much. When they die, they smell of musk perfume. This is true. When a martyr dies, he is met in paradise by seventy-two beautiful women.”
But I am beginning to wonder if all the beautiful women haven’t been murdered, whether some of those seventy-two women won’t have bloody wounds round their necks. In 1997, the holy month of Ramadan is again marked by a collective bloodbath of throat-cuttings, beheadings, car bombs and even baby-strangling. Three hundred die and even the prime minister admits 80,000 Algerians have now been killed. In Benachour, 50 kilometres from Algiers, whole families are eviscerated in revenge for the villagers’ support for their local pro-government militia. The dead include a child of six, two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls and a pregnant woman who is disembowelled before being beheaded. At Harouch Trab, ten civilians—including seven women and a ten-year-old boy— have their throats cut. The first is a twenty-five-year-old woman whose head is later cut off and tied by her hair to a pike—and left by the roadside so that she can “welcome” her husband when he returns from his militia patrol. “War through war and destruction through destruction. Kouka will return,” the killers spray-paint on a village wall. “Kouka” is the nom de guerre of a local GIA leader—real name Halilat Kouk—killed by “communal guard” militia forces a year earlier.
A young woman we know tells us in horror that her friend was on an Algiers bus, travelling to work, when the vehicle passed a street in which a policeman’s head had been attached to a pole on top of a gate. Another Algiers resident describes a new GIA machine, a primitive version of Madame Guillotine, a makeshift head-cutter with an iron blade to which its victims are subjected after being dragged from their homes. According to residents, the guillotine is mounted on a truck. Those condemned to die by the GIA are taken from their apartments with their mouths stuffed full of newspaper and are guillotined on the truck.
RAÏS AND BENTALHA. Two more dirt villages in the bled. But this time, the sadism as well as the scale of the attacks mark a new depth of savagery, something we have never seen before, entire villages liquidated by the knife, their population slaughtered en masse like animals, cut open, axed down, hacked apart. When we are taken to these flat, poor hamlets—Bosnian-style ghost towns of crumbling walls and collapsed roofs—even the cops and soldiers fall silent. Through shame or guilt?
From the roof of Ali’s house in Raïs, I can see the local army barracks just half a kilometre across the fields, yellow-painted with a green-and-white Algerian flag fluttering gaily from the roof. No, Ali says, he doesn’t know why the soldiers didn’t intervene when the murderers turned up—dressed in Afghan robes and hats, he says—to cut the throats of his family. Round the side of Ali’s neck, there is a ferocious purple scar that slices through his skin, crudely stitched—because they cut Ali’s throat too.
“There were up to a hundred men who came into our village from three directions—they were here for at least three hours,” he says, his head leaning at an odd, permanent angle to the right. “There was shooting and screaming. No one helped us.” Around him, in cheap brick villas and chicken yards and burned-out garages, lay still the thick scum of old blood, all that remains in the village of the 349 Algerians—mostly women and children—slaughtered in the late evening of 29 August 1997. When I ask Ali to describe the night, he stares at me in silence, fingering his left arm, which is swathed in bandages but reveals another frightful purple scar at the wrist. A neighbour whispers in my ear: “They knifed his wife in front of him.” And it was this that forced Ali to talk:
I had most of my family here. My wife, my three sons, my brother, his wife, sons and daughter, and many cousins. We hid in the house but they threw bombs through the windows and broke down the door with axes.
Ali sways against the balcony wall as he says these words. I have already crunched through the carbonised interior of the house and found, beside the begonia plants and vines on the balcony, an old tray bearing the words “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his Prophet.” Beside it, as if painted onto the wall in defiance of all religion, was a darkened stream of blood. Ali draws in his breath. He is about to plunge deep into an ocean of pain:
My baby son Mohamed was five and they cut his throat and threw him out of the upper window. Then they cut the throat of my eldest son Rabeh and then my brother’s throat because he saw they were kidnapping his wife and tried to stop them. They took some of the other girls.
And Ali raises his hand and says: “Blood.” There is more downstairs, stained brown across the living-room floor where Ali’s final calvary took place:
They cut my throat and I felt the knife in my neck but I tried to shield myself and the man sliced me on the arm. My wife was so brave. She tried to help, to fight them, to save me. So they dragged her to the door where I was lying and slit her throat in front of me. There was another baby, the mother tried to hide it behind some bricks but they cut her throat and then did the same to the baby on the bricks. The man who used the knife on me—I recognised him. I had seen him on the streets of our village.
There were times in this place of atrocities when the sheer awfulness of what happened almost blinded one to the obvious questions. Why didn’t the army venture across the fields? They must have heard the shrieks from the buildings on the main road. They must have seen the fires in the roofs. They must have heard the bombs. And who were the so-called “Islamists” performing these acts of unparalleled butchery? Why should “Islamists” murder the very same villagers who voted so faithfully for the FIS and who traditionally opposed the Algerian government?
In the neighbouring village of Bentalha—with about 240 dead—the old FIS election signs remain on walls and lamp-posts. Here, too, a fifty-four-year-old man who would only give his name as Saïd claimed to me that the village men had fled to warn the army, leaving their women and children behind. The more I walked through these desolate streets, the more I remembered. Two years before, Commandant Mohamed of the garde mobile drove me through these villages. In Bentalha, his squad of cops had arrested two men who tried to run away from them—just next to a sewage outflow, which I recognised as I walked through the village now. The men had been fearful of execution. The people all supported the “Islamists.” The villagers, the commandant had told me in his Land Cruiser back then, were “with the terrorists.” It was a “terrorist area.” So why would the “terrorists” now want to kill all these people who allegedly supported them? Bentalha, far from being a village of politically uninvolved civilians, had been a stronghold of the FIS.
The big houses—for the poor fled to larger homes for protection when the gunmen and axemen arrived—were burned out, their back yards swamped with blood. “The men ran away—it was a mistake,” Saïd conceded miserably. “They knew what would happen. Some tried to throw slates and bricks from the roofs of the houses. One of our men got a rifle and killed one of these savages. The dead man turned out to be from this same village.” Again, the screaming had gone on long into the night. And again, soldiers from the local barracks only arrived after the murderers had fled. The “Islamists,” Saïd recalled, even shouted curses as they poured through the unpaved street in turbans and gowns. “They kept crying: ‘You will die and go to hell—we will kill you and go to heaven.’ ”
Most of the people of Bentalha fled after the massacre. A few now drifted back in the morning. I found two of them trying to repair the blackened interior of their homes, screwing half-burned light fittings back into the walls, ignoring my questions while a group of children—who had hidden on the roof during the massacres—watched them in silence. Another man refused to name his dead wife. “Her name belongs to me,” he said, and began to cry.
The pathetic remnants of families evoke something more than pity. They are as frightened of the future as they are of the past. In each kitchen, cheap metal trays have been twisted out of recognition, the pots smashed, medicines thrown over the floor. In one house, a bomb has been thrown at a bird cage, hurling its dead occupants in a mass of blackened feathers around the room. What sort of men would throw a bomb into a bird cage? A pile of school books in a garage next to three huge pools of congealed blood showed how earnestly its dead owner had tried— amid the immense poverty of these Algerian slum villages—to improve his lot.
The first page of the boy’s exercise book shows his name was Koreishi; he had practised his declensions and dutifully written the biography of his doomed family. “Abdelkader is my father, he is an electrician. Zhor is my mother, she is a dressmaker. Hamid is my uncle, he is a policeman. Salima is my aunt, she is a nurse . . . ” And I wondered whether Hamid’s job might have sent the family to their deaths. But the survivors said there was no discrimination. All the victims were treated equally: they were all killed. One man said he heard the gunmen who entered the village shouting that their enemies were “Jews.”
A man who pleaded with me not to publish his name said he saw the poorer families of Bentalha seeking refuge in a large house in Hijilali Street. “It was no good for them. I stood here at the window and I could hear those poor people screaming and dying. When I looked out of my window, I could see them axeing the women on the roof.” At least seventeen people died in that one house. In a corner of it, I discovered a book of European art—a coloured photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà lay face up on the floor—and another depicted the features of dead martyrs of the war against the French, their faces disfigured by bullets and shrapnel. How little Algeria’s suffering had changed. Days later, a photograph of a distraught Bentalha woman, told that her family were dead, will become the image of this Golgotha. They will call the picture the Pietà.
So who killed all these poor people? On 20 August, just two days before the massacre at Raïs, President Zeroual had announced that “terrorism is living its last hours in our country.” Violent acts were now to be regarded as “residual terrorism.” Bentalha was the village whose destruction had been studied by the Algerian hotel concierge in Paris, the hotel in which the Australian soldier whom my father was told to execute had killed the British military policeman in 1919. That Algerian, too, noticed how the army did not enter the villages until the murderers had gone. He had used the word pouvoir—the authorities—and chosen to say no more.
WE ALL KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING in Algeria. For more than four years, released prisoners had been telling us of the water torture and beatings, the suffocation with rags, of nails ripped out by interrogators, of women gang-raped by policemen, of secret executions in police stations. The evidence was convincing enough, even when it came from self-declared enemies of the Algerian regime or members of the armed organisations opposed to it. But by mid-1997, even as the village massacres were taking place—blamed, of course, on the FIS, the GIA, the “terrorists,” “barbarians”—I had collected hundreds of pages of evidence from Algerian lawyers and human rights workers which proved incontrovertibly that the Algerian security forces had been guilty of “disappearances,” of torture and crimes against humanity. Even more sensational was that, after weeks of tentative contacts, I found members of the Algerian security forces who had sought asylum in Britain— and were themselves now prepared to talk of the terrors they had witnessed.
I travelled to London to talk to Andy Marshall, my new foreign news editor at The Independent. I brought with me from Algeria photographs of young women who had been “disappeared” and—from my meetings with these ex-Algerian police officers—details of torture and execution by the security forces. Andy recoiled at the obscenity of what he read in the transcripts of my interviews which I gave him. “I believe it,” he said. “We need to get the editor to put this all over the front.” I knew what this meant. Little chance now of those hard-sought visas to Algeria. No explanation of our impartiality would wash my reputation clean with the pouvoir after we presented them with this evidence of human wickedness. My reporting started in Algiers city.
Maître Mohamed Tahri puts the number of “disappeared” at 12,000, but the moment I am about to dispute this terrifying figure, a young woman in a white headscarf walks quietly through the door and whispers in Maître Tahri’s ear. The forty-six-year-old lawyer listens without emotion, his eyes on the floor. He is a little moustachioed vole of a man with sharp eyes, impressive and heroic, but no match for the lanky flics who have arrived at his office. I catch sight of them briefly: tall, thin men staring through the front door, the noise of the Algiers suburb of Kouba behind them. Above Maître Tahri, his court robes hang on the wall: black with white fur edges, a fading symbol of the Napoleonic law that once governed Algeria. But the government now is metres away.
“She says the men have come from the commissariat of police and want to see me again,” Tahri mutters. On his desk there lies a file of photographs, thousands of them, men and women, the quick and the dead, all “disappeared” by the Algerian police—the very same flics who are now at the door. Tahri pulls coloured snapshots out of the file to give to me; two young women, one in a patterned black pullover with a heart-shaped brooch, a fringe over her forehead, the other sitting in a photographer’s studio in a long red dress, a thinner fringe but with the same open, delicate face.
Naïma and Nedjoua Boughaba are sisters, aged twenty-three and twenty-nine; both were arrested by the Algerian police on 12 April 1997. Both were court clerks, one working for an Algiers judge who by misfortune was investigating a list of suspected “Islamists” drawn up by the Swiss police—and sold by a Swiss policeman to the Algerian intelligence services. The women were kidnapped by government agents outside the tribunal. They are thought to be alive. Tahri pulls another snapshot out of his file, of a beautiful young woman with a radiant face, her tousled hair held back by a pink band, half smiling at the photographer. Amina Beuslimane is alleged to have taken photographs of cemeteries and blown-up buildings—perhaps to have proof of government violence against civilians. She was twenty-eight when she was arrested by security police on 13 December 1994, never to be seen again. Her mother has been advised by friends who have contacts in the prisons that she must not hold out any hope of seeing her daughter again. Amina, they have told her, was tortured to death.
Each time Tahri produces a photograph, I catch sight of hundreds of others; of bland, middle-aged men, of suspected “Islamists” in beards, and girls and old men. The oldest “disappeared” in the Tahri files is seventy-four-year-old Ahmed Aboud, arrested on 23 February 1997. The youngest is fifteen-year-old Brahim Maghraoui. A photocopy of a photograph shows Moussa Maddi, a paraplegic in a wheelchair arrested on 3 May 1997. No one knows why. An attractive young woman in a red dress with Princess Diana–style hair, Saïda Kheroui is—or was—the sister of a wanted member of an armed “Islamist” group. Her snapshot is smaller than the others. She was “disappeared” by intelligence agents on 7 May 1997. All that is known of her fate is that the security police, during her interrogation, broke the bones of one of her feet.
Mohamed Tahri was frightened in October 1997 that he was about to be added to the list. He had called a meeting of mothers of the “disappeared” in front of Algiers’ central post office. The police broke it up. “They told me not to follow the protesters,” he says to us in an ultra-quiet voice, aware that the police are still lingering at the front door. “They told me to go down a side street where there were only policemen and I was afraid I would be kidnapped. So I started shouting: ‘I am a lawyer, I defend human rights—you have no right to hinder my movements.’ I took out my professional card but there was a high-ranking policeman pushing me to prevent me being able to leave.” Cops surrounded Tahri. “I said, ‘I’m a lawyer’ but the police officer said: ‘You’re not a lawyer—you’re a traitor because you have contact with foreigners and with so-called human rights organisations.’ When I said I refused to go down the street . . . the officer said: ‘Take him in.’
“They took me to an office at the Cavignac police station—I know people who had died there under torture. They said to me: ‘You are the one who gives information to Amnesty International and other organisations . . . you’re the one who arranges the demonstrations, who causes trouble in this country.’ ” Before he was released, Tahri was taken to the commissariat in Amirouche Street, where he was told: “You have contacts with journalists . . . ”
If Tahri’s evidence was damning, the meetings I arranged with defecting Algerian police and army officers in London provided even more compelling proof of their government’s involvement in crimes against humanity. All but one of my interviews with these brave, frightened men—and one woman—were conducted on a different political planet, not in an Algiers suburb but in a conference room at the Sheraton Belgravia Hotel in Knightsbridge in central London, a room that grew lung-crushingly fuggy as these lonely witnesses to savagery smoked their way through pack after pack of cigarettes.
DALILAH IS USED TO BLOOD. When she describes the prisoners, stripped half-naked and tied to ladders in the garage of the Cavignac police station, she does so with a curious detachment. Later, when I have spent more than an hour listening to her evidence of cruelty and death, she will turn to me with a terrifying admission. “I’m being treated by a psychologist because I have bad dreams,” she says. “My great passion now is to go to see horror movies—it’s the only thing that interests me. I want to see blood.”
It is an extraordinary remark to come from this attractive woman of thirty with her abundant dark black hair tied in a bunch, dandling the child of an Algerian woman friend on her knee. She joined up as a detective in the Algerian special branch in 1985—“I’d wanted to be a policewoman to serve my people since I was twelve years old,” not least because her father had been a cop—but things began to go seriously wrong for her after the cancellation of elections:
I was moved to Cavignac police station near the post office and I hated what was happening there, what was happening to the police. They tortured people—I saw this happening. I saw innocent young people tortured like wild animals. Yes, I myself saw the torture sessions. What could I do? They executed people at 11 o’clock at night, people who had done nothing. They had been denounced by people who didn’t get along with them. People just said “He’s a terrorist” and the man would be executed. They tied young people to a ladder with rope. They were always shirtless, sometimes naked. They put a rag over their face. Then they forced salty water into them. There was a tap with a pipe that they stuck in the prisoner’s throat and they ran the water until the prisoners’ bellies had swelled right up. When I remember it, I think how it hurt to see a human being like this—it’s better to murder men than see them tortured like that.
Dalilah talks about torture like an automaton, her voice a monotone. She says she saw, over a period of months, at least 1,000 men tortured at the rate of twelve a day, the police interrogators starting at 10 a.m. and working in shifts until 11 p.m. But she cries when she describes what she saw:
The torturers would say: “You must confess that you killed so-and-so” and they made the prisoner sign a confession with their eyes blindfolded—they didn’t have the right to read what they were signing. There were prisoners who wept and said: “I’ve done nothing—I have the right to a doctor and a lawyer.” When they said that, they got a fist in the mouth. Those who died were under the water torture. Their bellies were too swollen with water. Sometimes while this happened, the torturers would put broomsticks up their anuses. They enjoyed it. Some of the prisoners had beards, some didn’t. They were all poor. The top policemen gave the order to torture—I think it was given over the phone. But they didn’t use the word torture— they used to call it nakdoulou eslah—“guest treatment.” There would be screaming and crying from the prisoners. They would shout: “In the name of God, I did nothing” or “We’re all the same, we’re Muslims like you.” They screamed and cried a lot. I saw two men who died like that on the ladder. The two bodies hung there on the ladder. They were dead and the torturer said: “Take them to the hospital and say they died in a battle.” They did the same thing with those who were executed at eleven at night—it was done after curfew when only the police and the gendarmerie could drive around. I had to fill out the death certificates so the bodies could be taken out of the hospitals. I had to sign that it was a body that had been found in the forest after it had decomposed—it was very hot then.
Dalilah says that she tried to protest to a superior officer, whose name she gives as Hamid:
I said to him: “You mustn’t do these things because we are all Muslims— there should at least be evidence against these people before you kill them.” He said to me: “My girl, you are not made for the police force—if you suspect someone, you must kill him. When you kill people, that’s how you get promoted.” Any cop would hit the prisoners with the butt of his “Kalash.” Some of the prisoners went completely mad from being tortured. Everyone who was brought to the Cavignac was tortured—around 70 per cent of the cops there saw all this. They participated. Although the torture was the job of the judiciary police, the others joined in. The prisoners would be twenty or thirty to a cell and they would be brought one by one to the ladder, kicked in the ribs all the time. It was inhuman.
According to Dalilah, women prisoners were taken to a special section of the Châteauneuf police station called the “National Organisation for the Suppression of Criminality,” where Algerian military security police prevented all but those with special passes from entering. “You had to be a high-ranking officer to get in there because of the way they treated women. They killed there too . . . ” Dalilah’s tragedy was personal. “I can’t sleep in the dark because I’m afraid. It’s not my fault, because my fiancé was murdered during Ramadan in 1993. The men who did this to him were dressed as policemen—and they killed him because he was a policeman.” Who are “they”? I ask. And she replies: “That’s the big question.” But it was torture that destroyed Dalilah’s life—and which proved her undoing:
There was a group of elderly people who were tortured. I couldn’t stand to see it, especially one man of about fifty-five whose arm was rotting. He had gangrene and he smelled very bad. I couldn’t bear it and I went and bought him some penicillin and put it on his arm because I thought it would help. There were another six people in his cell who had been tortured—it smelled like death in there. But another policeman had seen me and I asked him not to say anything. You see, we didn’t have the right to talk to prisoners—only to hit them. But the policeman wrote a report to the commissioner who called me in . . . He said: “Maybe you’ll go to prison for helping terrorists.” The man I helped was freed afterwards— which showed me he was innocent.
Armed “Islamists”—four young men who turned up at her mother’s home— had meanwhile targeted Dalilah, demanding she hand over her police pistol within fifteen days. When she asked for police protection, she was denied it. Dalilah slept in police stations at night. Then she slipped away from her home and bribed her way onto a boat for Europe, on the run from both the Algerian security services and the “Islamist” guerrillas.
REDA LEFT LONG PAUSES between his sentences. Safe in London, the soldier’s memory was on a road 30 kilometres from Algiers. He had been on military service, part of a commando unit outside Blida:
They gave us vaccinations in our backs and then told us to inject each other before we went out on sorties. It was an off-white liquid which we injected into each other’s arms . . . It made us feel like Rambo . . . We were on a roadblock, stopping anyone we suspected of being a terrorist. If a man had a face like a terrorist, if he had a big beard, he was shot. There was a man with a beard walking past the petrol station. I told him to stop. He said: “Why should I stop?” The man was rude, so I killed him. It’s like I was dreaming and it wasn’t me. I didn’t remember it till my friends told me . . . The bullets hit him in the chest. When he died, he cried: “There is no God but God.” I hope that God will forgive me and that all humanity will forgive me.
Knightsbridge may be an unexpected place to seek forgiveness but from time to time, Reda wept—for the killings, for the torture he witnessed, for the soldiers he believed were murdered by his own army. He began his military service in the town of Skikda, then moved to Biskra for weapons training. “We were told that all people were against us. We were taught how to recognise terrorists—by their beards and khamis robes, their Islamic clothes.”
On 12 May 1997, Reda was flown to Blida for active service in the anti-guerrilla war. On his first sortie into the village of Sidi Moussa on 27 May, he and his comrades ordered families from their homes and he said that, while searching their houses, they stole all the money and gold they could find:
We took sixteen men for torture. We had been told by informers that there were terrorists there. Whatever they told us to do, we would do it. All sixteen men were bearded. There was an underground room at the Blida barracks called the katellah—the “killing room”—and the prisoners were all given names by the interrogators, names like Zitouni. The men were stripped and bound and tied to a chair and hosed with cold water. Two soldiers stood in front of each prisoner and asked questions. Then they started with the electric drill.
Reda fidgets with his hands as he tells his awful story. The drills were used on the prisoners’ legs. He says he saw one army torturer drill open a man’s stomach. It lasted four hours with each prisoner—if they lived, they were released after a week. At one point in his story, Reda asks his younger brother to leave the room; he doesn’t want his family to know what else he has seen:
There was a cable about five centimetres in diameter and they put it in the ears or anus of the prisoners. Then they threw water at them. Two of the men began cursing us . . . And the torturer would shout Yarabak —“God damn you—so much for your God.” The torture went on twenty-four hours a day. I was only a conscript. I watched but I didn’t take part. The man whose stomach was drilled, he was drilled because he was suspected 100 per cent of being a terrorist.
In June 1997, Reda was asked to join a protection force around Sidi Moussa during a raid by regular troops. “We had to go in if there were flares sent up—but there were no flares and we went home after two hours. Next day . . . we heard that in this same village a massacre had taken place and twenty-eight villagers had been beheaded. And that made us start thinking about who did it. I started to think that our people had been the killers.”
Two days later, Reda says, he and fellow conscripts were cleaning the barracks and searching the clothes of regular troops for cigarettes when they found a false beard and musk, a perfume worn by devout Muslims. “We asked ourselves, what were the soldiers doing with this beard?” Reda concluded that this army unit must have carried out the Sidi Moussa massacre but his alarm worsened when twenty-six of his fellow conscripts were driven off to another barracks at Chréa. “They later brought all their bodies back to us and said that they had been killed in an ambush, but I am sure they were executed because they weren’t trusted any more. There had been no wounded in the ‘ambush.’ Maybe they talked too much. All our soldiers knew these men had been eliminated—because earlier, before they were taken away, we were told not to talk to them.”
The end of Reda’s military career was not heroic. His teeth were kicked out by colleagues, he says, and he was imprisoned for a week after he was seen giving bread to prisoners. Then, ambushed while on roadblock duty on the edge of Blida, he was recognised by two armed Islamists. “They were friends of mine and they saw me in my paratroop uniform and my green beret. One of them shouted: ‘There is plenty of time left in the year to get you. Take care of yourself and your wife and child.’ I and three other conscripts ran away with the help of locals who gave us civilian clothes. Now I am between two fires—between the terrorists and the Algerian government.”
Reda turned up at Heathrow Airport in London a few weeks later, pleading for protection. The Algerian authorities claimed they knew him—and that he fabricated his story of military atrocities to gain asylum in Britain. But why would Reda seek asylum in Britain in the first place, along with dozens of other members of the Algerian security services? Reda’s last news from Algeria when he spoke to me was horrifying enough: eight relatives in the suburb of Boufarik—not far from Blida—had just had their throats cut.
Other former Algerian security personnel were interviewed for The Independent. Inspector Abdessalam, who was in charge of police ordnance at the Dar el-Beïda police station near Algiers airport, also described to me how he watched suspected “Islamists” interrogated by torturers, some of whose names he also provided, names that were confirmed to be those of security operatives. “Sometimes,” he said, “prisoners were forced to drink acid or a cloth was tied to their mouths and acid poured over it. Prisoners were forced to stand next to tables with their testicles on the table and their testicles would be beaten . . . A small number of the prisoners gave information. Some preferred to be killed. Some died under water torture.”
The Independent, which was using a new page layout that projected our reports on the front page in depth and at length, published photographs of four of the missing young women—Amina Beuslimane, Naïma and Nedjoua Boughaba and Saïda Kheroui—with “DISAPPEARED” stamped over their faces. Our series started on 30 October 1997, with the page one headline: “Lost souls of the Algerian night: now their torturers tell the truth.” We were not the only newspaper trying to uncover the Algerian government’s role in crimes against humanity—several French journalists had nursed these suspicions for years—but our reports were treated by governments with the same disdain that had met our dispatches on Saddam’s tortures in the 1980s, our investigation of Israeli killings in the same period, our inquiries into depleted uranium munitions in Iraq and our reopening of the Turkish–Armenian genocide of 1915.
The Algerian ambassador in London wrote a spiteful and abusive letter to the editor of The Independent, sneering at Saïda Kheroui, the young woman whose foot was broken under torture, because I referred to her “Princess Diana–style hair,” and suggesting that the thousands of “disappeared”—including the other young women who had been tortured to death—had “in most cases, joined the terrorist bands.”
Ambassadors are expected to lie for their country. The response of Western nations to the growing evidence of Algerian government complicity in the horrors of this war, however, was as pitiful as it was shameful. In May 1998, more than six months after The Independent had devoted so much space and resources to reveal the testimony of Algerian ex-security forces and human rights lawyers, the British Foreign Office published a policy statement on Algeria. It said that while there were reports of Algerian complicity in the massacres, “there is no credible, substantive evidence to support the allegations.” It claimed that “large scale and brutal violence”—rather than the suspension of democratic elections—was “the genesis of the terrible events” in Algeria.
Far from recognising the courage of those former policemen who were denouncing their country’s crimes, Britain had in early 1997 rejected an asylum appeal by another former Algerian ex-policeman and forcibly returned him to Algeria in handcuffs. He was arrested at Algiers airport, brutally interrogated by his former comrades-in-arms about his Algerian contacts in London and then murdered by the security police. His body was delivered to his mother for burial two weeks after he was deported from London. He had changed his address in Britain and thus failed to receive his notice of leave to appeal the initial refusal of his asylum request. Scandalously, the UK authorities furnished the Algerian government with details showing he had been a police officer—which, of course, doomed him at once.122
When Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, tried to address the causes rather than the acts of violence in Algeria, the country’s foreign minister, Ahmed Attaf, berated her. “What causes justify killing women and children?” he demanded to know. Mrs. Robinson then held her tongue. Far more obnoxious was the UN panel led by former Portuguese prime minister Mário Soares which embarked on an “information-gathering” mission to Algeria in the autumn of 1998. It produced a report that might have been written by the Algerian government itself. In an extraordinary act of moral cowardice, Soares allowed Algerian officials to read the UN report before it was published, entirely accepted the Algerian government’s claim that it was “fighting terrorism” and concluded that “Algeria deserves the support of the international community in its efforts to combat this phenomenon.” In just nineteen pages, the report used the word “terrorism” or “terror” ninety-one times without asking who these “terrorists” were or why they opposed the government. It agreed with interviewees who said that “excesses” committed by the security forces could not compare with the “Islamists’ ” “crimes against humanity.” Although around 20,000 Algerians were still being held on “terrorism” charges, the UN panel interviewed only one of them. No wonder Attaf distributed the Soares report to the local Algerian press for publication. When Amnesty International condemned the UN report as a “whitewash,” Attaf brusquely dismissed the charge.
An earlier European Union mission had behaved with even less heed to the evidence of torture and murder by the authorities. In just eighteen hours in Algiers, it never left the villas and government offices of the Algerian authorities. The vice president of the European Commission, Manuel Marin, urged the Europeans to “tread softly”; there were no questions about torture or the need for an international inquiry into the massacres. A few days earlier, the Irish foreign minister David Andrews had told radio listeners that the time had come for outsiders “to stop condemning Algeria from afar.”
Much the same sentiment was being expressed by President Jacques Chirac of France. Asked what France could do to stop the massacres, he replied: “Nothing by interference. We have to find a way of acting effectively from the outside.” It was a policy that suited the Algerian authorities perfectly. They were eager to accept French weaponry and military equipment to fight their civil war but refused to accept any demands for investigations on the grounds that this would constitute interference in their domestic affairs. For a time, even France’s most boring intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, bought the Algerian government line. He said it was “obscene” and “an affront to the memory of the victims” of the massacres to ask who was killing whom in Algeria—because it was so obviously Muslim fundamentalists who were to blame. In so obscene and shameful way did Lévy ignore the thousands of victims of government torture. Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former Algerian prime minister who accuses the military of massacring thirty-one of his relatives in Médéa, was to claim that—by rejecting an international inquiry—Lévy and other French intellectuals “defend the regime by denying the responsibility of the junta in these massacres.”
The United States had largely kept out of Algerian affairs, save for several American diplomats in Algiers who awarded young Algerian women visas in return for their favours. Although Algeria gave financial support to the PLO during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—it sent $20 million in arms via the Soviet Union—the country was always sympathetic to America. During the Cuban missile crisis, Ben Bella was in New York and took a secret message to Fidel Castro from President John Kennedy, warning him of the seriousness of the confrontation with the Soviets. Ben Bella had not forgotten that Kennedy was alone in Congress in calling for Algerian independence during the war with the French.
But repeated claims by the Algerians that they were fighting foreign as well as FIS “terrorists” had its effect. The U.S. Justice Department tried to deport the FIS spokesman, Anwar Haddam—who spoke of the need for peace and reconciliation at a Rome conference—by using dozens of reports from the government-controlled Algerian press and misquotations from my own articles in The Independent. Although the U.S. State Department had acknowledged that “there is convincing evidence that the security forces carried out dozens of extrajudicial killings and often tortured and otherwise abused detainees,” the Justice Department largely relied on Algerian government supporters for its “evidence” against Haddam of “crimes against humanity,” “rape” and “beheading”—for none of which was Haddam held personally responsible.123
The American press either reported the mass killings of “Muslim militants” by “security forces sweeping through a western region wracked by recent massacres” without questioning how so large a number might have been killed in so short a period of time—this came from the Associated Press on 11 March 1998—or persuaded readers to believe that the slaughter of civilians somehow encouraged Algerians to support the government that might have been partly responsible for the killings. Thus John Lancaster in The Washington Post apparently discovered in 1997 that “the violence appears to have generated a backlash against the militants, even among those who once supported their cause.” Only an oblique reference was made in his dispatch to claims that the authorities might be involved in the massacres.
By the late 1990s, when the complicity of the Algerian military in the killings was already widely suspected, the U.S. Navy undertook manoeuvres with Algerian warships in the Mediterranean while American diplomats were encouraged to visit Algiers. Robert Pelletreau was a guest of the Algerian government in 1996. In 1998, the State Department sent a more prominent figure to the Algerian capital, none other than Martin Indyk, the point man for President Clinton’s “peace process” team to the Israeli–Palestinian talks and a former director of research at the largest Israeli lobby group in Washington. Algerian radio heralded Indyk’s arrival by announcing that American policies had changed “now that the White House has decided to support the struggle against terrorism and Congress has several times condemned the GIA.”
Given this indifference to the true nature of the massacres—and who might be responsible for them—Algerian officials now felt able to dismiss security force atrocities with near abandon. “It’s not impossible, in the situation in which we find ourselves, that some excesses may have occurred on the part of individuals acting outside the orders of their commander,” the Algerian chief of staff and principal éradicateur General Mohamed Lamari blandly admitted. A further jump into the depths of insensitivity came from Algeria’s former minister of higher education, Abdelhak Bererhi, who announced in 1998 that “to compare a rape in a police station to a rape by a GIA terrorist is indecent.” Even Lévy could not have equalled this.
The GIA was not itself an Algerian government creation, although its Afghan origins are unclear. While thousands of Algerians did travel to join the anti-Soviet mujahedin, some of whom gave their support to Osama bin Laden—I had, after all, met Algerians in al-Qaeda during my own visits to bin Laden in Afghanistan, and stood beside them as that prophetic comet soared above us near his camp in 1997—recent research suggests that even here the hand of the pouvoir was present. Algeria’s military security, it is now reported, sent their own men to Afghanistan to maintain surveillance over the Algerian “Afghanis” who had taken up the jihad— posing as loyal Muslim fighters while reporting back to Algiers on the aims and methods of the army of “Islamists” who would eventually filter home to seek a conflict with its own corrupt “socialist” enemies. Algeria’s military penetration of its antagonists was therefore accomplished at a very early stage.
When the GIA leader Djamel Zitouni was killed, supposedly in an Algerian army ambush, the authorities triumphantly announced that they had scored a tactical victory over their “terrorist” enemies. The twenty-nine-year-old son of a chicken farmer, who had worked in his father’s shop in Algiers before coming under the influence of Mustafa Bouyali, he went underground in 1991 and was allegedly given the command of the GIA’s “Phalangists of Death” squad, becoming the organisation’s emir when its earlier leader, Cherif Gousmi, died in 1994. Zitouni personally claimed responsibility for the Air France hijacking and a wave of bomb attacks in France in 1995, and even wrote a 62-page book—possibly ghost-written by his colleagues—on the “duties of holy warriors.” But Zitouni, according to the GIA itself, had been banished from the movement on 15 July 1996, and would be judged for his activities. It was a statement from the GIA’s majlis e-shoura council that announced his death the following day, adding that Antar Zouabri had taken over the leadership. So was Zitouni killed by the army or executed by the GIA? Or did these two possibilities amount to one and the same thing?
The Algerian government, for example, had long accused Zitouni of responsibility for the beheading of the seven French priests from the monastery at Tibherine in 1996. But two years later, a long investigation in Le Monde suggested that Algerian security forces were implicated in the executions after a double-cross by French secret servicemen—an act much resented by Zitouni’s lieutenant, who was a former officer in the Algerian military security apparatus. The same article alleged that French diplomats believed the bomb that killed Pierre Claverie, the bishop of Oran, might have been planted by the Algerian authorities—because he might have known of secret negotiations between the French and Algerian governments over the kidnapped monks. In 2002, by which time up to 200,000 Algerians had been killed in the war, the army killed Zitouni’s successor, Antar Zouabri— this time displaying his body, complete with bullet-broken head, as proof.
But international human rights groups now performed the task that both the UN and the EU—and, of course, the United States and other Western nations— had so disgracefully evaded: they actively demanded answers to the epic “disappearances” of the war. Human Rights Watch accused the authorities of kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial executions. A year later, Amnesty International did the same, listing 3,000 victims—a small proportion of them already named in The Independent’s investigation—who had apparently been murdered by the authorities, including hospital workers, civil servants, schoolchildren, secretaries, farmers and lawyers. When General Khaled Nezzar, one of the leaders of the 1992 military coup and former Algerian minister of defence, was visiting France in 2001 to publicise his new book on Algeria, a French court opened an inquiry against him—at the request of relatives of victims—for torturing detainees. Nezzar left France when the inquiry was dropped.124
Successive elections in Algeria, all designed to promote the idea that the country remained “democratic” despite the control of the military, threw up in 1999 another relic of the FLN nomenklatura, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, as president. Bouteflika’s policy of “working for peace and civil concord” produced a Saddamite 98.3 per cent of the vote—a statistic that went unchallenged in the West—and he survived even widespread demonstrations when a Berber revolt in Tizi-Ouzou turned into a social insurrection against poverty and corruption. He wanted Algerians to forget what they had done to each other—and, by implication, what the government had done to them—and enjoy prosperity after the military had chosen seven prime ministers and four presidents since 1992. But the evidence of Algeria’s “dirty war” built up against the regime.
When former Algerian Special Forces Lieutenant Habib Souaïda published La Sale guerre—“The Dirty War”—in Paris in 2001, the sky should have fallen. It was the first time an officer had allowed his full name—and his photograph—to appear in the press. “I’ve seen colleagues burn a 15-year-old child alive,” Lt. Souaïda wrote. “I’ve seen soldiers massacre civilians and claim their crimes were committed by terrorists. I’ve seen colonels murder suspects in cold blood. I’ve seen officers torture Islamists to death. I’ve seen too many things. I can no longer keep silent.” He gave names, dates and locations—in the forlorn hope that there might one day be war crimes trials against those responsible. The Italian judge Ferdinando Imposimato wrote in the preface that “there has always been a hidden centre of power in Algeria . . . It has locked up society, it has liquidated opponents . . . ”
There could be no more damning evidence against the regime. The French knew it was true—just as British readers of The Independent knew that the Algerians who bravely spoke to us had told the truth—but it was like the truth behind the 2003 Iraq War. The lies and the misinformation and the grotesque exaggerations and deliberate distortions were fully understood by those who cared to know—and in Europe, at least, they were in the majority—but the “official” world ignored the evidence. “Official” France did not respond to Lt. Souaïda’s revelations. “Official” France went on supporting the Algerian regime—as the U.S. administration did, as the EU did. “Official” Britain saw no “credible or substantive evidence” of army involvement in the massacres.
In 2004, Amnesty International appealed for an investigation into the discovery of at least twelve mass graves found in Algeria since 1998, the latest of them on 29 July, “to establish the truth about these killings.” The world ignored Amnesty’s appeal. At the same time, U.S. Special Forces began operations in the southern Algerian deserts against al-Qaeda—alongside their Algerian opposite numbers. The very men who were suspected of crimes against humanity were now working with the Americans to hunt down those responsible for crimes against humanity. This military cooperation, the Pentagon declared, was part of “the war on terror.”