The Great War for Civilisation (109 page)

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.