The Great War for Civilisation (112 page)

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.”