The Great War for Civilisation (113 page)

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.