The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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 Jan
uary 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.