by Robert Fisk
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 silve
r 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.”
