The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.

  On 23 January, Algeria’s Channel Three pop radio gave a fair reflection of the government’s policy. The first item on its hourly news broadcast was the prime minister’s international appeal for $8 billion in loans to ease the country’s 20 per cent unemployment and supplement food supplies. Then, almost as an afterthought, came a brief report on the arrest of Abdelkader Hachani. The government’s plan was obvious: encourage the people with talk of good economic times to come and treat the suppression of the FIS as of secondary importance, an unhappy but necessary result of the party’s foolishness in winning 188 of the seats in the first election. Hachani had anyway been detained on the orders of General Khaled Nezzar, the defence minister, for calling upon the Algerian army to rebel against the government.

  Hachani had done just that. Two days before his arrest, I had been given a copy of his cyclostyled appeal, addressed to the “Popular National Army” and signed in Hachani’s own handwriting. For good measure, police and troops moved into the offices of the daily Al-Khabar, which had printed the desertion appeal, and arrested the journalists working on the newspaper. Hachani himself was stopped by plain-clothes police while driving in his own car in the Belcourt district of Algiers and taken off to Blida prison to join Abassi Madani and Ali Belhaj, the two principal leaders of the FIS. At the very same hour, the prime minister, Sid-Ahmed Ghozali, announced that no speeches “of a political nature” would in future be allowed in the country’s mosques and that no demonstrations would be permitted in the vicinity of mosques. As usual, there were historical precedents behind the latest arrests. In 1930, the French dissolved Algeria’s first twentieth-century independence group—the “North African Star”—whose leader, Messali Hadj, called himself an “Islamo-nationalist” and ran a newspaper called El-Umma which celebrated “the revival of Islam.” Hadj was imprisoned for trying to reconstitute a dissolved association and later condemned to a year in a French prison for “provoking soldiers to disobey orders with the intention of creating anarchy.”

  Algerian government spokesmen talked each day about calme et sérénité. In the streets, the shopkeepers talked about the “explosion” to come. We all felt it, the absolute certainty that you couldn’t obstruct democracy without creating violence. On 20 January a brigadier in the Algerian gendarmerie was shot dead. Forty-three-year-old Amari Aïssa was married with four children. Crowds of youths had thrown stones at military checkpoints outside Algiers and soldiers had to fire warning shots in the air to disperse them. “Anyone can kill a policeman,” an official commented offhandedly when I asked for some indication of the government’s concern. “People kill policemen from New York to Nepal. It is a criminal act and will anyway reflect badly on the FIS. Every time a policeman is killed, his village turns out for the funeral and the people turn against the FIS.” Only a criminal matter. Nothing that couldn’t happen in the United States. But no one suspends elections in America. And Brigadier Aïssa wasn’t murdered by the mafia. Within three weeks, seven days of rioting between police and FIS supporters—in which at least 50 people were believed to have been killed and 200 wounded— prompted Boudiaf’s military-controlled “Council” to proclaim a state of emergency. In the slums of Algiers there were clandestine calls for a “holy war” against Boudiaf’s authorities. Almost the entire FIS leadership was already under arrest, the party’s head office in Algiers had been closed down and sixty imams had been detained.

  The meltdown comes faster than we expected. The Casbah, Algiers, 15 February 1992. Somewhere amid Bouznad Hadi’s scorched home—around the charred bedclothes, the burned electrical wiring, the bl
ackened stone staircase—lies the Truth. The veiled Algerian women crying in the tight alleyways outside the house are sure they knew what that is. So is Bouznad Hadi’s cousin, holding a generator lamp in his right hand as he tells how four of the innocent inhabitants were incinerated by Algerian army rocket fire. So is the Algerian government, which states that its soldiers only attacked the house because shots had been fired at them from the building. You can witness the same scenes in Belfast or in the West Bank. But in the Algiers Casbah, its implications are far more serious. For the difference between truths here symbolises the gulf between the people and a government fearful of civil war. Are the people going to believe that Bouznad Hadi and his friends were “martyrs” or “terrorists”?

  The fruit merchant’s home lies in the very heart of the Casbah, where winding stone steps meander between wooden and mud-baked walls, where even narrower alleyways lead to old domed houses so buried in layers of habitation that they are almost underground. No one disputes that five men were in the house in the early hours of the previous day. Nor does anyone dispute that Algerian army paratroopers—neighbours saw their red berets in the semi-darkness—surrounded Bouznad Hadi’s tiny dwelling some time between 2 and 3 a.m.

  This, however, is where truth becomes a little slippery. The government says the soldiers came under fire from the building; but the doorway is too low to be seen from the nearest pathway and there are no windows facing the only alleyway down which the soldiers could have been walking. There is a hole above the door, apparently caused by a rocket-propelled grenade, and the authorities are content to let it be known that five militants of the FIS were killed inside.

  Claw your way in darkness up the stone stairs of the interior and, in a room containing several charred beds, you will find Bouznad Hadi’s cousin. No names are forthcoming, least of all for the bearded, thoughtful young man who will arrive during the morning. “They were all innocent,” says the cousin. “There had been no shooting. The men were asleep. My cousin had only married recently—his wife is four months pregnant. When we found the dead, they were unrecognisable. They had been totally burned.” There is a French woman radio reporter on the landing, thrusting her microphone into the cousin’s face. “Are you telling the truth?” she snaps. I’m not sure he is, but this is no way to treat a man who has just lost his relative; this is not the time to practise the art of tough investigative journalist, here in this house of the dead.

  But no one can explain why the pregnant wife and other female relatives were not in the house at the time. Another man arrives, a brother-in-law of Hadi. “The authorities could have taken them alive,” he says. “The house was surrounded. But the soldiers burst in, they shot dead a man in the corridor and then fired a grenade into this room. Two of the dead men were lying on the ground. They had been wounded earlier.”

  Wounded earlier? Could these two men have been among the attackers who murdered six policemen in the Casbah a week ago, at least one of whom was wounded when he made his escape? “Definitely not!” the brother-in-law says at once. “They were shot during street demonstrations.” But the soldiers obviously knew the wounded men were there. They had been betrayed; even the brother-in-law admitted ruefully that “someone told the soldiers the wounded men were here.” Then the bearded man arrives. “It was revenge by the army,” he says in a soft, dangerous voice. “When they came into the house, one of the soldiers shouted: ‘We will do to you what you did to us at Guemmar.’ ” Guemmar is the border post where Muslim gunmen shot dead as many as fifteen Algerian soldiers in 1991. For the bearded man, standing in the semi-darkness, muttering “revenge” again and again, the matter is clear cut. “Of course they could have taken them alive. But they wanted to kill them all, including the wounded. We can’t take wounded men with beards to hospital because they are then arrested and tortured. So they were sheltering here.”

  Outside in the alleyways, more women have gathered, weeping quietly, joined by dozens of watchful young men. History shoulders its way gently towards us, as it always seems to in Algeria. One of the men asks if we know the significance of the house only 300 metres up the same claustrophobic street, another “martyrs” house. It was in this other building that FLN guerrillas—including the fugitive Ali La Pointe, the “hero” of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers—and some of their children preferred to be blown to pieces by French paratroopers rather than surrender. Early on the morning of 14 February 1992, “Paras” of a different nationality returned to the Casbah, and another legend was born.

  No one ever discovered how many angels could dance on the end of a pin. But an even more pressing theological question weighed heavily upon FIS supporters the day Boudiaf came home: how long does it take to shave off a man’s beard? Down at Ali’s coiffeur on the end of Rahmouni al-Tayeb Street, they could hack off an Islamic beard in about five minutes. But as the seventy-five-year-old proprietor tells us, FIS men sometimes talk a lot during their necessary shave. This can prolong the process by ten minutes but will still cost only 15 Algerian dinars, a mere 60 U.S. cents, and is well worth the price to avoid summary arrest and imprisonment. Which was why, in the streets of Algiers, only brave men and fools now sported the long, pointed Muslim beards which were, until a week earlier, the symbol of the FIS. The tonsorial change therefore had grave political—even military—implications for the Algerian government. By shaving off their beards, the Islamists had gone underground.

  The proof lay all over Ali’s floor, a mass of thick brown and black hair, a carpet of human fur, which he swiftly dispatched into the garbage with a stout industrial broom. Ali was too frightened to give his family name but far too proud to resist advertising his craft as he squatted on his doorstep where two sleek grey cats were purring in the sunshine. Never before had his profession played so prominent a role in Algerian politics. “Shaving a beard is like flying an aircraft,” he said. “Or . . . ”—and here there was a combination of cynicism as well as mischief in his smile—“it is like writing an article. The skill is in your hands. I get around five beards a day to shave although I couldn’t open last Friday because of the shooting. But most of these people shave off their beards at home.” Wisely so. For the Algerian intelligence services, however, the disappearance of the beard created another problem; in order to mingle in the streets, many of their agents had adorned their own cautious faces with a full growth of poorly groomed hair. Less than a week earlier, one such bearded security operative, dressed in a long khamis shirt, was known to have seized an imam near the Bab el-Oued mosque. In the local police station, the agent dutifully shaved off the right half of the imam’s beard, adding—according to the preacher—“We will get all of you in the end.” An ambitious undertaking now that the barbers of Algiers had made their extra profits.

  The people of Algiers were asked to give a tumultuous welcome to the returning prodigal. But when Mohamed Boudiaf, tall, frail, his features thin and elderly, arrived at the airport that bears the name of his late and hated rival, Houari Boumedienne, only a few taxi-drivers, porters, journalists and FLN functionaries were there to greet him. The only sign of enthusiasm came from three groups of Berbers in traditional brown robes who stood near the arrivals lounge and thumped away joylessly on high-pitched drums under the eyes of secret policemen. Boudiaf was driven through empty streets to the office of the vacated presidency where, with his hand on the Koran, he accepted the unconstitutional office of leader of the “Council of State.” He promised to continue what he called “the democratic process” without explaining how he could do this when the democratic process—like the president and parliament—no longer existed.

  For the press to be let loose on a seventy-two-year-old pensioner who was until a month ago the owner of a Moroccan brick factory should have been a trial for a man who was supposed to lead Algeria to its salvation. But for all of two hours, Mohamed Boudiaf proved to be a hard, almost aquiline man, soaking up the camera flashes like sunlight, reproving journalists who dared to talk of “repression,
” appealing to Western nations to help Algeria in its hour of need. He condemned his predecessors in government. He demanded obedience to the law. He admitted the incarceration of at least 6,000 young Algerians in desert prison camps—another copy-cat act of imprisonment from French colonial days—and claimed that “respect for democracy must not lead to the destruction of democracy.”118

  In just four days, another fifty Muslim demonstrators were killed by police in Algerian cities. Abdelkader Moghni, the most important of the FIS candidates to be elected in December and the one man who might have been able to renegotiate its position within the political establishment—even talk to the government—was imprisoned. But Boudiaf did not want to talk to the FIS. There was a growing suspicion in Algeria that the “Council of State” would prefer to provoke the FIS into armed insurrection—and thus “prove” that the party was never interested in constitutional politics, that the annulment of the January elections prevented a coup d’état by the Islamists rather than by the army. Certainly, more groupuscules of armed men began to emerge. An organisation naming itself “Faithful to the Promise” called for a jihad, claiming that this was a continuation à la Bouyali of the independence war. Boudiaf concentrated his anger on two targets: the FIS, and the corruption which had driven so many Algerians to despair of the democracy they had been promised. The first of his targets would despise him. The second would kill him.