by Robert Fisk
And the moment Boudiaf died, on 29 June 1992, we all got it wrong. I was in Moscow, sitting in a hotel room that overlooked the Kremlin wall after returning from the Nagorno-Karabakh war on the edge of Armenia, when the phone rang and Harvey Morris, still my foreign news editor, came on the line from London. “They’ve topped Boudiaf,” he said with his usual sensitivity. “Looks like your Islamic mates have done ’im in.” And I believed him. In fact, we all thought, when we heard that three bullets had cut Boudiaf down while he addressed a public meeting in the eastern Algerian city of Annaba, that the FIS—or some armed group sympathetic to the movement—had carried out the death threat uttered by so many Islamists. At least one organisation, Islamic Jihad, had promised that an “all-out war” against the Algerian government would start on 30 June. They had promised to kill “a thousand” policemen and soldiers but—so I portentously announced in The Independent—“they struck a day early and decapitated instead the entire structure of government authority which had been created to destroy them.”
I didn’t have any doubts about who “they” were, didn’t ask myself why we had never heard before from an Algerian Islamic Jihad, even though its name had been used by other groups in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. I couldn’t go back through my Algerian reporting notebooks—because they were in Beirut and I was in Moscow—in which I might have traced some antagonism towards Boudiaf, not just from the FIS but from wealthy members of the pouvoir, even among the military, who feared his anti-corruption campaign. Only when I returned to Algiers two weeks later did I discover that there was growing evidence that the old president might not, after all, have been killed by Islamists. In the weeks before his death, Boudiaf made powerful secular enemies inside Algeria—at least one of them reportedly linked to ex-President Chadli Bendjedid—and even Boudiaf’s widow now said that she did not believe that the FIS committed the crime. Less than three weeks after the murder, the interior minister, General Larbi Belkheir—who with General Nezzar had formed the most powerful duo in Boudiaf’s “Council”—was sacked by the new prime minister, Belaïd Abdesselam, for a “lapse” in security. Some lapse.
Boudiaf was killed by one of his own bodyguards, Second Lieutenant Lembarek Boumarafi. State television cameras were taping the president’s address at the moment of his death and Belkheir announced that Boumarafi had acted alone. He had fired two bullets into Boudiaf’s head and a third into his back. What was not known at the time was that the president’s anti-corruption campaign had already netted a retired Algerian army major-general and a prominent businessman and associate of Chadli Bendjedid in the southern city of Tamanrasset. And only days before Boudiaf was assassinated, a senior officer responsible for one of the investigations was himself mysteriously murdered. There were also rumours that Boudiaf—following the precedent set by de Gaulle of negotiating with the FLN—was trying to open a private dialogue with moderate FIS officials.
A quiet visit to an acquaintance in Algerian state television proved that some of the videotape of Boudiaf’s killing had been suppressed by the authorities. Eyewitnesses in Annaba claimed that four separate television cameras taped the scene at the moment of the assassination. The footage shown around the world, in which Boudiaf could be seen uttering his last words and then lying dead on the ground with blood on his chest, was censored. My source was explicit:
The cameras filmed the actual moment of the killing and they censored the scene when the bullets hit Boudiaf. The tape showed his brain exploding when the bullets hit him in the head—you cannot show something so terrible on television. There is another tape which shows the arrest of Boumarafi. In this, Boumarafi says on camera: “I killed Boudiaf, knowing of his heroic past and that he was a good man. But he didn’t do enough against the mafia. And he opposed the choice of the people. I belong to no political party but I belong to the Islamic movement.” Boumarafi was so self-confident, so sure of himself—he spoke so well and was so charismatic—that the authorities feared he would become a hero if the tape was shown on television.
If this account was correct, then Boudiaf’s murder might indeed have involved Islamists. But the events surrounding Boumarafi’s arrest were extremely puzzling—especially if the authorities really believed him to be a fundamentalist murderer. One account said that he had been able to escape from the Annaba conference hall but later surrendered peacefully to the police. Curiously, the army—which tried the leaders of the FIS in a well-publicised military court hearing in Blida two weeks later—refused to take responsibility for Boumarafi, claiming instead that he must be tried by a civilian court. Boumarafi was now incarcerated in the civilian prison at Annaba—by chance, the home town of Chadli Bendjedid—while local journalists were able to find out little about his life. He was twenty-six and, so it was rumoured, used to be a bodyguard for President Bendjedid. He was trained for his job in the presidential security unit by Italian Carabinieri.
It was Boudiaf’s actions in the months before his assassination, however, that showed he was not afraid of being unpopular. Perhaps to the surprise of the old FLN and army hands who originally supported him, Boudiaf had in May ordered the arrest of retired Major-General Mustafa Beloucif, who was charged before a military tribunal at Blida with misuse of state funds. Boudiaf also ordered the arrest of a prominent businessman on corruption charges; the man was allegedly involved in the illegal sale of subsidised food and smuggling. One of the officers dispatched to conduct this investigation was a lieutenant in the security forces; only days before Boudiaf’s murder, he was assassinated in an Algiers street.
Already one Algerian newspaper columnist had dubbed Boudiaf’s assassination “Algeria-gate” and hinted that details of his death might be covered up like the murders of FLN dissidents Mohamed Kider, shot in a Madrid street in 1967, and Krim Belkacem, the 1970 Frankfurt strangulation victim. In the daily El Watan , Laïd Zaghlani recalled that details of the death of Algerian foreign minister Mohamed Benyahyia—shot down along with his delegation over the Iran–Iraq frontier in 1982 during an attempt to end the war—were kept secret “to protect the nation’s supreme interests.” More likely, this was done to protect Saddam Hussein—but that is another story.
It was now popular in Algeria to attribute Boudiaf’s assassination to the “mafia,” an opaque term used to indicate the social and political class that enriched itself at the expense of the country during Chadli Bendjedid’s twelve-year rule. Former prime minister Abdel-Hamid Brahimi’s claim that bribes of $28 billion— the equivalent of Algeria’s foreign debt—were paid to government officials over a decade had entered popular folklore. Boudiaf’s supporters even claimed that there was an alliance between the “mafia” and the Islamist movements. The one thing they wanted, however, they most certainly would not get.
“We demand to know the whole truth about the assassination of our martyr Mohamed Boudiaf—raise your hands with me and say you want the truth.” The words drifted over the pile of brown clay and dying wreaths under which lay the last, bullet-cracked remains of the assassinated president. And Boudiaf’s anciens combattants comrades—the gunmen and bombers and couriers who more than thirty years earlier had freed their land from Massu’s paras—raised their right hands by the grave and said, firmly and loudly: “I do.”
Age confers dignity and gentleness upon the most ruthless of men and women. White-haired, head bowed in homage to his dead leader, Omar Boudaoud looked like just another old soldier, the kind of stooped figure you might see by an English war memorial any Remembrance Sunday. Yet Boudaoud was the man who led the FLN inside France, who organised the blowing up of fuel dumps, the derailment of a train at Cagnes-sur-Mer, the killing of four gendarmes in Lyon, the attempted assassination of Algerian governor-general Jacques Soustelle. Can men with so bloody an inheritance expect the truth? There was Abu Bakr Belkaïd, for example, freedom fighter, fellow inmate with Boudiaf at Fresnes prison in 1956, mourning the lost opportunities of Algeria. “Things are more serious now,�
�� he said. “President Boudiaf was clean—he had been in exile, far from the establishment, before he became our leader. He came here to modernise our country, to give us a clear path. Yes, I hope we will know the truth about his martyrdom. But will we? Do we know who killed Kennedy? Do we?”
Madame Boudiaf was there; she who said that she did not think “for a single moment” that the FIS had murdered her husband. Cloaked in green and white, face hidden behind sunglasses, she stood before the pile of earth, then embraced Belkaïd and sobbed in his arms, ignoring the marble catafalque next to her husband’s grave. “Houari Boumedienne, 1932–1978,” it said. Boudiaf had turned down Boumedienne’s offer to be president after the 1962 liberation because he did not want to be a figurehead; he opposed Boumedienne from his Moroccan exile. There were other, identical, catafalques in the same row as Boudiaf’s grave, each containing an honoured warrior, their names inscribed on each without comment or verbal homage; you needed memory and a history book to understand their meaning. There was Larbi Ben M’Hidi (murdered by French paratroopers in March 1957). There was Ferhat Abbas (exiled by his own FLN). There was Abane Ramdane (brutally murdered—probably strangled—in 1957 by his FLN colleagues near Tangiers). There was Belkacem, the Frankfurt murder victim, and Aït Hamouda Amirouche and Sid el-Hawass (FLN leaders of Wilaya 4—Bouyali’s sector—both killed by the French in 1959). With so many bullet-smashed bones and broken necks inside these graves, could anyone expect to learn the truth about the cemetery’s newest “martyr”?
Such was the demand for truth, light and discovery in the humid graveyard of El-Alia. No one pointed the finger, of course. No one blamed Islamists or the “mafia” or the old FLN. Behind the gravestones stood a bunch of soldiers, a few blue-uniformed policemen and a scattering of unshaven young men in jeans holding sub-machine guns, ammunition clips in their trouser belts. For security, of course. Just like the bodyguards who protected Mohamed Boudiaf in Annaba, one of whom shot him in the head and back.
Boudiaf’s death was the moment when Algeria’s war turned savage. The BBC, when it wished to air atrocity film, would give due warning to viewers of what it called “a nervous disposition.” Readers are thus duly given the same warning before they wade through the following blood-drenched pages of this book. For within two years, a largely unreported tragedy was unfolding across Algeria, its nature—an insurrection by Muslim militants denied an election victory—well known, but its dimensions growing daily more fearful with bloodletting on a scale unknown since independence from France. By 1994, up to 4,000 violent deaths had been officially recorded and large areas of Algeria were falling each night under the control of an increasingly cohesive military organisation, the “Armed Islamic Movement.” If the previous two years were a playback of Algeria’s “savage war of peace” with France, the bloodbath now unleashed held terrible precedents for the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq a decade later.
The families of security forces personnel—and in some cases the officers themselves—were now forced to retreat each night into government compounds for their own protection. Despite full-scale battles with the Islamists, the Algerian army and paramilitary police were unable to protect the growing number of victims cut down so brutally. The word “cut” was all too accurate. Many of those assassinated by “Islamists” were dispatched with knives, left on garbage tips or roadsides with their heads almost severed from their bodies. Professors and journalists, soldiers and Muslim militants, policemen and local government officials were slaughtered daily. The notebooks of my frightening visits to Algeria were now filling up with details of these gruesome, wanton killings. On 27 January 1994, a twenty-four-year-old unemployed man in the village of Kasr el-Boukhari was totally decapitated and his head left on the steps of a disused cinema. “An example,” his murderers said in a fly-sheet pasted on village walls, “to all those who violate the morality of Islam.” On the eve of a “national conference” of political parties—the FIS, needless to say, was excluded—a policeman was stabbed to death in front of a group of children in Annaba. On the night the conference ended, Islamists assassinated seven civilians in Djidjel province, one of them Dr. Ferhat Chibout, a professor of history, who was shot down in front of his parents, his wife and two children.
As usual, the outside world cared more about foreign than domestic victims of the war, a fact shrewdly grasped by the killers. Their promise to “execute” all citizens of “Crusader states” culminated in early January 1994 in the murder of the twenty-sixth Westerner in Algeria, a female French consular official whose death led at once to the suspension of all visas to France. Monique Afri’s murder was followed by the killing of Raymond Louzoum, a sixty-two-year-old Tunisian-born Jew who had been living in Algiers for thirty years. An optician who had married a Muslim woman and was seeking Algerian citizenship, he played French officers in a series of films about the independence war. Two bullets were fired into Louzoum’s head in Didouche Mourad Street in the very centre of Algiers city.
Not that the Muslim insurrection had a monopoly on killing. It was in late 1993 that an Algerian human rights group first claimed that the government was using death squads in its struggle with the Islamists. A French intelligence intercept of an Algerian police assault on a Muslim stronghold provided clear evidence of an officer ordering his men to take no prisoners. In December 1993, “Islamists”—and at this point, we should perhaps start putting quotation marks around that word— killed twelve army recruits in their camp near Sidi Bel-Abbès. In early January 1994, a soldier was stopped at a routine police checkpoint outside Algiers. He showed his army pass—and immediately had his throat cut. The checkpoint was false; the “policemen” were gunmen in police uniform. Or were they? These faux barrages were becoming ever more frequent and creeping closer to the capital each week. It soon became all too obvious to the few journalists still travelling to Algiers that in many cases the killers were real policemen—working for the government by day and the insurrection by night.
Already the army was using tanks and helicopters against “Islamist” units in the mountains of Lakhdaria. It had little choice, because the insurgents were now moving across Algeria in company strength. When a dozen Croat guest workers had their throats cut in December 1993, they had no chance of escape; their executioners were among fifty armed men who stormed their accommodation shacks outside Oran. At times, Algeria’s cities were close to mass panic. Bread queues in Algiers were outnumbered only by the thousands of Algerians desperate to leave their country who stood outside the French embassy day and night until Monique Afri’s murder closed down the visa section. Nor did the authorities allow Algerians to forget what civil war would mean. Every day, state television repeated news film of the post-Soviet slaughter in Kabul, MiG jet fighters bombing the Afghan capital, corpses of women and children lying in the streets. If you do not remain united behind your government, the unspoken message went, then this will be Algiers and Oran and Constantine and all the other cities of Algeria. But how far could the authorities go in frightening a people into supporting a government?
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 intrigu
ing 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.”
