The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.

  A few years earlier, he might have claimed that all Muslim forces were united in one aim. Algeria’s war changed that. There was a time when the Algerian authorities would have tried to censor the atrocities being carried out by the “Islamists,” but the sheer cruelty with which the innocent were being exterminated forced them to change their policy; now they wished to médiatiser les atrocités. The two women did have their throats cut—their heads were afterwards torn from their bodies—because they refused “pleasure marriages.” One of them was twenty-five, the other twenty-one, and both had been kidnapped with other members of their family from their home in Blida. A defecting Algerian army officer spoke of 50,000 troops now engaged in the “anti-terrorist struggle” and of “secret liquidation” of many suspected “Islamists.”

  MOHAMED USED TO ATTEND a Koranic school, a madrassa, and was preaching in a mosque in Algiers. He sits on a sofa in an Algiers “safe” house to which Lara Marlowe of Time and I have been invited
. It is 3 February 1994, just four months after thirty ski-masked commandos came for him at his home at two in the morning. He is aged far beyond his nineteen years. He stares at a brass table top as he talks:

  They hit my 48-year-old mother. They blindfolded me and drove me straight to a torture room. It was down three or four flights of stairs and it was very cold. They stripped me naked. There was a manhole in the floor, and they kept dunking my head in the sewage. They asked me over and over: “Where are the weapons?” I said I didn’t know. They kept insisting, because I preached in the mosque on Fridays. When they took off my blindfold, I saw they were all wearing blue police jumpsuits and hoods. There were about eighteen of them. I could hear other people screaming. There were very bright lights, and bloodstains on the walls. They tied me to a concrete bench and pinched my nostrils shut, then stuffed a rag soaked in water and bleach in my mouth. They poured more of the stuff through the rag, until my stomach filled with water and bleach, then they kicked my stomach until I vomited. This went on for three hours.

  This young man was then taken to the basement of the Châteauneuf police school in the El Biar district. Mohamed points to dark purple scars on his feet. He was given electric shocks on his feet, he says, “with a thing that looked like a pistol. ” Ten days later, he was taken to the central commissariat near the Air France building in central Algiers:

  The officers at the commissariat in charge of torture were called Kraa and Abdel-Samad . . . they tortured us in front of each other, for psychological effect. They showed us dead people hanging by handcuffs from the ceiling. These were people who had died from torture and starvation. They had been in cells with me. They were from Belcourt . . . I saw five dead people at the commissariat. Two hanging from the ceiling. The other three had been tortured and they were burned to death with blow torches. They threatened to bring my wife if I didn’t tell the truth. A man called Sid-Ahmed Shabla from Baraki was in prison with me. He told me they tortured his wife. They brought his mother and tortured and raped her in front of him. I was outside the room when they did this, and when his mother came out. She was naked and covered in blood. She was about fifty-five. She told us to be brave, to hang on. Sid-Ahmed was condemned to death. At the commissariat, I was tortured so badly that I condemned my own brother as being in the resistance. They tied my hands and feet and laid me on my stomach on the floor. They smashed my head against the floor until my teeth fell out.

  Mohamed breaks down in tears. We sit and wait until he wants to talk again:

  They brought my brother to the commissariat and put us face to face in a room. I told him: “It’s not true, I only said it because of the torture.” My brother was weeping and he said: “May God forgive you.” They broke his ribs and let him go . . . Under torture, I’d said I was collecting medicine and money for the resistance. It wasn’t true. I only said this because I wanted them to stop torturing me . . . I was barefoot in front of the [tribunal] judge and my body was still covered with marks. I cried in front of him and said I’d been tortured. He said: “Yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.” . . . At Sekardji, they put me in a narrow, wet cell underground for forty-five days . . . There was no light, and many rats. There I was tortured again, both by beating on my feet and the chiffon. They gave me one small bowl of soup full of cockroaches and one piece of bread every day.

  He names his torturers as a Lieutenant Bouamra and Saïd Haddad; the prisoners called the latter “Hitler” because of his moustache. Mohamed was taken to court again and this time acquitted. He says the guards told him: “If you come back, we’ll finish you off.” Now he is in hiding “because death squads are going around killing everyone who comes out of prison.”

  NOW A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNt of fraternal war, given to us by a man whom I called Lyes—for his safety—in my report:

  Up the hill at Duc des Cars, there were two boys who went to school together and lived in the same building. One of them was a fundamentalist, the other a policeman. The fundamentalist was sent to a prison camp in the south. When he got out, he wanted revenge so he killed his school-friend, the policeman. So the policeman’s father killed the “Islamist.” Everyone in our neighbourhood knew them. If you go to a policeman’s funeral, the FIS say you’re with the government. And if you go to an “Islamist’s” funeral, the police come after you. So the people in our building paid condolences to both families.

  Even ex-general Jacques Massu vouchsafed his advice to the embattled Algerian government. “The security forces have the principal responsibility for the future of their country,” the former commander of the brutal French Paras pompously announced. “With the West’s help, their power will inevitably be successful.”120 The Algerians never asked for Massu’s advice, but he would have approved of the elevation to corps commander of General Mohamed Lamari, leader of the Algerian army’s éradicateur faction. And he would have had no objection to Abderrahmane Meziane-Cherif as Algerian minister of the interior, one of that rare breed of Algerian muscle-men of whom all Algerians talk, who believe that only a military solution can bring peace to Algeria. So when he walked into his office on the second floor of the Palais du Gouvernement—well-cut blue suit, red tie, goatee beard and a massive Havana—I asked the fatal question. Who were the éradicateurs? And was he one of them?

  Meziane-Cherif drew heavily on his cigar for a long time—a very long time indeed—before replying. And then he said:

  A farmer can be an eradicator when he pulls weeds from the fields, sometimes a man has to purify water and cleanse things of insects and bugs. There is an extreme situation of violence and terrorism in Algeria. Do you call a law-enforcement officer who does his job an eradicator? . . . People usually call those who will commit treason and escape “conciliators.” If I have to choose between the two, I will do everything to ensure Algeria remains a modern society.

  In other words, Meziane-Cherif was an “eradicator,” prepared to fight to the end against “terrorists,” “criminals,” the “virus”—his word, along with the Saddamite “insects”—that threatened the country. He was one of the hard men, sentenced to death by the French in the war of independence, a former governor of Jelfa, Nijaya, Gelba, Aïn Defla and Algiers, the kind of guy whose jails would not have air conditioning. When I ask if it was fair to condemn a recent Western initiative in Rome in which Algerians—including the FIS—called for peace and condemned violence, the minister’s aide, a bruiser of a man with close-cropped hair and a handshake as fierce as a lobster’s claw, mutters: “It condemned violence in a philosophical way.” So much for conciliation.

  The Algerian war had slipped into a system of self-provocation in which every atrocity would be avenged fourfold. In January 1995 the “Islamic Salvation Army,” widely regarded as the military wing of the FIS, had announced that they would launch a bloody offensive to coincide with Ramadan in which they would intensify their attacks against “apostates and their henchmen.” A few days earlier, issue No. 33 of the “Islamic Salvation Army” broadsheet El-Feth el-Moubine— “Brilliant Victory”—promised that the group’s operations would “affect the capital.” Sure enough, a car bomb in the centre of Algiers killed 38 people and left 256 wounded. This was precisely what Iraq’s insurgents would do a decade later, by marking Ramadan as a month of military offensive—and then assaulting their American occupiers and their Iraqi police auxiliaries without any heed to the innocents who would die. The Algiers bomb had been set off outside the police headquarters in Amrouche Street—a gaunt, four-storey building in whose dungeons many Islamists claimed to have been tortured—and exploded at a time when Algerians were buying food before the start of the month of fasting. Many of the 256 wounded lost limbs.

  The most vulnerable of the innocent were, increasingly, the victims of the most ruthless attacks. In January 1995, gunmen came to the home of Salah Zoubar, an independence war veteran, near Chlef in western Algeria, kidnapped his twenty-four-year-old daughter and three sons—the youngest only thirteen—and shot all of them in th
e head. In February, the “Islamists” murdered Azzedine Medjoubi, the director of the Algerian national theatre. A popular film actor with a comical drooping moustache—he was well known in Algiers for his adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire—he was walking out of his theatre after organising a children’s performance when two men in their twenties fired several bullets into his head.121

  Events now moved so fast in Algeria that even those of us travelling regularly to the country could scarcely keep pace. In February, a prison riot at the Sekardji jail—the old French Barberousse prison in central Algiers where the guillotine once fell on the necks of FLN captives—ended with ninety-nine inmates dead, among them two senior officials of the FIS. Algerian paramilitary police had surrounded the prison after four of the guards, according to the authorities, had their throats cut. No one knew if they were trying to break out—as 900 “Islamists” did from Tazult-Lambese jail the previous year—or whether the bloodbath was, as the FIS would later claim, a deliberate massacre by the authorities. Two Algerian newspapers reported that fourteen prisoners had been murdered by their own cell-mates. At first, it was said that Lembarek Boumarafi—accused of Boudiaf’s murder—was among the dead. But then he suddenly surfaced on television screens with nothing more than a wounded knee, sporting a new moustache, smiling slightly and greeting viewers of his videotape with the words: “It’s me, Boumarafi, and I’m alive.” Then the rumour spread that it was not Boumarafi on the tape.

  The Algerian war was being fought in the shadows. Both sides wished this darkness to envelop their struggle, although the results were always ghoulishly publicised. I spent several days with the Algerian garde mobile , transformed into paramilitary units for the duration, watching the hooded, masked cops hauling young men from the slums for interrogation. We would snake through the poverty of Algiers in a convoy of green-and-white Land Cruisers, Kalashnikovs pointing from the doors of the rear vehicles, between crowds of men who stood in the ordure and garbage that lay piled along the tracks through Château Rouge, Cherarba, Gaid Gassem, Eucalyptus, Houaoura. Sometimes we broke into open country, the gendarmes in their green uniforms running into the orange orchards around Blida to search youths whose hands were held high, their faces filled with terror, the muzzles of the cops’ Kalashnikovs caressing the backs of their necks. What happened, I kept asking myself, when we journalists were not travelling with the police?