The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Commandant Mohamed—I knew his family name but promised never to reveal it—would become an inverted tourist guide, pointing out places of dangerous attraction: two gutted supermarkets, a burned-out gas factory, a row of carbonised trucks belonging to a government cooperative, a wrecked school with shattered windows. Once we passed an entire railway train, its row of silver carriages burned and twisted in a siding. Noting their hoods and ski-masks, the people of Algiers had long ago nicknamed the cops Ninjas , a title they were happy to adopt. Each time we passed a road, we could see young men at the other end, running for cover into shops and laneways. The youths who did not run looked at us with such hatred that their gaze went right through us, as if they had already defeated the government which the commandant’s men represented. But the facts came pouring forth from Mohamed. Almost all the armed “Islamists” carried Czech or Israeli weapons—“Skorpions or Uzis,” he said—he thought they had been smuggled across Algeria’s borders with Morocco, Libya, Tunisia or Mali. They were making bombs with butane gas bottles filled with explosives, glass, acetylene, sulphur and iron filings, buried in the roads and detonated with batteries.

  “They are organised,” he said. “There is a ‘brain’ behind them. These are people who evolve with the situation. They change. They used to use stolen hunting rifles. Now they use automatic weapons and explosives. They strike wherever they want and they have the initiative. They have ‘spotters’ and they have a method. The leaders know each other but those who make the attacks don’t know each other. It’s a pyramid structure.” The Islamists had shaved their beards, donned djellaba robes, sometimes pretended to be fruit-pickers, rifles at their side in the orange groves, resting in the slums at night, walking out through the suburban wadis by the sewage overflows at dawn. “In Algiers, the GIA are much more numerous than the FIS’s armed movement,” Commandant Mohamed confided to us as he relaxed in his office in Harrash, an old Rolling Stones 33 rpm long-playing record track—“Street-Fighting Man”—on the turntable. “When you fight with them, they fight to the end. They never surrender.” Six years later, that is what the U.S. Special Forces officers would say about the al-Qaeda men whom they fought in western Afghanistan.

  In Bab el-Oued, the hardest of all the “Islamist” strongholds in any Algerian city, Commandant Mohamed and his fifteen men strung themselves along the pavement, watched by perhaps a thousand young men, so I could take photographs. “It’s swarming with ‘spotters,’ ” he murmured. “Look at the way they look at us.” The cops pointed their rifles at the roofs and balconies as the crowds grew thicker, more disturbed. Then suddenly, Mohamed wanted to leave. We had been here just two minutes. “We should go,” he snapped. “Now.” How many new GIA recruits had his men just created? Support for authority does not come from a rifle at the neck. Almost every street through which we passed had effectively been lost to government control. There were, to be sure, no “no-go” areas in Algiers. But there were no safe areas either.

  I liked travelling with these men and they liked the company of Westerners for the false sense of protection it gave them. It was false. I knew if I stuck with them long enough, I would see the war; I knew that as the days passed, there would be a shooting, an ambush which I would see with my own eyes rather than report at second hand hours or days later. But I never believed it would come so quickly.

  THE PINE TREES SWAYED in the early morning light, the orange orchards gleamed gold, the fields of yellow rape seed stretched to a grey curtain of mountains. You couldn’t find a more sleepy laneway, meandering through cypress trees past streams flooded by the night showers. This is how they used to illustrate paradise in children’s books.

  Chaibia was a one-street town, some broken old French villas and a row of cheap cement houses. The shutters were open. In fact, the windows were open on this brisk, cold morning. There were no people on the streets. And somewhere inside my head—and I was in the heated cocoon of Commandant Mohamed’s Land Cruiser—part of my brain was asking another part of my brain a question. It must be cold outside. The people were at home. But why had they all opened their windows? What a very odd thing to do . . .

  That’s when we were ambushed. I don’t like the “we.” But you can’t stick a journalist’s flag on top of an Algerian police vehicle; besides, the bombers would have been more than happy to know that they had a foreigner as well as sixteen gendarmes as their target. And when the first bomb went off, it sounded, inside our leading armoured vehicle, like a tyre bursting behind us. The cops in their ski masks knew what it was and the second bomb went off 100 metres away as I opened the rear door, a wall of sound and a sheet of concrete and smoke behind the second police van.

  I pulled up my camera and looked through the lens at the second car—to capture the smoke drifting behind it—when there was a third blast like someone bashing their hands over my ears and, through my telephoto lens, a curtain of roadway, grass, iron and muck streaming upwards in slow motion. A policeman ran in front of me, firing into the yellow-flowered field to the left, a woman came screaming out of a broken-down house—an old pied noir villa, I remember thinking—shrieking and imploring God and the police to stop the noise. A rain of stones and concrete thundered onto the roadway around us and the petrol cap of the third police van came bowling down the roadway and jumped past my face. That’s when the fourth bomb went off.

  “Get down, get down, there may be another,” Commandant Mohamed shouted. I looked around. There was a sinister ditch beside me, a deserted barber’s shop on the other side of the road with Coi feur des Jeunes crudely painted on the glass door. So we were lying on the ground when the shrapnel came pattering down again, a mad rain on this beautiful spring morning in paradise. There was a silence broken only by the crying of the terrified woman and the sound of men breathing and coughing and a voice on the radio asking if anyone had been hurt and a policeman saying, very quietly: “God is Great.” At which point, the gendarmes began spraying the trees with bullets, the rounds hissing into the leaves, firing into the fields again, their bullets thwacking through undergrowth and howling towards a railway embankment. I had been reporting Algeria’s war second hand; not any more.

  It was a perfect ambush. They—the GIA, no doubt, led by its new emir in the Blida Wilaya, Saïd Makhloufi—had set the roadside bombs 50 metres apart, four of them to hit the four vehicles of the patrol. “They were very professional,” Mohamed said. “They waited till we got out of our vehicles before they set off the fourth bomb, but our vans were spread out. Then they ran. They could be there . . . ” And he pointed to the oh-so-innocent village of Chaibia, deserted again, not a soul on its streets, all of its people forewarned by the GIA so that the bombs did not break the glass of their windows which is why—yes, my brain had not quite worked out the significance in time—they had opened those windows on this cold spring morning. “Or they could be there—or there,” Mohamed said, his finger sweeping across the horizon where the sunshine now splashed merrily on the walls of hamlets almost buried behind the trees.

  We trudged into the fields, warily, the cops firing in front of them, looking for the wires, splashing through the soggy grass and stunted orchards. A railway train clicked past, the local diesel from Blida to Algiers, the passengers with their morning papers staring at us out of drowsy carriages as if we were on a lunatic field exercise. That’s when we found the electric detonator lines, four car batteries carelessly covered with earth, a series of broken lightbulbs for detonators, near the massive craters in the road. One of the police vehicles had its windscreen smashed, its door fittings ripped off, shrapnel gashes on the bodywork, no one hurt.

  The electric leads ran across the fields and a police sergeant followed them, pulling them out of the mud and water like that scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness discovers that someone is planning to blow up his bridge. The wires sucked their way out of the mud, stretching to knot on a barbed wire fence from which a single thin green fishing line ran towards the railway. T
he line ended on the tracks. That’s where they had waited for us, three, maybe four of them, listening on their scanners—according to Commandant Mohamed—to the police radios. An old man was cutting grass in the corner of the fields. “There were some guys here this morning with hunting guns,” he said. “They were shooting birds.” But in truth everyone in Chaibia must have known what was going to happen. It must have taken hours to lay the butane gas bottles of explosives, the electric lines, the batteries and detonators. They may have lain there for days, just waiting for us.

  When we left Chaibia, the people did not look at us, did not even glance at the bomb-damaged Toyota van; it was as if we did not exist, the fate that the GIA had intended for us. All that was wrong was the distance between the bombs. “Distance—keep your distance from each other,” Commandant Mohamed called into his radio. And then he said Allahu akbar—God is great—again. And the cop beside me muttered a prayer in Arabic and the words “Mohamed is the Prophet of God.” All the policemen said this. It intrigued me, this praying, in a way I did not at first understand. It went on and on, for minutes, for an hour after the ambush. The police were thanking God for his mercy. And I had no doubt that, on the other side of that railway embankment, the bombers must have used the very same words, seeking God’s grace and invoking the Prophet’s name in their endeavour to kill us all. It was Commandant Mohamed who turned to me on the road back to Algiers and said: “We had beautiful luck today.”

  I had beautiful luck, too. I wanted to see the war and I had my first-hand report and I was back in the safety of the Hôtel el-Djezair, but at 5:38 next morning—I had formed the habit of checking my watch every time a bomb went off—there was a great thunderous roar and a mass of black smoke hanging over the police family residence in Kouba. Just before the explosion, the bombers had fled the scene shouting—oh, for the unity of Islam—Allahu akbar. God is great. And the cops would believe this doubly since the detonation that was supposed to bring down the entire building on the heads of their families only tore down the front wall. Most of the twenty-one wounded were women and children, the youngest a year-old baby. There used to be two police on guard duty outside. “But they were both assassinated last year,” an off-duty gendarme told me. “Since then, there hasn’t been a guard on our buildings.”

  It was instructive to watch the Algerian security forces as they turned up at the bomb-site. There were gendarmerie men in green uniforms and ski masks and city traffic policemen in blue uniforms and white braids and another rarely seen species dressed all in black with crimson bandoliers and black hoods with slits for the eyes and mouth, who hung around the outside of the crowds, watching us all. Who were they?

  “I’LL TURN THIS ON so they can’t hear us,” the young man says, and places a small transistor on the windowsill, its brassy music smothering any listening equipment the Algerian security men may have rigged up near the house. The story we listen to is one of secrecy and fear, of summary execution, of clandestine government death squads, of an “Islamist” leader shot dead “while trying to escape,” of mass graves and numbered corpses in plastic bags. The slaughter at Sekardji prison killed off 223 “cadres” of the FIS, according to the men in the room, all “murdered” in revenge for the bombing of the Algiers police commissariat.

  There is not a hint of doubt among these men, not a moment’s hesitation in their story. For them, the GIA are not “terrorists” but the “armed opposition.” Ask about the claims—backed up by all-too-detailed evidence—that the GIA rape women, and one of the men replies: “This is just an attempt to discredit the resistance. ” Express incredulity at this answer, and the response is softened, the kind of grubby reply that governments give when called to account. “There are excesses by the GIA, of course.” Which is one way of saying that the GIA rape women.

  But it is government excess of which they wish to speak, brutal, consistent, carried out with the help—so they claim in Algiers—of a special “anti-terrorist brigade” based at the Châteauneuf police station, the torture centre where women are still taken, according to these same men, for systematic rape and execution. Lawyers acting on behalf of FIS men say that in many cases the Algerian police no longer bother to torture prisoners for confessions before dragging them into court. They merely execute them.

  An Algiers lawyer tries to explain. “In the last month and a half, there have been no more judicial hearings in Algiers—there have been no trials—but there have been thousands of arrests. The government set up special courts in Oran, Algiers and Constantine in September 1992, but they didn’t work because the lawyers wouldn’t cooperate. The government abolished special courts this year— and this was said to be a good, liberal thing. But there have been no court hearings since then, just the arrests.”

  He mentions the cases of two “Islamist” physics teachers from Blida, Dr. Fouad Bouchlagem and Dr. Ahmed Noulaaresse. “Both were arrested by the Algiers police. One had a Ph.D. from Toulouse University, the other was trained at MIT. Then later, after their detention, the police just said that they were both ‘shot while trying to escape.’ What are we supposed to conclude from this?” More frightening still are the cases of Dr. Nourredine Ameur, head of the orthopaedic unit at the Harrash hospital in Algiers, and Dr. Cherif Belahrache, head of the rheumatology department at Constantine University. Taken from their hospitals by armed policemen in 1994, they have simply disappeared.

  Then there is the case of Azedine Alwane, an accountant in the nationalised water company, SEDAC. “A cop had been killed last year and my client was accused of the crime,” a second lawyer says. “Alwane’s father was a moudjahed, a hero of the independence war against France. But in prison they tortured Alwane very badly and then they castrated him. His father intervened to try and get him out of prison and we got an acquittal in court—the other policemen in the courtroom were weeping when they heard the evidence of what had been done to him . . . His father even went to the minister of the interior, Meziane-Cherif, and asked for his help, but the minister told him that he couldn’t help because the men responsible were not under his orders.”

  When I had interviewed the cigar-chomping éradicateur Meziane-Cherif, he had denied the existence of an “anti-terrorism brigade” but agreed that “we have organised groups within the army, the police and the gendarmerie” to counter “terrorism.” According to the men in the room, these “groups” were now 6,000 strong and worked out of police stations in the Algiers suburbs of Hussein Dey, Kouba, Ben Aknoun and Fontaine Fraiche as well as Châteauneuf. One of them said that a doctor at Sekardji prison told them that 230 inmates had been killed. “It was a liquidation. Among our cadres killed was Ikhlef Sherati, an imam and a professor at a small Koranic school . . . and Noureddin Harek, a professor of education . . . ” All the victims were buried in mass graves at the Al-Alia cemetery, thirty or forty in holes in the ground with numbers on the graves. The Algerian government announced an inquiry into the scandal. And who was appointed to head the investigation? Why, Meziane-Cherif, of course.

  And all the while, the war becomes more atrocious, harder to report—not just because of its physical dangers but because its horrifying details disgust even those of us who must chronicle its bestialities. The Algerian newspapers do their best—with the government’s encouragement, of course—to terrify readers with photographs of these crimes against humanity. An Algerian schoolgirl, only fifteen years old, her throat slashed, lying on a mortuary slab at Blida, eyes open in accusation at the reader. Another photo shows her body, bathed in blood, hands tied with wire behind her school uniform. Pictures in another Algerian daily show the decapitated body of another young woman. The moment I open the papers each morning, I feel I must look over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching me. Merely to look at these terrible images is a criminal act. Can Algeria produce more horror?

  It can. Fatima Ghodbane was wearing a veil in her classroom in the Mohamed Lazhar school when they came for her in March 1995, six men armed with hunting guns and
pistols. According to her classmates, she cried and pleaded with the gunmen who took her to the school gate, where they tore off her veil, tied her hands, stabbed her in the face and then cut her throat. One witness said the gunmen placed her severed head outside the classroom door, where many of the other children became hysterical. Algerian police found several of them unconscious with terror. On one of Fatima’s hands, the men had scratched the letters “GIA.” Fatima Ghodbane’s father was a retired public works inspector, which hardly qualified him as a government agent. The newspaper El Watan concluded that Fatima’s crime had been her beauty.

  Two days before Fatima’s death, gunmen broke into the home of a farmer’s family at Reghaia at five in the morning, locked the youngest daughter in the bathroom and lined up her two sisters, Amal, aged eighteen, and Karima Geudjali, who was twenty-one—beside their father. Then they shot Amal in the head with two bullets and Karima in the heart with another. Amal had been engaged to marry an Algerian police officer. That same night, more armed men broke into a house in Tessala el-Mardja near Blida and shot Yamina Amrani, a nine-months-pregnant woman of twenty-six whose husband was away from the house. Three other women—two in their twenties—were also murdered near Blida in the same week; a few days later, two sisters aged sixteen and seventeen were taken by gunmen from their home in the Aurès mountains; their throats were cut 200 metres from their front door.