The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  What primeval energy produces such sadism? Although the cost was terrible, the Algerians won their war against the French. They are all Muslims, all of the Sunni sect. Their huge land stands on billions of dollars’ worth of oil and natural gas deposits. Algeria is the world’s eighteenth-largest exporter of petrol, the seventh for gas. After France and Canada, it is the world’s third francophone country. It should be as wealthy as the Arab Gulf states, its people able to buy property and invest in Europe and America like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis. Yet it suffers 25 per cent unemployment, 47 per cent illiteracy and one of the world’s cruellest internal conflicts. At the Interior Ministry they now produce videotapes of the massacres, more revolting, more banal even than the government’s porno-picture books of death. Up to 200 men and women are now dying every week in the towns around Algiers; Algerian journalists privately suspect that up to 100,000 were now dying every day.

  In many of the recent massacres, the GIA appeared to be taking revenge on those villages that had set up government-sponsored militias to fight them— another of Meziane-Cherif’s little initiatives. Trucks and buses were stopped outside these towns at the frightening faux barrages; their occupants—twenty or thirty at a time—had their throats cut. Near Laghaout in November 1996, an ambulance carrying a sick woman and her husband, along with a paramedic, stopped behind a bus at a “police” checkpoint. According to Liberté, perhaps the only reliable journalistic source left in this war, the “police”/gunmen cut the throats of the paramedic, the driver and the husband, leaving the sick woman alone in the vehicle. All the bus passengers in front are murdered in the same way. Several motorists queued up behind the ambulance until they realised what was happening, turned their cars round and drove for their lives to Laghaout.

  At Sidi el-Kebir, there is no such escape. The village menfolk are in the hills above their homes on 6 November, searching for the “terrorists” against whom the government had armed them. Behind them, up to thirty GIA members enter Sidi el-Kebir and proceed, again systematically, to kill all whom they find in the village. A baby reportedly has its throat cut after a discussion among the intruders about the morality of killing children. At least ten women are égorgées. A newly married couple are “executed” in their home, the husband on the bed, the woman in the doorway of their bedroom, after reportedly—and inexplicably—being ordered to lay out her wedding trousseau. Their tiny baby is left tied up in the same room.

  Gunmen arrive high in the Algerian mountains at the monastery of Tibherine. They take seven monks from the building. France is appalled. These kindly, spiritual men gave help even to wounded GIA men. Seven months later, I am sitting beside the little French Catholic chapel in Hydra in Algiers with the bespectacled figure of Monseigneur Henri Teissier, archbishop of Algiers, a sixty-seven-year-old French professor of Arabic who took Algerian nationality after independence. On 21 May 1996, he took a phone call which told him that all seven monks had been decapitated:

  It is true that we found only their heads. Three of their heads were hanging from a tree near a petrol station. The other four heads were lying on the grass beneath. But it is marvellous that the families of those monks maintained their friendship for us and for all Algerians. They had visited the monastery. They had been able to accept the loss of their sons. They knew it was not all Algerians who did this thing.

  So who did “this thing”? The GIA, said the Algerian government, led by a man called Sayah Attia; one of the Tibherine priests had recognised him—when he answered the door—from a newspaper photograph that identified Attia as the murderer of the Croats whose throats were slashed near the monastery.

  So could the archbishop understand what happened in the minds of the killers when they took up their knives?

  They will kill a boy of two or an old man of eighty-five. I think they are out of their consciences. They work under their understanding of Islamic law—“We have to kill the enemies of the Lord”—and it is finished. We think not only of our life but of the lives of all the people in Algeria . . . The most difficult thing is to know that every day some people die, mothers cry for their sons and daughters. We ourselves are not in the same situation as we were before this crisis. When you begin celebrating the Eucharist, you cannot help remembering that Jesus was murdered by human violence— and in the name of religion. Now we have to understand the risk in this society, that we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus. We cannot look at the cross of Jesus as we have done before. Before, it was an abstract thing. Now it is a daily reality.

  The archbishop had just celebrated mass for six nuns and monks in Algiers, the priest reading from St. Matthew, chapter 25, verse 13. “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.” They had come to remember one of France’s first religious martyrs in Algeria, Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, the soldier-turned-priest who was assassinated by an Islamist in Tamanrasset in 1916 and whose murder set an awful precedent for the monks and nuns who still refused to leave Algeria. Early in 1996 the bishop of Oran, Monseigneur Pierre Claverie, died in a bomb explosion on the same day he had met the French foreign minister, Hervé de Charrette. “The bomb went off in the street,” Archbishop Teissier said. “He was crushed by the door of the chapel and his brains were found on the chapel floor. It was absurd, idiotic, unconscionable.”

  HE WAS YOUNG, well-dressed, an expensive leather jacket over his shoulders. I had already received a contact call from Britain but never expected a representative of Algeria’s “Islamist” guerrilla force to turn up at my Algiers hotel with its heavy security guard, its armed cops in the front hall, its militiamen at the gates. “You can call me ‘Abu Mohamed,’ ” the young man said as we sat on the balcony of my room, the palm trees dipping in the wind behind us. Openly acknowledging his membership of the military wing of the FIS, he stated categorically that after months of internecine war, his own Islamic Salvation Army had united with the GIA. He was the mediator, he said, of the third meeting at Chlef at the beginning of October at which the final decision had been taken to combine the two commands.

  But he claimed that the GIA had been deeply infiltrated by the Algerian military intelligence service. He even alleged that the worst atrocities of the war— especially the massacre of women and children in mountain villages—were carried out at the instigation of government agents. His words were ruthless and absolute. When I asked him why the Muslim groups cut the throats of their enemies, he replied:

  It’s the best way to become closer to God, the best way to kill a taghout [enemy of God]. If you have someone who is capable of killing five-year-old children, what do you do with him? Kill him with bullets? Bullets are precious to us—they are very expensive. Take a 9-mm Kalash[nikov] bullet—it’s as if you are throwing it away. Anyone who tries to destroy Islam, to destroy the Good Lord, who takes the Lord’s name in vain, is a devil. You can do anything to wipe out a devil.

  There was another of those inversions at work here. “Abu Mohamed” believed the police and government agents were child-killers. The police and government believed the GIA were child-killers. Or so they said. So who was killing the children? At one point, “Abu Mohamed” handed me an Islamic tract and a key chain with “Khaled” written on the handle. Khaled, he added, was the name of his local military leader or emir. He repeatedly referred to the need to “exterminate with God’s help” the Algerian government in order to set up a legitimate Islamic state, justifying his remarks by quoting the Koran in a state of near ecstasy.

  “I’ve lost 200 friends, but it doesn’t matter because I know that one day we’ll see each other again,” he said. “For the 200 who were killed, another 600 or 700 have become moudjahedin.” He described how he had been arrested in January 1996—it was now December of the same year—and tortured by security men with electricity:

  I thank God I gave no information. The moment you give one piece of information, you are finished because they will torture you for more information until you die . . . The
re have been many women who have secretly worked for the Islamists . . . Sometimes they contact the moudjahedin and tell them that their husbands work for the state. This happened to me, a woman came to me a year ago and denounced her husband and said he worked for military security. We had to follow it up to find the proof. The GIA killed him—the real GIA which is not infiltrated. The military security have captured women and tortured and raped them and thrown them into prison. Do you know what they are asking us? They are asking us to put a bomb in their prisons. Do you know why? Because they have suffered too much. They are living a nightmare. They are all pregnant.

  There had been many consistent reports, gathered by The Independent as well as human rights groups, of the rape of women prisoners in Algeria.

  “Abu Mohamed” was equally adamant in his view of other Arab states. “Muslims are everywhere, but all their presidents are devils. All Muslims are at war with the state—in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya. They say Sudan is a Muslim country but there are mistakes there. Iran is Shiite—they’re not really Muslim.” “Abu Mohamed” did not know that a bomb had just exploded on the Paris Métro, but his response was immediate. “It’s legitimate. France is the cause of everything that’s going on in Algeria. It helps the Algerian state . . . So why do you think they specifically choose France? You have to ask yourself that question.”

  “Abu Mohamed” looked less like an “Islamist” than a playboy, with his leather jacket and his neatly shaved face and his overpowering aftershave. So his reflections on martyrdom seemed all the more bizarre. “The Koran promises us victory or martyrdom. It says real martyrs don’t bleed very much. When they die, they smell of musk perfume. This is true. When a martyr dies, he is met in paradise by seventy-two beautiful women.”

  But I am beginning to wonder if all the beautiful women haven’t been murdered, whether some of those seventy-two women won’t have bloody wounds round their necks. In 1997, the holy month of Ramadan is again marked by a collective bloodbath of throat-cuttings, beheadings, car bombs and even baby-strangling. Three hundred die and even the prime minister admits 80,000 Algerians have now been killed. In Benachour, 50 kilometres from Algiers, whole families are eviscerated in revenge for the villagers’ support for their local pro-government militia. The dead include a child of six, two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls and a pregnant woman who is disembowelled before being beheaded. At Harouch Trab, ten civilians—including seven women and a ten-year-old boy— have their throats cut. The first is a twenty-five-year-old woman whose head is later cut off and tied by her hair to a pike—and left by the roadside so that she can “welcome” her husband when he returns from his militia patrol. “War through war and destruction through destruction. Kouka will return,” the killers spray-paint on a village wall. “Kouka” is the nom de guerre of a local GIA leader—real name Halilat Kouk—killed by “communal guard” militia forces a year earlier.

  A young woman we know tells us in horror that her friend was on an Algiers bus, travelling to work, when the vehicle passed a street in which a policeman’s head had been attached to a pole on top of a gate. Another Algiers resident describes a new GIA machine, a primitive version of Madame Guillotine, a makeshift head-cutter with an iron blade to which its victims are subjected after being dragged from their homes. According to residents, the guillotine is mounted on a truck. Those condemned to die by the GIA are taken from their apartments with their mouths stuffed full of newspaper and are guillotined on the truck.

  RAÏS AND BENTALHA. Two more dirt villages in the bled. But this time, the sadism as well as the scale of the attacks mark a new depth of savagery, something we have never seen before, entire villages liquidated by the knife, their population slaughtered en masse like animals, cut open, axed down, hacked apart. When we are taken to these flat, poor hamlets—Bosnian-style ghost towns of crumbling walls and collapsed roofs—even the cops and soldiers fall silent. Through shame or guilt?

  From the roof of Ali’s house in Raïs, I can see the local army barracks just half a kilometre across the fields, yellow-painted with a green-and-white Algerian flag fluttering gaily from the roof. No, Ali says, he doesn’t know why the soldiers didn’t intervene when the murderers turned up—dressed in Afghan robes and hats, he says—to cut the throats of his family. Round the side of Ali’s neck, there is a ferocious purple scar that slices through his skin, crudely stitched—because they cut Ali’s throat too.

  “There were up to a hundred men who came into our village from three directions—they were here for at least three hours,” he says, his head leaning at an odd, permanent angle to the right. “There was shooting and screaming. No one helped us.” Around him, in cheap brick villas and chicken yards and burned-out garages, lay still the thick scum of old blood, all that remains in the village of the 349 Algerians—mostly women and children—slaughtered in the late evening of 29 August 1997. When I ask Ali to describe the night, he stares at me in silence, fingering his left arm, which is swathed in bandages but reveals another frightful purple scar at the wrist. A neighbour whispers in my ear: “They knifed his wife in front of him.” And it was this that forced Ali to talk:

  I had most of my family here. My wife, my three sons, my brother, his wife, sons and daughter, and many cousins. We hid in the house but they threw bombs through the windows and broke down the door with axes.

  Ali sways against the balcony wall as he says these words. I have already crunched through the carbonised interior of the house and found, beside the begonia plants and vines on the balcony, an old tray bearing the words “There is no God but God and Mohamed is his Prophet.” Beside it, as if painted onto the wall in defiance of all religion, was a darkened stream of blood. Ali draws in his breath. He is about to plunge deep into an ocean of pain:

  My baby son Mohamed was five and they cut his throat and threw him out of the upper window. Then they cut the throat of my eldest son Rabeh and then my brother’s throat because he saw they were kidnapping his wife and tried to stop them. They took some of the other girls.

  And Ali raises his hand and says: “Blood.” There is more downstairs, stained brown across the living-room floor where Ali’s final calvary took place:

  They cut my throat and I felt the knife in my neck but I tried to shield myself and the man sliced me on the arm. My wife was so brave. She tried to help, to fight them, to save me. So they dragged her to the door where I was lying and slit her throat in front of me. There was another baby, the mother tried to hide it behind some bricks but they cut her throat and then did the same to the baby on the bricks. The man who used the knife on me—I recognised him. I had seen him on the streets of our village.

  There were times in this place of atrocities when the sheer awfulness of what happened almost blinded one to the obvious questions. Why didn’t the army venture across the fields? They must have heard the shrieks from the buildings on the main road. They must have seen the fires in the roofs. They must have heard the bombs. And who were the so-called “Islamists” performing these acts of unparalleled butchery? Why should “Islamists” murder the very same villagers who voted so faithfully for the FIS and who traditionally opposed the Algerian government?

  In the neighbouring village of Bentalha—with about 240 dead—the old FIS election signs remain on walls and lamp-posts. Here, too, a fifty-four-year-old man who would only give his name as Saïd claimed to me that the village men had fled to warn the army, leaving their women and children behind. The more I walked through these desolate streets, the more I remembered. Two years before, Commandant Mohamed of the garde mobile drove me through these villages. In Bentalha, his squad of cops had arrested two men who tried to run away from them—just next to a sewage outflow, which I recognised as I walked through the village now. The men had been fearful of execution. The people all supported the “Islamists.” The villagers, the commandant had told me in his Land Cruiser back then, were “with the terrorists.” It was a “terrorist area.” So why would the “terrorists” now want to kill all the
se people who allegedly supported them? Bentalha, far from being a village of politically uninvolved civilians, had been a stronghold of the FIS.

  The big houses—for the poor fled to larger homes for protection when the gunmen and axemen arrived—were burned out, their back yards swamped with blood. “The men ran away—it was a mistake,” Saïd conceded miserably. “They knew what would happen. Some tried to throw slates and bricks from the roofs of the houses. One of our men got a rifle and killed one of these savages. The dead man turned out to be from this same village.” Again, the screaming had gone on long into the night. And again, soldiers from the local barracks only arrived after the murderers had fled. The “Islamists,” Saïd recalled, even shouted curses as they poured through the unpaved street in turbans and gowns. “They kept crying: ‘You will die and go to hell—we will kill you and go to heaven.’ ”

  Most of the people of Bentalha fled after the massacre. A few now drifted back in the morning. I found two of them trying to repair the blackened interior of their homes, screwing half-burned light fittings back into the walls, ignoring my questions while a group of children—who had hidden on the roof during the massacres—watched them in silence. Another man refused to name his dead wife. “Her name belongs to me,” he said, and began to cry.

  The pathetic remnants of families evoke something more than pity. They are as frightened of the future as they are of the past. In each kitchen, cheap metal trays have been twisted out of recognition, the pots smashed, medicines thrown over the floor. In one house, a bomb has been thrown at a bird cage, hurling its dead occupants in a mass of blackened feathers around the room. What sort of men would throw a bomb into a bird cage? A pile of school books in a garage next to three huge pools of congealed blood showed how earnestly its dead owner had tried— amid the immense poverty of these Algerian slum villages—to improve his lot.