The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In June 1997, Reda was asked to join a protection force around Sidi Moussa during a raid by regular troops. “We had to go in if there were flares sent up—but there were no flares and we went home after two hours. Next day . . . we heard that in this same village a massacre had taken place and twenty-eight villagers had been beheaded. And that made us start thinking about who did it. I started to think that our people had been the killers.”

  Two days later, Reda says, he and fellow conscripts were cleaning the barracks and searching the clothes of regular troops for cigarettes when they found a false beard and musk, a perfume worn by devout Muslims. “We asked ourselves, what were the soldiers doing with this beard?” Reda concluded that this army unit must have carried out the Sidi Moussa massacre but his alarm worsened when twenty-six of his fellow conscripts were driven off to another barracks at Chréa. “They later brought all their bodies back to us and said that they had been killed in an ambush, but I am sure they were executed because they weren’t trusted any more. There had been no wounded in the ‘ambush.’ Maybe they talked too much. All our soldiers knew these men had been eliminated—because earlier, before they were taken away, we were told not to talk to them.”

  The end of Reda’s military career was not heroic. His teeth were kicked out by colleagues, he says, and he was imprisoned for a week after he was seen giving bread to prisoners. Then, ambushed while on roadblock duty on the edge of Blida, he was recognised by two armed Islamists. “They were friends of mine and they saw me in my paratroop uniform and my green beret. One of them shouted: ‘There is plenty of time left in the year to get you. Take care of yourself and your wife and child.’ I and three other conscripts ran away with the help of locals who gave us civilian clothes. Now I am between two fires—between the terrorists and the Algerian government.”

  Reda turned up at Heathrow Airport in London a few weeks later, pleading for protection. The Algerian authorities claimed they knew him—and that he fabricated his story of military atrocities to gain asylum in Britain. But why would Reda seek asylum in Britain in the first place, along with dozens of other members of the Algerian security services? Reda’s last news from Algeria when he spoke to me was horrifying enough: eight relatives in the suburb of Boufarik—not far from Blida—had just had their throats cut.

  Other former Algerian security personnel were interviewed for The Independent. Inspector Abdessalam, who was in charge of police ordnance at the Dar el-Beïda police station near Algiers airport, also described to me how he watched suspected “Islamists” interrogated by torturers, some of whose names he also provided, names that were confirmed to be those of security operatives. “Sometimes,” he said, “prisoners were forced to drink acid or a cloth was tied to their mouths and acid poured over it. Prisoners were forced to stand next to tables with their testicles on the table and their testicles would be beaten . . . A small number of the prisoners gave information. Some preferred to be killed. Some died under water torture.”

  The Independent, which was using a new page layout that projected our reports on the front page in depth and at length, published photographs of four of the missing young women—Amina Beuslimane, Naïma and Nedjoua Boughaba and Saïda Kheroui—with “DISAPPEARED” stamped over their faces. Our series started on 30 October 1997, with the page one headline: “Lost souls of the Algerian night: now their torturers tell the truth.” We were not the only newspaper trying to uncover the Algerian government’s role in crimes against humanity—several French journalists had nursed these suspicions for years—but our reports were treated by governments with the same disdain that had met our dispatches on Saddam’s tortures in the 1980s, our investigation of Israeli killings in the same period, our inquiries into depleted uranium munitions in Iraq and our reopening of the Turkish–Armenian genocide of 1915.

  The Algerian ambassador in London wrote a spiteful and abusive letter to the editor of The Independent, sneering at Saïda Kheroui, the young woman whose foot was broken under torture, because I referred to her “Princess Diana–style hair,” and suggesting that the thousands of “disappeared”—including the other young women who had been tortured to death—had “in most cases, joined the terrorist bands.”

  Ambassadors are expected to lie for their country. The response of Western nations to the growing evidence of Algerian government complicity in the horrors of this war, however, was as pitiful as it was shameful. In May 1998, more than six months after The Independent had devoted so much space and resources to reveal the testimony of Algerian ex-security forces and human rights lawyers, the British Foreign Office published a policy statement on Algeria. It said that while there were reports of Algerian complicity in the massacres, “there is no credible, substantive evidence to support the allegations.” It claimed that “large scale and brutal violence”—rather than the suspension of democratic elections—was “the genesis of the terrible events” in Algeria.

  Far from recognising the courage of those former policemen who were denouncing their country’s crimes, Britain had in early 1997 rejected an asylum appeal by another former Algerian ex-policeman and forcibly returned him to Algeria in handcuffs. He was arrested at Algiers airport, brutally interrogated by his former comrades-in-arms about his Algerian contacts in London and then murdered by the security police. His body was delivered to his mother for burial two weeks after he was deported from London. He had changed his address in Britain and thus failed to receive his notice of leave to appeal the initial refusal of his asylum request. Scandalously, the UK authorities furnished the Algerian government with details showing he had been a police officer—which, of course, doomed him at once.122

  When Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, tried to address the causes rather than the acts of violence in Algeria, the country’s foreign minister, Ahmed Attaf, berated her. “What causes justify killing women and children?” he demanded to know. Mrs. Robinson then held her tongue. Far more obnoxious was the UN panel led by former Portuguese prime minister Mário Soares which embarked on an “information-gathering” mission to Algeria in the autumn of 1998. It produced a report that might have been written by the Algerian government itself. In an extraordinary act of moral cowardice, Soares allowed Algerian officials to read the UN report before it was published, entirely accepted the Algerian government’s claim that it was “fighting terrorism” and concluded that “Algeria deserves the support of the international community in its efforts to combat this phenomenon.” In just nineteen pages, the report used the word “terrorism” or “terror” ninety-one times without asking who these “terrorists” were or why they opposed the government. It agreed with interviewees who said that “excesses” committed by the security forces could not compare with the “Islamists’ ” “crimes against humanity.” Although around 20,000 Algerians were still being held on “terrorism” charges, the UN panel interviewed only one of them. No wonder Attaf distributed the Soares report to the local Algerian press for publication. When Amnesty International condemned the UN report as a “whitewash,” Attaf brusquely dismissed the charge.

  An earlier European Union mission had behaved with even less heed to the evidence of torture and murder by the authorities. In just eighteen hours in Algiers, it never left the villas and government offices of the Algerian authorities. The vice president of the European Commission, Manuel Marin, urged the Europeans to “tread softly”; there were no questions about torture or the need for an international inquiry into the massacres. A few days earlier, the Irish foreign minister David Andrews had told radio listeners that the time had come for outsiders “to stop condemning Algeria from afar.”

  Much the same sentiment was being expressed by President Jacques Chirac of France. Asked what France could do to stop the massacres, he replied: “Nothing by interference. We have to find a way of acting effectively from the outside.” It was a policy that suited the Algerian authorities perfectly. They were eager to accept French weaponry and military equipment to fight their civil war but
refused to accept any demands for investigations on the grounds that this would constitute interference in their domestic affairs. For a time, even France’s most boring intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, bought the Algerian government line. He said it was “obscene” and “an affront to the memory of the victims” of the massacres to ask who was killing whom in Algeria—because it was so obviously Muslim fundamentalists who were to blame. In so obscene and shameful way did Lévy ignore the thousands of victims of government torture. Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former Algerian prime minister who accuses the military of massacring thirty-one of his relatives in Médéa, was to claim that—by rejecting an international inquiry—Lévy and other French intellectuals “defend the regime by denying the responsibility of the junta in these massacres.”

  The United States had largely kept out of Algerian affairs, save for several American diplomats in Algiers who awarded young Algerian women visas in return for their favours. Although Algeria gave financial support to the PLO during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—it sent $20 million in arms via the Soviet Union—the country was always sympathetic to America. During the Cuban missile crisis, Ben Bella was in New York and took a secret message to Fidel Castro from President John Kennedy, warning him of the seriousness of the confrontation with the Soviets. Ben Bella had not forgotten that Kennedy was alone in Congress in calling for Algerian independence during the war with the French.

  But repeated claims by the Algerians that they were fighting foreign as well as FIS “terrorists” had its effect. The U.S. Justice Department tried to deport the FIS spokesman, Anwar Haddam—who spoke of the need for peace and reconciliation at a Rome conference—by using dozens of reports from the government-controlled Algerian press and misquotations from my own articles in The Independent. Although the U.S. State Department had acknowledged that “there is convincing evidence that the security forces carried out dozens of extrajudicial killings and often tortured and otherwise abused detainees,” the Justice Department largely relied on Algerian government supporters for its “evidence” against Haddam of “crimes against humanity,” “rape” and “beheading”—for none of which was Haddam held personally responsible.123

  The American press either reported the mass killings of “Muslim militants” by “security forces sweeping through a western region wracked by recent massacres” without questioning how so large a number might have been killed in so short a period of time—this came from the Associated Press on 11 March 1998—or persuaded readers to believe that the slaughter of civilians somehow encouraged Algerians to support the government that might have been partly responsible for the killings. Thus John Lancaster in The Washington Post apparently discovered in 1997 that “the violence appears to have generated a backlash against the militants, even among those who once supported their cause.” Only an oblique reference was made in his dispatch to claims that the authorities might be involved in the massacres.

  By the late 1990s, when the complicity of the Algerian military in the killings was already widely suspected, the U.S. Navy undertook manoeuvres with Algerian warships in the Mediterranean while American diplomats were encouraged to visit Algiers. Robert Pelletreau was a guest of the Algerian government in 1996. In 1998, the State Department sent a more prominent figure to the Algerian capital, none other than Martin Indyk, the point man for President Clinton’s “peace process” team to the Israeli–Palestinian talks and a former director of research at the largest Israeli lobby group in Washington. Algerian radio heralded Indyk’s arrival by announcing that American policies had changed “now that the White House has decided to support the struggle against terrorism and Congress has several times condemned the GIA.”

  Given this indifference to the true nature of the massacres—and who might be responsible for them—Algerian officials now felt able to dismiss security force atrocities with near abandon. “It’s not impossible, in the situation in which we find ourselves, that some excesses may have occurred on the part of individuals acting outside the orders of their commander,” the Algerian chief of staff and principal éradicateur General Mohamed Lamari blandly admitted. A further jump into the depths of insensitivity came from Algeria’s former minister of higher education, Abdelhak Bererhi, who announced in 1998 that “to compare a rape in a police station to a rape by a GIA terrorist is indecent.” Even Lévy could not have equalled this.

  The GIA was not itself an Algerian government creation, although its Afghan origins are unclear. While thousands of Algerians did travel to join the anti-Soviet mujahedin, some of whom gave their support to Osama bin Laden—I had, after all, met Algerians in al-Qaeda during my own visits to bin Laden in Afghanistan, and stood beside them as that prophetic comet soared above us near his camp in 1997—recent research suggests that even here the hand of the pouvoir was present. Algeria’s military security, it is now reported, sent their own men to Afghanistan to maintain surveillance over the Algerian “Afghanis” who had taken up the jihad— posing as loyal Muslim fighters while reporting back to Algiers on the aims and methods of the army of “Islamists” who would eventually filter home to seek a conflict with its own corrupt “socialist” enemies. Algeria’s military penetration of its antagonists was therefore accomplished at a very early stage.

  When the GIA leader Djamel Zitouni was killed, supposedly in an Algerian army ambush, the authorities triumphantly announced that they had scored a tactical victory over their “terrorist” enemies. The twenty-nine-year-old son of a chicken farmer, who had worked in his father’s shop in Algiers before coming under the influence of Mustafa Bouyali, he went underground in 1991 and was allegedly given the command of the GIA’s “Phalangists of Death” squad, becoming the organisation’s emir when its earlier leader, Cherif Gousmi, died in 1994. Zitouni personally claimed responsibility for the Air France hijacking and a wave of bomb attacks in France in 1995, and even wrote a 62-page book—possibly ghost-written by his colleagues—on the “duties of holy warriors.” But Zitouni, according to the GIA itself, had been banished from the movement on 15 July 1996, and would be judged for his activities. It was a statement from the GIA’s majlis e-shoura council that announced his death the following day, adding that Antar Zouabri had taken over the leadership. So was Zitouni killed by the army or executed by the GIA? Or did these two possibilities amount to one and the same thing?

  The Algerian government, for example, had long accused Zitouni of responsibility for the beheading of the seven French priests from the monastery at Tibherine in 1996. But two years later, a long investigation in Le Monde suggested that Algerian security forces were implicated in the executions after a double-cross by French secret servicemen—an act much resented by Zitouni’s lieutenant, who was a former officer in the Algerian military security apparatus. The same article alleged that French diplomats believed the bomb that killed Pierre Claverie, the bishop of Oran, might have been planted by the Algerian authorities—because he might have known of secret negotiations between the French and Algerian governments over the kidnapped monks. In 2002, by which time up to 200,000 Algerians had been killed in the war, the army killed Zitouni’s successor, Antar Zouabri— this time displaying his body, complete with bullet-broken head, as proof.

  But international human rights groups now performed the task that both the UN and the EU—and, of course, the United States and other Western nations— had so disgracefully evaded: they actively demanded answers to the epic “disappearances” of the war. Human Rights Watch accused the authorities of kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial executions. A year later, Amnesty International did the same, listing 3,000 victims—a small proportion of them already named in The Independent’s investigation—who had apparently been murdered by the authorities, including hospital workers, civil servants, schoolchildren, secretaries, farmers and lawyers. When General Khaled Nezzar, one of the leaders of the 1992 military coup and former Algerian minister of defence, was visiting France in 2001 to publicise his new book on Algeria, a French court opened an inquir
y against him—at the request of relatives of victims—for torturing detainees. Nezzar left France when the inquiry was dropped.124

  Successive elections in Algeria, all designed to promote the idea that the country remained “democratic” despite the control of the military, threw up in 1999 another relic of the FLN nomenklatura, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, as president. Bouteflika’s policy of “working for peace and civil concord” produced a Saddamite 98.3 per cent of the vote—a statistic that went unchallenged in the West—and he survived even widespread demonstrations when a Berber revolt in Tizi-Ouzou turned into a social insurrection against poverty and corruption. He wanted Algerians to forget what they had done to each other—and, by implication, what the government had done to them—and enjoy prosperity after the military had chosen seven prime ministers and four presidents since 1992. But the evidence of Algeria’s “dirty war” built up against the regime.

  When former Algerian Special Forces Lieutenant Habib Souaïda published La Sale guerre—“The Dirty War”—in Paris in 2001, the sky should have fallen. It was the first time an officer had allowed his full name—and his photograph—to appear in the press. “I’ve seen colleagues burn a 15-year-old child alive,” Lt. Souaïda wrote. “I’ve seen soldiers massacre civilians and claim their crimes were committed by terrorists. I’ve seen colonels murder suspects in cold blood. I’ve seen officers torture Islamists to death. I’ve seen too many things. I can no longer keep silent.” He gave names, dates and locations—in the forlorn hope that there might one day be war crimes trials against those responsible. The Italian judge Ferdinando Imposimato wrote in the preface that “there has always been a hidden centre of power in Algeria . . . It has locked up society, it has liquidated opponents . . . ”

  There could be no more damning evidence against the regime. The French knew it was true—just as British readers of The Independent knew that the Algerians who bravely spoke to us had told the truth—but it was like the truth behind the 2003 Iraq War. The lies and the misinformation and the grotesque exaggerations and deliberate distortions were fully understood by those who cared to know—and in Europe, at least, they were in the majority—but the “official” world ignored the evidence. “Official” France did not respond to Lt. Souaïda’s revelations. “Official” France went on supporting the Algerian regime—as the U.S. administration did, as the EU did. “Official” Britain saw no “credible or substantive evidence” of army involvement in the massacres.