The Great War for Civilisation (108 page)

Within months of the latest insurgency, the Algerian government, in effect run by a coterie of privileged and immensely powerful army officers, cast around the Middle East for inspiration in their struggle against “fundamentalist terrorism.” They produced books and pamphlets on the roots of Islamic revivalism in an effort to persuade diplomats and foreign journalists that the roots of Algeria's “terrorism” lay in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia. In 1995, the interior minister even claimed that the Lebanese Hizballah, the Iranians and the Palestinian Hamas movement had made contact with the Algerian GIA at a meeting in Tripoli in northern Lebanon. The story was the fantasy of a French novelist—who alleged “Syrian intelligence” as his source—which had been recycled in a
New York Times
story out of Paris. The Algerians searched everywhere— anywhere—for some way of proving that the Algerian insurgency was not Algerian. Like the Americans in Iraq ten years later, their enemies had to be foreigners, aliens, dark figures who had crossed the frontiers to fight the forces of democracy.

Both sides had complementary illusions. Many Frenchmen had thought they were fighting communism in Algeria when they were in fact fighting nationalism—or Islam, if Bouyali's comrades and the French propagandists of the time are to be believed. The Islamic “resistance” now believed the independence war had been partly a religious jihad which—given the weight of documentary evidence to the contrary—it clearly was not for most of the participants. Bouyali's former supporters—those who left him when he went into the mountains—still believe that if only successive Algerian governments had talked to their opponents rather than imprisoned them, the crisis could have been resolved. Instead, those who chose to fight with weapons turned the memory of Mustafa Bouyali into an inspiration for further struggle. His brother Mohamed has one other photograph of him. It is a coloured snapshot of Bouyali in his last months, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a mountain cave, reading a Koran that lies open in front of him—with a French sub-machine gun propped against the wall on his right. And of course, today I remember another armed Islamist who sits on the floor of a cave and reads a Koran with a gun beside him.

Did Bouyali doom his people to re-enact the dreadful war that ended in 1962? In July 1992, Bouyali's old comrade Abdelkader Chebouti was captured again, along with another former Bouyali supporter, Mansouri Meliani, after a gun battle in Ashour. They were caught only a few hundred metres from Bouyali's unmarked grave.

“Democracy”—which in the Algerian context must always, like “Palestine,” be used in quotation marks—came to an end on 12 January 1992, when the government effectively introduced martial law and stripped the FIS of its democratic election victory by cancelling the second round of the poll due to be held four days later. I had arrived in Algiers with a visa to cover the election that was no longer going to take place. Thus having been encouraged to witness Algeria's “experiment in democracy,” I checked into the old French Hôtel Saint Georges, once Second World War headquarters to General Dwight D. Eisenhower—now the Hôtel el-Djezair—only to find Chadli Bendjedid announcing his resignation on the old and flickering television set in the hotel bar. Government “minders” who had been groomed to extol to us the wonders of Algerian “democracy” had suddenly to be reprogrammed to explain how “democracy” could only be protected by suspending “democracy.” This was hard work. To destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it was one thing. To destroy democracy in order to save it, quite another.

The army had pushed Chadli Bendjedid from the presidency and a five-man “Council of State”—including Algeria's most powerful general, Khaled Nezzar— soon announced it would run the country. Although it appeared to have no constitutional legality, this “Council” needed a symbolic figure to sit on its throne; in desperation, the authorities called in a hero of the past, a man of destiny who would return from exile to lead Algeria in its hour of need. Just as de Gaulle had returned from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, so Mohamed Boudiaf, veteran of the 1954–62 war and one of the founders of the FLN, must come back to Algeria. He told his people he understood their needs, just as de Gaulle said he understood the French Algerians. There would be no Islamic republic in Algeria.

Algeria's Islamist leaders—stunned to find the army in control of the country they thought they were about to rule—warned that they would not tolerate any attempt to cancel the second round of elections. But a quiet coup d'état had left the generals rather than the politicans in charge of the army, and paramilitary police checkpoints had now been set up on all main roads into the capital. Troops and armoured personnel carriers were positioned around government buildings—the prime minister's office, the foreign ministry, the post office, the treasury and radio station—and Algerian commandos with fixed bayonets patrolled the southern streets of the capital. The acting leader of the FIS, Sheikh Abdelkader Hachani, denounced the country's new rulers as thieves who had “stolen the liberty of the Algerian people.” The army, he said, “must side with the people.” Even Sheikh Nahnah, whose moderate plumage ensured his freedom from arrest, felt it necessary to say that “the greatest violence is done when a state attacks its own people.” The new regime, he said, was a “dictocracy.”

I took one of Algiers' yellow-painted taxis downtown that first morning of “dictocracy,” to a shabby ground-floor room in rue Larbi Ben M'Hidi where an exhibition every bit as distressing as the “Museum of the Martyrs” was showing to a packed house. Here Beethoven and Brahms were replaced by a grotesquely amplified voice reciting verses from the Koran. Yet this display of much more recent history provided by the FIS contained some grim parallels with the other museum on the hill. Here again were the broken faces of dead and beaten men—in colour this time—yet they were not the victims of the 1954–62 war against the French but the dozens of Algerians who were shot down in the streets of Algiers by Algerian troops in the 1988 riots. There was even a showcase—ironically of the same size and layout as the case in the “Museum of Martyrs”—containing bullets and cartridges fired by the Algerian army. One of the cartridges was clearly marked: “Federal Laboratories Inc. Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681 U.S.A.”

It was not the Western provenance of these weapons that was important— though the anti-Western resentment within the FIS had been growing daily—but the pattern of repression which they represented. It was as if French colonial rule bequeathed not freedom but military force to the Algerians. Under the FLN's post-independence dictatorship, the Algerian security services practised many of the same tortures as their French predecessors—“electricity with oriental refinements,” as one victim put it to me—and the French had themselves learned how to make men and women talk in the dungeons of the Gestapo during the Second World War. It was a genealogy of horror, one that would be expanded if Algeria were to be faced with an Islamist uprising.

FIS supporters could explain their anger very simply. They had been encouraged to participate in these elections. The West had repeatedly said that power should come through the ballot box rather than through revolution—Islamist or otherwise—and the FIS had dutifully played the democratic card. The FIS abided by the rules—and made the mistake of winning the election. This was not what the
pouvoir
, or its Western supporters, intended. France was happy to avoid the nightmare of an Islamic “catastrophe” on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The Americans did not want another Islamic revolution along the lines of Iran. So much for democracy.

Of course, it was not that simple. The FIS sought power without responsibility. Their repeated demands for an Islamic republic alienated the 26 million other Algerians whom they would have to represent once they achieved power. And their assumption of “rightness”—their unquestionable faith in their own Islamic path with all its social sharia laws—could be breathtaking. So could their grasp of history. “All our martyrs against the French died for Islam,” a young FIS acolyte told me outside the Bab el-Oued mosque. “The independence war was an Islamic struggle.” This was the Bouyali doctrine.

In reality, the body politic of Algeria was not threatened in the way that Chadli Bendjedid's pitiful television appearance suggested. The Algerian constitution was so cleverly devised that even if the FIS had dominated parliament, it would not have been able to take over the government. For it was the president who chose ministers—and ministers who drew up the political programme. If that programme was twice rejected by parliament, there had to be new general elections. In other words, the government itself—for which, read the army—would continue to control Algeria. Once again, however, the authorities did not want to talk to the opposition. They did not want a democracy unless they could be the winners. They wanted to lock their opponents up. And within three days of the declaration of martial law, the FIS announced that fifty-three of its members—including three who gained seats in the first round of elections—had been arrested by the army.

Hachani shrewdly adopted the role of a constitutionalist, suggesting that all 231 deputies—including 188 FIS members—elected in the December first round should form a “parallel” parliament. “A political process has to be resumed,” he said, although Hachani's words were diminished by the appearance at his press conference of Amar Bramia, the coach to Algeria's national athletic team, who gave an unpleasant account of his arrest and ill-treatment at the hands of the army on 13 January. He said he had been taken to the Ministry of Defence in Algiers because he had been identified at a FIS rally, and had been forced to remove his trousers before being severely beaten. “They threatened to rape my wife if I told anyone what happened,” he said. “I am . . . telling this to the press so that the Algerian people should know what sort of people are in power.”

But what sort of people supported the FIS? From outside, the apartment blocks of Bab el-Oued are pigeon lofts, tiny rectangular windows stuffed with drying bedclothes and tired mattresses, the flats eight storeys high, thirty abreast, the exterior walls streaked with grime, more than three and a half thousand souls sleeping ten to a room. Walk the gaunt, grey corridors, deafening with the shriek of children, and you can see bunks, floor to ceiling, in each room as if the inhabitants live in a barracks. Which, in a sense, they do. Modern police stations have been erected on the roads above Bab el-Oued, the security forces a permanent army of occupation. No wonder the people there never regarded the Popular Democratic Republic of Algeria as either popular or democratic. The acronym “FIS,” that cold, wet January of 1992, was on every wall.

“Why are you foreigners so surprised we voted for the FIS?” The thirty-nine-year-old shopkeeper, unshaven, in an old grey sweater and worn shoes—anonymous in these days of ghostly martial law—pointed eastwards in the direction of Algiers airport, where Mohamed Boudiaf, the grand old man of the independence war, was about to land after twenty-eight years of exile in Morocco. “If I was at the airport and had a gun, I'd shoot Boudiaf. How dare they impose this old man on us after our election victory? What has he got to do with us? I had never heard of him until they said he would be the new leader of Algeria.” Nor could the shopkeeper be expected to know of Boudiaf. He was only nine years old when the French left Algeria and freed Boudiaf from prison. With 70 per cent of Algeria's 26 million people under the age of thirty-five—44 per cent were under fourteen—only a quarter could remember the guerrilla war with France.

But Algeria's “conversion” to Islam was ambiguous. The Algerian flag bears the half-moon of Islam. The first words of the Koran are printed above Article One of the Algerian constitution. Article Two declares that “Islam is the state religion.” But the theological renaissance that millions of Algerians experienced over the previous decade bore no resemblance to the ruling FLN's formal adherence to the faith. FIS members recalled that they began to follow Islam in earnest around ten years earlier—in 1982, when Bouyali went on the run and started his guerrilla campaign, when a new group of young preachers appeared in the Algiers mosques, men who refused to maintain political discretion in the face of the government's economic mismanagement. In retrospect, the collapse of oil prices and the further impoverishment of Algeria's youth guaranteed the rise of fundamentalism—though the FIS rejected the word “fundamentalism” as a Western invention.

Akli, for example, worshipped at the Kabul mosque in Belcourt—the attendance of ex-guerrillas who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan gave the building its name—and remembered when his religion began to dominate his life. “The discussion of Islam started around the end of the Seventies, in cafés, in the streets— yes, even in bars. It filled a void in Algerian society. Our people were growing poorer. I had always thought of an Islamic republic as a dream, but for me it became a reality. The West tells us that the problems of the Third World are economic, but I came to realise through Islam that this is untrue, that in fact it is the people who must change.”

Akli is a biologist, and a fascination with science characterised much of the FIS's thinking. Educated FIS supporters almost invariably turned out to be skilled engineers or communications technicians. Without exception, every bookshop in Algiers now displayed a special section on Islamic literature. Alongside each section were shelves of scientific works. All twenty-two of the FIS's candidates in the December parliamentary elections were graduates, fifteen of them scientists. In an Algerian Islamic republic, the government was more likely to be led by technocrats than by mullahs. Party supporters claimed that Islam and science were not only compatible but complementary, that both involved absolute truth and understanding.