The Great War for Civilisation (114 page)

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 the 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?

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.