The Great War for Civilisation (117 page)

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 these 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.

The first page of the boy's exercise book shows his name was Koreishi; he had practised his declensions and dutifully written the biography of his doomed family. “Abdelkader is my father, he is an electrician. Zhor is my mother, she is a dressmaker. Hamid is my uncle, he is a policeman. Salima is my aunt, she is a nurse . . . ” And I wondered whether Hamid's job might have sent the family to their deaths. But the survivors said there was no discrimination. All the victims were treated equally: they were all killed. One man said he heard the gunmen who entered the village shouting that their enemies were “Jews.”

A man who pleaded with me not to publish his name said he saw the poorer families of Bentalha seeking refuge in a large house in Hijilali Street. “It was no good for them. I stood here at the window and I could hear those poor people screaming and dying. When I looked out of my window, I could see them axeing the women on the roof.” At least seventeen people died in that one house. In a corner of it, I discovered a book of European art—a coloured photograph of Michelangelo's
Pietà
lay face up on the floor—and another depicted the features of dead martyrs of the war against the French, their faces disfigured by bullets and shrapnel. How little Algeria's suffering had changed. Days later, a photograph of a distraught Bentalha woman, told that her family were dead, will become the image of this Golgotha. They will call the picture the
Pietà
.

So who killed all these poor people? On 20 August, just two days before the massacre at Raïs, President Zeroual had announced that “terrorism is living its last hours in our country.” Violent acts were now to be regarded as “residual terrorism.” Bentalha was the village whose destruction had been studied by the Algerian hotel concierge in Paris, the hotel in which the Australian soldier whom my father was told to execute had killed the British military policeman in 1919. That Algerian, too, noticed how the army did not enter the villages until the murderers had gone. He had used the word
pouvoir
—the authorities—and chosen to say no more.

WE ALL KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING in Algeria. For more than four years, released prisoners had been telling us of the water torture and beatings, the suffocation with rags, of nails ripped out by interrogators, of women gang-raped by policemen, of secret executions in police stations. The evidence was convincing enough, even when it came from self-declared enemies of the Algerian regime or members of the armed organisations opposed to it. But by mid-1997, even as the village massacres were taking place—blamed, of course, on the FIS, the GIA, the “terrorists,” “barbarians”—I had collected hundreds of pages of evidence from Algerian lawyers and human rights workers which proved incontrovertibly that the Algerian security forces had been guilty of “disappearances,” of torture and crimes against humanity. Even more sensational was that, after weeks of tentative contacts, I found members of the Algerian security forces who had sought asylum in Britain— and were themselves now prepared to talk of the terrors they had witnessed.

I travelled to London to talk to Andy Marshall, my new foreign news editor at
The Independent
. I brought with me from Algeria photographs of young women who had been “disappeared” and—from my meetings with these ex-Algerian police officers—details of torture and execution by the security forces. Andy recoiled at the obscenity of what he read in the transcripts of my interviews which I gave him. “I believe it,” he said. “We need to get the editor to put this all over the front.” I knew what this meant. Little chance now of those hard-sought visas to Algeria. No explanation of our impartiality would wash my reputation clean with the
pouvoir
after we presented them with this evidence of human wickedness. My reporting started in Algiers city.

Maître Mohamed Tahri puts the number of “disappeared” at 12,000, but the moment I am about to dispute this terrifying figure, a young woman in a white headscarf walks quietly through the door and whispers in Maître Tahri's ear. The forty-six-year-old lawyer listens without emotion, his eyes on the floor. He is a little moustachioed vole of a man with sharp eyes, impressive and heroic, but no match for the lanky
flics
who have arrived at his office. I catch sight of them briefly: tall, thin men staring through the front door, the noise of the Algiers suburb of Kouba behind them. Above Maître Tahri, his court robes hang on the wall: black with white fur edges, a fading symbol of the Napoleonic law that once governed Algeria. But the government now is metres away.

“She says the men have come from the commissariat of police and want to see me again,” Tahri mutters. On his desk there lies a file of photographs, thousands of them, men and women, the quick and the dead, all “disappeared” by the Algerian police—the very same
flics
who are now at the door. Tahri pulls coloured snapshots out of the file to give to me; two young women, one in a patterned black pullover with a heart-shaped brooch, a fringe over her forehead, the other sitting in a photographer's studio in a long red dress, a thinner fringe but with the same open, delicate face.

Naïma and Nedjoua Boughaba are sisters, aged twenty-three and twenty-nine; both were arrested by the Algerian police on 12 April 1997. Both were court clerks, one working for an Algiers judge who by misfortune was investigating a list of suspected “Islamists” drawn up by the Swiss police—and sold by a Swiss policeman to the Algerian intelligence services. The women were kidnapped by government agents outside the tribunal. They are thought to be alive. Tahri pulls another snapshot out of his file, of a beautiful young woman with a radiant face, her tousled hair held back by a pink band, half smiling at the photographer. Amina Beuslimane is alleged to have taken photographs of cemeteries and blown-up buildings—perhaps to have proof of government violence against civilians. She was twenty-eight when she was arrested by security police on 13 December 1994, never to be seen again. Her mother has been advised by friends who have contacts in the prisons that she must not hold out any hope of seeing her daughter again. Amina, they have told her, was tortured to death.

Each time Tahri produces a photograph, I catch sight of hundreds of others; of bland, middle-aged men, of suspected “Islamists” in beards, and girls and old men. The oldest “disappeared” in the Tahri files is seventy-four-year-old Ahmed Aboud, arrested on 23 February 1997. The youngest is fifteen-year-old Brahim Maghraoui. A photocopy of a photograph shows Moussa Maddi, a paraplegic in a wheelchair arrested on 3 May 1997. No one knows why. An attractive young woman in a red dress with Princess Diana–style hair, Saïda Kheroui is—or was—the sister of a wanted member of an armed “Islamist” group. Her snapshot is smaller than the others. She was “disappeared” by intelligence agents on 7 May 1997. All that is known of her fate is that the security police, during her interrogation, broke the bones of one of her feet.

Mohamed Tahri was frightened in October 1997 that he was about to be added to the list. He had called a meeting of mothers of the “disappeared” in front of Algiers' central post office. The police broke it up. “They told me not to follow the protesters,” he says to us in an ultra-quiet voice, aware that the police are still lingering at the front door. “They told me to go down a side street where there were only policemen and I was afraid I would be kidnapped. So I started shouting: ‘I am a lawyer, I defend human rights—you have no right to hinder my movements.' I took out my professional card but there was a high-ranking policeman pushing me to prevent me being able to leave.” Cops surrounded Tahri. “I said, ‘I'm a lawyer' but the police officer said: ‘You're not a lawyer—you're a traitor because you have contact with foreigners and with so-called human rights organisations.' When I said I refused to go down the street . . . the officer said: ‘Take him in.'