The Great War for Civilisation (118 page)

“They took me to an office at the Cavignac police station—I know people who had died there under torture. They said to me: ‘You are the one who gives information to Amnesty International and other organisations . . . you're the one who arranges the demonstrations, who causes trouble in this country.' ” Before he was released, Tahri was taken to the commissariat in Amirouche Street, where he was told: “You have contacts with journalists . . . ”

If Tahri's evidence was damning, the meetings I arranged with defecting Algerian police and army officers in London provided even more compelling proof of their government's involvement in crimes against humanity. All but one of my interviews with these brave, frightened men—and one woman—were conducted on a different political planet, not in an Algiers suburb but in a conference room at the Sheraton Belgravia Hotel in Knightsbridge in central London, a room that grew lung-crushingly fuggy as these lonely witnesses to savagery smoked their way through pack after pack of cigarettes.

DALILAH IS USED TO BLOOD. When she describes the prisoners, stripped half-naked and tied to ladders in the garage of the Cavignac police station, she does so with a curious detachment. Later, when I have spent more than an hour listening to her evidence of cruelty and death, she will turn to me with a terrifying admission. “I'm being treated by a psychologist because I have bad dreams,” she says. “My great passion now is to go to see horror movies—it's the only thing that interests me. I want to see blood.”

It is an extraordinary remark to come from this attractive woman of thirty with her abundant dark black hair tied in a bunch, dandling the child of an Algerian woman friend on her knee. She joined up as a detective in the Algerian special branch in 1985—“I'd wanted to be a policewoman to serve my people since I was twelve years old,” not least because her father had been a cop—but things began to go seriously wrong for her after the cancellation of elections:

I was moved to Cavignac police station near the post office and I hated what was happening there, what was happening to the police. They tortured people—I saw this happening. I saw innocent young people tortured like wild animals. Yes, I myself saw the torture sessions. What could I do? They executed people at 11 o'clock at night, people who had done nothing. They had been denounced by people who didn't get along with them. People just said “He's a terrorist” and the man would be executed. They tied young people to a ladder with rope. They were always shirtless, sometimes naked. They put a rag over their face. Then they forced salty water into them. There was a tap with a pipe that they stuck in the prisoner's throat and they ran the water until the prisoners' bellies had swelled right up. When I remember it, I think how it hurt to see a human being like this—it's better to murder men than see them tortured like that.

Dalilah talks about torture like an automaton, her voice a monotone. She says she saw, over a period of months, at least 1,000 men tortured at the rate of twelve a day, the police interrogators starting at 10 a.m. and working in shifts until 11 p.m. But she cries when she describes what she saw:

The torturers would say: “You must confess that you killed so-and-so” and they made the prisoner sign a confession with their eyes blindfolded—they didn't have the right to read what they were signing. There were prisoners who wept and said: “I've done nothing—I have the right to a doctor and a lawyer.” When they said that, they got a fist in the mouth. Those who died were under the water torture. Their bellies were too swollen with water. Sometimes while this happened, the torturers would put broomsticks up their anuses. They enjoyed it. Some of the prisoners had beards, some didn't. They were all poor. The top policemen gave the order to torture—I think it was given over the phone. But they didn't use the word torture— they used to call it
nakdoulou eslah
—“guest treatment.” There would be screaming and crying from the prisoners. They would shout: “In the name of God, I did nothing” or “We're all the same, we're Muslims like you.” They screamed and cried a lot. I saw two men who died like that on the ladder. The two bodies hung there on the ladder. They were dead and the torturer said: “Take them to the hospital and say they died in a battle.” They did the same thing with those who were executed at eleven at night—it was done after curfew when only the police and the gendarmerie could drive around. I had to fill out the death certificates so the bodies could be taken out of the hospitals. I had to sign that it was a body that had been found in the forest after it had decomposed—it was very hot then.

Dalilah says that she tried to protest to a superior officer, whose name she gives as Hamid:

I said to him: “You mustn't do these things because we are all Muslims— there should at least be evidence against these people before you kill them.” He said to me: “My girl, you are not made for the police force—if you suspect someone, you must kill him. When you kill people, that's how you get promoted.” Any cop would hit the prisoners with the butt of his “Kalash.” Some of the prisoners went completely mad from being tortured. Everyone who was brought to the Cavignac was tortured—around 70 per cent of the cops there saw all this. They participated. Although the torture was the job of the judiciary police, the others joined in. The prisoners would be twenty or thirty to a cell and they would be brought one by one to the ladder, kicked in the ribs all the time. It was inhuman.

According to Dalilah, women prisoners were taken to a special section of the Châteauneuf police station called the “National Organisation for the Suppression of Criminality,” where Algerian military security police prevented all but those with special passes from entering. “You had to be a high-ranking officer to get in there because of the way they treated women. They killed there too . . . ” Dalilah's tragedy was personal. “I can't sleep in the dark because I'm afraid. It's not my fault, because my fiancé was murdered during Ramadan in 1993. The men who did this to him were dressed as policemen—and they killed him because he was a policeman.” Who are “they”? I ask. And she replies: “That's the big question.” But it was torture that destroyed Dalilah's life—and which proved her undoing:

There was a group of elderly people who were tortured. I couldn't stand to see it, especially one man of about fifty-five whose arm was rotting. He had gangrene and he smelled very bad. I couldn't bear it and I went and bought him some penicillin and put it on his arm because I thought it would help. There were another six people in his cell who had been tortured—it smelled like death in there. But another policeman had seen me and I asked him not to say anything. You see, we didn't have the right to talk to prisoners—only to hit them. But the policeman wrote a report to the commissioner who called me in . . . He said: “Maybe you'll go to prison for helping terrorists.” The man I helped was freed afterwards— which showed me he was innocent.

Armed “Islamists”—four young men who turned up at her mother's home— had meanwhile targeted Dalilah, demanding she hand over her police pistol within fifteen days. When she asked for police protection, she was denied it. Dalilah slept in police stations at night. Then she slipped away from her home and bribed her way onto a boat for Europe, on the run from both the Algerian security services and the “Islamist” guerrillas.

REDA LEFT LONG PAUSES between his sentences. Safe in London, the soldier's memory was on a road 30 kilometres from Algiers. He had been on military service, part of a commando unit outside Blida:

They gave us vaccinations in our backs and then told us to inject each other before we went out on sorties. It was an off-white liquid which we injected into each other's arms . . . It made us feel like Rambo . . . We were on a roadblock, stopping anyone we suspected of being a terrorist. If a man had a face like a terrorist, if he had a big beard, he was shot. There was a man with a beard walking past the petrol station. I told him to stop. He said: “Why should I stop?” The man was rude, so I killed him. It's like I was dreaming and it wasn't me. I didn't remember it till my friends told me . . . The bullets hit him in the chest. When he died, he cried: “There is no God but God.” I hope that God will forgive me and that all humanity will forgive me.

Knightsbridge may be an unexpected place to seek forgiveness but from time to time, Reda wept—for the killings, for the torture he witnessed, for the soldiers he believed were murdered by his own army. He began his military service in the town of Skikda, then moved to Biskra for weapons training. “We were told that all people were against us. We were taught how to recognise terrorists—by their beards and
khamis
robes, their Islamic clothes.”

On 12 May 1997, Reda was flown to Blida for active service in the anti-guerrilla war. On his first sortie into the village of Sidi Moussa on 27 May, he and his comrades ordered families from their homes and he said that, while searching their houses, they stole all the money and gold they could find:

We took sixteen men for torture. We had been told by informers that there were terrorists there. Whatever they told us to do, we would do it. All sixteen men were bearded. There was an underground room at the Blida barracks called the
katellah
—the “killing room”—and the prisoners were all given names by the interrogators, names like Zitouni. The men were stripped and bound and tied to a chair and hosed with cold water. Two soldiers stood in front of each prisoner and asked questions. Then they started with the electric drill.

Reda fidgets with his hands as he tells his awful story. The drills were used on the prisoners' legs. He says he saw one army torturer drill open a man's stomach. It lasted four hours with each prisoner—if they lived, they were released after a week. At one point in his story, Reda asks his younger brother to leave the room; he doesn't want his family to know what else he has seen:

There was a cable about five centimetres in diameter and they put it in the ears or anus of the prisoners. Then they threw water at them. Two of the men began cursing us . . . And the torturer would shout
Yarabak
—“God damn you—so much for your God.” The torture went on twenty-four hours a day. I was only a conscript. I watched but I didn't take part. The man whose stomach was drilled, he was drilled because he was suspected 100 per cent of being a terrorist.

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.