The Battle for Algeria

...At the time it won independence from France in 1962, it was rich in human and natural resources, particularly after the French gave up their claim to the Sahara and its rich oil and gas reserves...

...More shocking still for the Algerians were reports that the soldiers were torturing some of the arrested demonstrators...

...Let bygones be bygones, forget about Algerian contingents in several Arab-Israel wars and years of hateful propaganda, and remember rather that during the Gulf War, the Islamists brought tens of thousands into the streets with pro-Saddam, anti-Israel, and anti-America slogans...

...With the hard men on each side determined to finish each other off, the only alternative would seem to be not the "moderates" the State department believes exist behind the men who decapitate teenage girls, but the many liberal-minded people of whom we rarely hear...

...the popular editor-in-chief of the French-language Le Matin, Said Mekbel, made only minor adjustments to his living arrangements...

...And though it tried to promote the emancipation of women, the reactionary pattern of male-female relations established by the Koran remained the societal norm...

...In a typical incident in late June, five women, aged 15 to 21, were abducted in The American Spectator October 1995 31 Chief, a town in western Algeria...

...If you don't hold Kabylie," King Fand of Saudi Arabia is supposed to have told Madani in 1991, "you won't hold Algeria...

...Shortly before he left office, former president Mitterrand suggested the European Union might mediate a deal...

...The FLN had badly misjudged the depth of resentment produced by their decades of mismanagement, upon which the Islamists had already begun to capitalize...

...Solidly Sunni Muslim, like the country as a whole, it is the only region where the FIS was unable to do well electorally in 1990 and 1991...

...But many more have stayed...

...Both are convinced we have designs on Algeria's natural resources, which are considerable, notably in naturalgas, and the market that its young and booming population represents...

...The idea of holding a presidential election this year was the regime's concession to normality...

...The terrorists have been audacious in their murderous xenophobia, going so far as to climb aboard an Italian ship docked in the Algiers harbor and slit the crew's throats...

...Torture is engraved in the Algerian psyche, for the French, a generation before, tortured them as they fought their bloody war for civil rights and independence...

...Amal Boumedienne, a reporter at the independent El-Watan, says, "My hope is that when they come for me, it will be with bullets, not knives or hatchets...

...Though wretchedly poor, Kabylie is the political hub of Algeria...

...The State Department also thinks that if this clique can be persuaded, that there is a moderate Islamist alternative, a compromise should be possible, the fighting can end, and the country can get back on an electoral track...

...The spiral of violence and counter-violence has by now claimed forty thousand lives, with the 500-a-week death toll likely to accelerate in the fall as the generals' regime moves forward with its plan for a presidential election to legitimize its rule...

...find—two young men entered the mosque, leaving their shoes in the entrance as custom requires, and went upstairs past the place of worship...

...Fed up with food shortages, overcrowded neighborhoods, and unemployment, young people took their grievances to the streets, where they were gunned down by the hundreds if not thousands...

...Though the long-reigning ruling party, the FLN, was brushed aside to be replaced by the Supreme State Council when the generals decided they did not want the FIS to win the elections, the State Department believes that essentially the same personnel have remained in charge...

...They believe the changes since 1988 are worth little in light of the 1992 military coup...

...The episode was another reminder that the Algerian situation—a mix of tortured history and incompatible ideas—continues to deteriorate...

...To be sure, [FIS] were busy killing soldiers in the neighborhood...

...But on July 11, according to police—who base their account on witnesses whom no one else seems able to Roger Kaplan is the editor of Freedom Review, published by Freedom House...

...But no less believable are the rumors that, if they are making do without French advisers, the "eradicators" are quite happy to have Israeli help...

...Islam had been an essential ingredient in the almost century-and-a-half resistance to the painful colonial experience...

...M adani, Benhadj, and imam Sahraoui formed the FIS in 1989 with the avowed goal of creating an Islamic Republic cleansed of unbelievers and foreigners...

...This victory came despite the fact that Benhadj was equating democracy with blasphemy, since it implied the people could second-guess God...

...Signs in shop windows assure customers that the meat for sale is certified hallal or kosher by the religious authorities...

...If anyone outside the State Department believes this, I have not met or heard of him...

...The European foreign policy establishment, beginning with the French, have repeated without much conviction that "only a political solution" is viable—but on the grounds they round up radicals and their supporters...

...They forgot their shoes on the way out, hijacked a car, left it a few streets away, and disappeared...

...And, of course, there is France...

...Madani is co 32 The American Spectator October 1995 Now they are complaining that French plans to render the France-Algeria air routes more secure by segregating the terminals smack of racism...

...30 The American Spectator October 1995 Though the group has not taken credit for Sahraoui's assassination, it is widely assumed that the GIA killed the imam as a warning to his imprisoned FIS colleagues Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, who were reported in June to be negotiating a compromise with the military government...

...From there to killing a basically tolerant man like Sahraoui, who had been granted special permission to leave the country for France, was not a very big step...

...Paris T he rue Myrha is in one of those little streets of the 18th arrondissement in northeast Paris where, if you close your eyes for a few moments, you can feel yourself transported to the other side of the Mediterranean, where the sun is always shining and the women peek through narrow slits in the Casbah's white walls...

...As FIS leaders were arrested—or, like Sahraoui, exiled—the armed wing of the party began attacking military targets...

...Jean-Francois Revel, the French philosopher and political journalist, scoffs at the notion...

...A lgeria certainly will not make it if the violence cannot be brought under control...

...In fact, we scarcely realize that we are playing a role even when we do nothing...

...But the socialist government discovered that it needed to import Egyptians to instruct schoolchildren in Arabic—most teachers only spoke French...

...But, thus far, no Americans have been attacked...

...Still others accept their situation with a kind of defiant courage...

...Though scores of foreigners have been killed since the war started, the official aim of the Islamists who have claimed responsibility for most of the killings is to cleanse an Islamic land of infidels...

...As one doctor put it, "When the Islamists won in the towns, the regime said, okay...

...The GIA did not take credit for the bomb, however, and observers in France and Algeria wondered out loud whether Algeria's feared Securite militaire might not have a rogue element intent on scaring the French into giving the regime more explicit and forceful support than it has so far...

...Neither the FLN nor the other legal parties are enthusiastic about it, and some high-ranking officers believe the FIS must be allowed, under another name, to field a candidate...

...Tocqueville remarked in the 1840s that the vast majority of Algerians were the worse off for the French presence, culturally and materially, and the same could have been said in the 1950s...

...Ever-more implacable and radical groups began splitting off from FIS—the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and later the GIA, which maintained that weakness in the face of the infidels' repression was itself an infidelity to Islam...

...Clashes in the east have left victims on both sides of the Tunisian border, including Tunisian border police...

...President Chirac has not made any policy statements on Algeria...

...Women should leav Abassi Madani said, " death...

...The army struck back with great brutality, which in turn gave rise to a more radical terrorist faction, the nebulous Armed Islamic Groups (GIA...

...Suspicions focused on the Islamists, and one French policeman asserted he had spotted a top GIA leader, one known to operate from Sweden, in the metro on the day of the blast...

...The more "respectable" Islamists, such as Madani, have waffled about just what sort of political life will be permitted after his side wins...

...But if Kabylie represents a major strategic prize, it is by no means the only front...

...They are 'green Khmers,— he says, thinking no doubt about the fate they have reserved for him...

...Anti-Islamist Algerians say that we are crazy if we think we will avoid being cast once again in the role of the Great Satan if, or when, as the State Department seems to feel, the FIS or its epigones set up an Islamic Republic...

...But then in some places the security services got hold of the voting records and came back and killed people who had voted FIS...

...Forget it," Revel says...

...The men who emerged from the terrible war with the French (a million killed out of a population of 12 million) conceived of politics as a constant fight among clans and factions...

...0 34 The American Spectator October 1995...

...The Algerian government told him to get lost, and recalled that when he was interior minister in the Fourth Republic, his line was, "The only negotiation is War...

...They were found a few days later, throats slit...

...In a war like this," says Jamsheed Marker, recently retired dean of Pakistan's diplomatic corps and a longtime observer of the convulsions in the Arab-Islamic world, "you get to a point where you cannot compromise...

...This has produced strikingly similar logic on both sides of the Mediterranean...

...From all parties, you hear—albeit for different reasons—the same refrain: "Do you ever wonder why no Americans have been killed...

...Throughout this past spring and summer, the French police rounded up terrorist suspects in France and "dismantled" networks that supply arms, money, supplies, and probably men, to the guerrillas...

...Surely...

...The tactical aim, of course, is to spread terror and put pressure on the regime...

...Robert Kaplan, a shrewd observer of Third World politics, remarks that, quite apart from what potential commercial interests we might have in North Africa, we would be fools to think that, in an upheaval as bloody as the one taking place in Algeria, the "moderates" are likely to be anywhere near the finish line...

...The uprising convinced the FLN it was time to loosen up, and the revised constitution of 1989 allowed the formation of new political entities, including the FIS, human rights organizations, women's groups, and independent newspapers...

...The tiny grocery stores of Paris's North African neighborhoods are stacked with boxes of dates and barrels of nuts, and there are ten-kilo sacks of couscous and baskets full of bread in every shape and size...

...F finally, in October 1988, the pressure cooker exploded...

...This time there were no fatalities, but that was the only thing unusual about the explosion...

...The democratic "third force" is far more afraid of the Islamists than of the government, but it acknowledges that if politics had not been "blocked" for twenty-eight years by a one-party regime that became increasingly venal as the years went by, the explosion might have been averted...

...The State Department," he says, "produces first-rate sociologists and second-rate historians, but for policy-making purposes forgets the lessons of history...

...The Islamists felt she was too well developed for her age, and that she should be staying at home waiting for marriage, not parading her body around in public...

...0 f all the countries of Arab Islam, Algeria seemed to have the most assets for a successful transition into the modern, politically pluralistic world...

...But by then—more than a quarter-century after independence—it was too little, much too late...

...Such barbarism has become routine...

...should support it...

...In any event, a fortnight after Sahraoui's slaying, a bomb exploded in the Paris metro near Notre Dame, killing seven and wounding a score more...

...The regime tried to fix the mess it had created by letting in some air, and then they tried to shut it out...

...In a typical crime which the government made sure was well publicized, a 16-year-old girl was dragged out of her classroom, stabbed to death, and left in the street near her school...

...Then the army decided the democratic experiment had reached its outer limit...

...Women have been especially targeted by the Islamists, and since 1993 they have been raped, mutilated, and murdered with breathtaking savagery...

...When the 1 killers found him, he was in one of his haunts, a little restaurant in a working-class neighborhood...

...Women should leave home three times," Abassi Madani said, "at birth, at marriage, at death...

...The Islamists reply that the government is made up of unbelievers, who are sullying a Moslem land, and frauds who confiscated a legal and legitimate electoral victory...

...A July government communiqué announced that Cherif had been assigned to "other tasks," and because Madani has been imprisoned since 1992, he is widely thought no longer to have control over his political base...

...People's family members have been killed, and they will not accept that whoever did it should survive, and thatperson knows this—and therefore is determined to save himself by eliminating his enemies and his enemies' relatives, and their children...

...To be sure, as Prime Minister Alain Juppe said earlier this year when he was still foreign minister, the Algerians are all grown up...

...And Jews and Muslims live side by side here the way they used to in Algiers, in a time so far in the past that some people doubt it happened...

...Most countries have shut their embassies or maintain skeleton staffs...

...Much of the French period, which began with a brutal military invasion in 1830 and ended with the bloodbath of the Algerian War, had been extraordinarily violent...

...Sahraoui, 80, had been one of the founders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which took the lead in the first round of voting as Algeria held its first multiparty elections in December 1991...

...S tate Department spokesmen, though, insist the Algerian government is hopeless and must be urged to share power...

...But one of the aides of Army Chief of Staff Mohamed Lamari was quoted as saying he would kill five hundred thousand or five million "Islamic totalitarians," if that is what it took...

...Mark Parris, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, reported "little progress" in political dialogue the last time he reported on the situation to the House—a polite way of saying that American advice to the generals is not being followed...

...The Islamists established an efficient system of parallel taxation (supplemented by the generous financial support of Iran and Saudi Arabia), offered needed services the government was unable to provide, and maintained that only a return to the strictures of Moslem law could right the nation...

...How could the country that, in a certain sense, is responsible for the whole Algerian disaster be spared...

...To the extent that our fancy rhetoric about new global orders and democracy on the march is more than just that, we also have a profound interest in the ability of Algeria to make a "transition" to something resembling a liberal regime—or at least one able to get along peacefully with such regimes...

...Alarmed at the prospect of coming under fundamentalist rule, and calling the FIS a threat to democracy, top army generals forbade the second electoral round, drove the FIS underground, and replaced the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) with their own Supreme State Council in a bloodless coup...

...The FLN made every conceivable mistake on the way out of colonialism, from the wreckage of collectivist agriculture to a one-party despotism complete with muzzled press, controlled labor unions, and the rest...

...There cannot be any compromise," says Osmane Bencherif, Algeria's ambassador to the U.S., "because there are no moderates on the other side...

...Indeed, the socialist FLN, which ruled from independence until the army coup of January 1992, turned Algeriainto virtually a textbook case of post-colonial disappointment...

...But not long after, the violence started...

...Only this, they maintain, will end the remaining support for the Islamists, whom the army will certainly hunt down and destroy...

...The extent of French military help is also immense—weapons, infrared sights, helicopters, and surely advisers...

...Demography may propel Algeria into Islamism, but that doesn't mean the U.S...

...The FLN also assigned a post-colonial role to Islam that became as much a bureaucratic bungle as a wellspring of a faith organically integrated into the life of the nation...

...But the polyglot, mixed-up, tolerant, cosmopolitan Algeria that is loved by the poets and intellectuals did not "take" at independence...

...And if Algeria cannot make it, it is difficult to see which country in the Arab-Islamic world can...

...Algerian denials, founded in the pride of the long fight for independence, may be believed...

...The Department's unofficial line is that the regime is the most unpopular in the Arab world, and "this includes Saddam' s," one spokesman told me...

...A few days after the Paris metro bomb, another one exploded near the Arc de Triomphe...

...Indeed, the Islamists have specialized in spectacular assassinations of prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, journalists, and professionals—the kinds of individuals Algeria cannot do without if it is to move toward a liberal culture that would make the Mediterranean a bridge, and not a gulf, between Africa and Europe...

...policy, if that's what it can be called, is to tilt toward the cruelest of the insurgents...

...The army came and killed some of the officials who had been elected on the FIS ticket...

...he military government maintains that the current crisis was brought on by an "Islamist Internationale," a new totalitarianism with hegemonic ambitions...

...As with so many things Algerian, however, the gesture is late...

...No one questions this, least of all the Algerians, extremely thin-skinned in all matters touching on their national prestige...

...Election or no, however, the ancient rivalries are likely to prove inexhaustible...

...But since the arrival of a band of French soldiers on the Algerian coast in 1830, the two countries' histories have been one, even if neither side will admit it...

...The French say we are naive, which is essentially the same thing in their book...

...The only region where the Islamists have never done well is Kabylie, a mountainous region east of Algiers, which is one reason why the government distributed weapons to militias there when the trouble started—the other reason being that many top army officers are Kabyles intent on protecting their clans and villages...

...About 60 percent of Algiers is made up of migrants from Kabylie, which has produced leaders across the whole spectrum of political, military, and religious life...

...Air traffic is being interrupted...

...Interior Minister Abderahmane Meziane Cherif—who, in one of the many paradoxes of the convoluted Algerian situation, had previously been part of the government's hard-line faction that argued no compromise with the Islamists was possible—was supposedly the architect of the deal, which subsequently fell apart on both sides...

...The activists among them, such as Khalida Messaoudi, the leader of a human rights organization dedicated to halting the killings of women, remain underground, rarely staying in any place more than one night...

...The government last year evidently lost control of substantial areas, including whole neighborhoods of Algiers...

...It was on the rue Myrha that Abdelbaki Sahraoui had his little mosque—nothing more than a storefront church, really—duly registered with the French authorities as a place of peace, a place of worship, a place of learning: a place of Islam...

...Others, without taking outspoken political positions, stoically go on with their work, in the hope that normality in the end will prove to be the best form of resistance...

...No one ever thought of King Fand as an expert on Algeria, but the story, even if apocryphal, is well taken...

...These conflicts were exacerbated by the government's predictable failure to deliver the educational and social services it had promised with its socialist rhetoric...

...They stepped up their campaign against the "unbelievers," and said the country's reactionary family code, which reduces women to the status of minors, did not go far enough...

...They had to be persuaded last Christmas to let the Islamist terrorists who had hijacked an Air France jet at Algiers airport fly the plane to Marseilles, where the French police were better equipped to storm it...

...The FLN," one journalist told me, "made the Revolution, then they stole it from us who were supposed to be its beneficiaries...

...It's showdown time...

...But both sides remained cynical about democracy...

...A s a foreign policy problem, the Algerian civil war is somewhat unusual for the U.S., in that to a large degree we do not know how important our role is...

...It was not supposed to be a place of murder...

...he may well have said neither, but the fact that he was credited with such a statement is an indication of why "dialogue and reconciliation," which President Liamine Zeroual favors, have not gone very far...

...After the electoral triumphs in 1990, the Islamists seemed on their way to winning the national legislative elections...

...e home three times," at birth, at marriage, at nsidered a moderate...

...The party swept the local elections in 1990, winning a majority of town halls across the country and gaining control of over half of Algeria's municipal and county administrations...

...Madani is considered a moderate...

...Their call for a return to Islam was not a hollow one...

...Since the offensive that began in March at Ain Defla, where the army apparently trapped a force of several thousand Islamist warriors and destroyed it, it has regained a lot of ground...

...Madani, Benhadj, and thousands more were detained, and the fundamentalist wheels were put in motion...

...Their vision of the Algerian melting pot was not Arabs and Berbers and French and Jews and Spaniards and Turks and Maltese and Italians, but a dreary brew of ideologists: socialists, "third-worldists," pan-Arab nationalists...

...Many have left the country, mainly to settle temporarily in France...

...The men found the imam in his study, and put two .44 slugs in him with a silencer-equipped gun...