by Guy Arnold
During the Gulf crisis public opinion throughout the Maghreb became overwhelmingly pro-Iraq and Saddam Hussein became a popular Arab hero. The Western press assumed this attitude to be the result of Islamic fundamentalism but in fact it was the reaction of the great majority of the Arab people. In Algeria the crisis helped radicalize public opinion and united much of the Algerian nation. The FIS depended upon the unemployed youth of the towns for its main support and from 26 May 1991 onwards it began to fill the streets and squares of Algiers with its followers in a series of peaceful protests. Certainly at this stage, in mid-1991, the principal complaint of the FIS was the attempt by the Hamrouche government to gerrymander the elections for the National Assembly, a complaint shared by others apart from the FIS. Meanwhile, the government carried out a number of economic reforms designed to move Algeria towards a full market economy. The FIS, however, faced internal factional problems and split between the moderates under Abbasi Madani, and the radicals under Ali Belhadj. The FIS objections to the electoral reforms, which led to a general strike and demonstrations gave the army an excuse to proclaim a state of emergency on 5 June 1991, which it maintained through to September, by which time the FIS leadership had been arrested and the party – apparently – disbanded.
The elections, which had been postponed from early 1991 as originally promised, were finally held on 26 December and to the dismay of the government and FLN, the FIS made huge gains, winning 188 of 430 seats in the National Assembly while it led in 150 of the remaining seats where a second round of voting would be held. The FLN had won a mere 16 seats (as opposed to 295 in 1987) while the socialists took 20 seats. The principal factor working in favour of the FIS was the perception that the Benjedid regime was totally decadent. In the two weeks following the elections the army decided that Benjedid was leading the country to disaster and would have to go. The second round of voting was set for 15 January 1992, when the FIS would only need 30 seats more to obtain an absolute majority. Fearing these results, the armed forces took control of the country, forced President Benjedid to resign on 11 January, cancelled the elections and declared a state of emergency. It then created a Haut Comité d’Etat (HCE) (High State Council) and invited the long-exiled Muhammad Boudiaf, who had impeccable nationalist credentials but had been 28 years in Morocco, to return to Algeria and head the HCE. When the Western media reacted to these events by describing a ‘military-backed’ regime they ignored the fact that governments in Algeria had always been military-backed and that of Benjedid more than most. Before he introduced his democratic reforms, Benjedid had got himself elected in 1988 under the old one-party, dictatorial rules. ‘The public reaction of Western governments and commentators to the suspension of the electoral process in Algeria following President Benjedid’s resignation on 11 January 1992 was a profoundly mixed one. Relief at the fact that Algeria was not about to become “a second Iran” very quickly gave way to disapproval of the manner in which this prospect had been conjured away at the last moment, as numerous editorialists in London and Paris and no doubt elsewhere indulged themselves in vigorous criticism of what they had not hesitated to call a “military coup”.’4 The West faced one of its classic dilemmas: it wanted, or pretended to want, democracy in Algeria provided the democratic process produced a ‘safe’ government from the West’s point of view but it came round to accepting the army’s intervention if this prevented Islamic fundamentalism. Then, when the FIS was deprived of its electoral victory, Western media argued that it should have been allowed to take power. The security forces proceeded to dismantle FIS party structures and arrested about 9,000 of its members who were interned in camps in the Sahara. On 4 March the FIS was banned. Violence followed these draconian measures and by October 150 people had been killed, mainly in urban areas.
Boudiaf was not as compliant as the army and old hierarchy had hoped. He tried to move the government back to its experiment with democracy by creating a new mass movement, Rassemblement Patriotique, and launching an anti-corruption campaign. He was assassinated on 29 June and though the Islamists were blamed for his death the people believed Benjedid rather than the FIS was responsible and that it was done to forestall the anti-corruption campaign. The appointment of Boudiaf as President had undermined the FIS claim to be the heirs to the historic FLN since he was an old revolutionary and had helped create the FLN. Boudiaf was replaced by Ali Kafi with a strong prime minister, Belaid Abdessalam, who tackled urban terrorism by creating special courts and laying down severe punishments. By this time violence was supplanting political manoeuvres. Unfortunately, Algeria had a long history of political violence – 50 years of fighting the French colonialists in the nineteenth century and a bloody independence struggle that had cost a million lives – and now violence replaced politics as the weapon of confrontation. Violence escalated through 1993. Some 210 security personnel had been killed in 1992 and by October 1993 about 1,000 Islamist sympathizers, whether members of the FIS or not, had been killed while a further 3,800 had been brought before the courts with 240 of these being condemned to death. The Islamists targeted prominent figures such as intellectuals and soldiers while the government responded by placing all responsibility on the FIS.
The government became increasingly unpopular as it failed to control the violence; it also became increasingly internationally isolated. On 23 March 1993 it broke diplomatic relations with Iran and then withdrew its ambassador from Sudan, accusing both countries of supporting the Islamist extremists. It tried to create a common anti-extremists front with Tunisia and Egypt. Its relations with Morocco had also deteriorated after King Hassan criticized the military suspension of the electoral process. The conflict escalated during 1994. The HCE chose Liamine Zeroual, a former general and defence minister, as President. Zeroual favoured the readmission of the FIS to the constitutional process and attempted to hold a dialogue from which no one should be excluded. He released a number of FIS prisoners and in September 1994 had Abbasi Madani and Ali Belhadj transferred from Blida prison to house arrest. Madani had intimated that the FIS would respect a pluralistic political system resulting from any future elections. The FIS would not renounce violence, however, and the dialogue did not materialize. The Islamist opposition split into two factions: the Groupe Islamiste Armée (GIA) (Armed Islamic Group), mainly centred upon the city of Algiers; and the Mouvement Islamiste Armée (MIA) (Armed Islamic Movement), which drew its strength from the east and west of the country. Foreign nationals were now targeted and more than 60 killed, persuading most countries to withdraw their nationals from Algeria. The government launched a new campaign against the GIA. The French government decided to expel FIS supporters from France. By the beginning of 1995 estimates suggested that as many as 40,000 people had been killed in the three years since January 1992.
In January 1995 the FIS, FLN, Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS) (the Socialist Forces Front) and the Hamas party met in Rome where they agreed on the need to end the violence and form a government of national unity to supervise elections. The government, however, rejected these proposals although they had the backing of France, Italy, Spain and the US as well as a majority of anti-government groups inside Algeria. The GIA demanded that the country’s leaders should be punished. Presidential elections were held in November 1995 and Zeroual was elected with a comfortable majority. He attempted further negotiations with the FIS leaders. By this time Algeria was subject to mounting international criticism for human rights abuses; there was growing concern at the increasing numbers of extra-judicial killings by security forces, which appeared to be condoned by the government. Many of the killings and massacres were conducted in barbaric fashion, billions of dinars worth of property had been destroyed and the army had also destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to deprive the Islamist guerrillas of cover. Members of the government divided between the eradicateurs who favoured all-out repression of ‘political Islam’ and the conciliators who argued that repression and security alone would not work. A compromi
se with the FIS was needed. The killings and massacres continued in 1996 and there were few witnesses and less information divulged by the government as to what was happening or what its retaliatory measures amounted to.
Algerians acknowledged Zeroual’s political skills but he failed to stop the killings and by February these were reckoned at a weekly rate of 100 to 150. Every city now had its ‘no go’ areas and foreigners were warned away from the centre of Algiers. The fundamentalists attacked newspapers and television and killed many journalists who were regarded as pro-government. In April Zeroual initiated talks to map out a new political-constitutional course of action. He proposed a ban on political parties based on religion or language and laid down that a party should draw its support from across the nation and not just from one region. The president was only to be allowed to serve two terms of five years. The parties reacted cautiously and the FIS, which had not been invited to take part in the talks, rejected the proposals as did old supporters of the former president, Chadli Benjedid. Nonetheless, the proposals were endorsed by a national conference in September and the new constitution was approved by referendum in November in which 80 per cent of the country’s 16.4 million voters took part to give an 86 per cent endorsement. There was to be a second chamber or upper house that would severely limit the powers of the lower chamber – an indirectly elected Council of the Nation – with two-thirds of its members drawn from local and regional assemblies and the rest ‘national personalities and experts’ approved by the President. Meanwhile, in May GIA made headlines when it kidnapped and subsequently executed seven Trappist monks. In August the bishop of Oran was killed by a car bomb; the incident raised fears in the French community in Algeria, then estimated at about 1,000. Up to that time about 40 French people had been killed since 1993. GIA regarded France as the main external supporter of the Algerian government. Evidence provided by human rights groups suggested that by 1996 government death squads as well as the GIA were responsible for the various massacres taking place. By this time the army had effectively privatized the war by arming 200,000 civilians as ‘communal guards’ or ‘self-defence groups’ and there were 550,000 men under arms in Algeria.
The war of the 1990s was fought between the forces of a government that had lost its credibility and was seen to have failed to satisfy the political and economic needs of the people, and the Islamic fundamentalists who saw themselves as an older, more radical alternative to the secular, one-party state that had ruled Algeria since 1962. By 1997, the repercussions of the war were being felt increasingly in Europe and suspected Algerian terrorists were being arrested in France, Germany and Italy. The savage tactics employed by the GIA were increasingly criticized by mainstream Islamists, including the FIS, but to no effect. As Ali Yahya, a leading human rights lawyer, said in Algiers: ‘There is no military solution because the crisis is primarily a political one, and must be resolved by talks.’ The prime minister claimed that 80,000 people had been killed since the violence began although the FIS said the figure was 120,000. Figures had become relatively meaningless; what mattered was that the rate of killing went on unabated. April 1997 was an especially brutal month with village massacres and train bombs. The area worst affected by atrocities such as throat-cutting massacres in villages was the Mitidja plain south of Algiers. It became increasingly clear that at least a proportion of these massacres could be attributed to the security forces rather than the fundamentalists. More disturbing, no one ever seemed to be brought before a court of law. As Amnesty International reported: ‘There is just a statement, released to the press, that the killer or killers had been killed.’ A certain European unease surfaced at the extent to which France supported the Algerian government: on the one hand it was suggested that the Algerian authorities were able to exert many pressures on the French government but, on the other hand, France managed to carry its EU partners with it so that EU policy towards Algeria was largely left to Paris. In the parliamentary elections of June 1997, the Rallé National Démocratique (RND) with 36.3 per cent of the vote won 156 seats in the assembly while its ally, the once all-powerful FLN, only obtained 15.3 per cent of the votes and 62 seats. Only 41.78 per cent of the electorate had voted. An estimated 5,000 people were killed between these elections and the end of September. Information about the violence was hard to come by and massacres often occurred near army barracks, yet neither the army nor the police intervened until the killers had gone, a fact that reinforced the argument that the army was either directly responsible for the massacres or willing to stand aside while they were perpetrated. By that October an estimated 12,000 Algerians had simply disappeared.
Discussions of the violence in Algeria by outsiders were always in terms of who was responsible for it rather than why it was taking place. In any case, the inability of the government to stop the violence put it on the defensive. By 1999 both the government and the Islamists were accused of terrible atrocities. Presidential elections were due in April 1999 and the day before they took place six of the seven candidates withdrew, accusing the authorities of initiating a massive fraud in favour of the former Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was the candidate favoured by the army. In the event, Bouteflika gained 73.8 per cent of the votes cast, with 60.25 per cent of eligible voters participating. Bouteflika quickly made contact with the FIS and in June the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS) agreed to make the ceasefire, which had been in place since October 1997, permanent and to co-operate with the government against the GIA. The FIS leader, Abbasi Madani, was still under house arrest but the FIS constitutional council endorsed the agreement. A referendum of September 1999 rendered a 98.6 per cent vote in favour of the Bouteflika peace initiative, which included a civil concord offering amnesty to Islamic militants not implicated in mass killings. There was opposition to the civil concord and one French language paper called it a ‘shameful capitulation to Islamist violence’. There has been much debate about the nature of the Algerian civil war. As one commentator said: ‘Not the least striking aspect of the Algerian crisis is the absence of a consensus as to its nature. There is not only disagreement as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict and uncertainty as to who has been responsible for which particular acts of violence but also, and above all, a fundamental disagreement over the character of the conflict itself.’5
In January 2000 a new agreement was reached between the government and the AIS to give full amnesty to its 3,000 fighters. AIS agreed to disband permanently though for a time some of its fighters were to be enrolled in an ‘auxiliary unit’ to fight the GIA. The ban of the FIS remained. Although Algiers and the major cities were calm, the countryside remained insecure with approximately 200 killings occurring every month. Meanwhile, Bouteflika worked to improve Algeria’s overseas image: he went on a state visit to France in June; in July Spain’s premier José María Aznar visited Algeria and US officials came to discuss political, economic and military issues. Despite many confrontations since independence, France and Algeria needed each other. Algeria wanted France to break the diplomatic isolation in which it had been stuck for most of the 1990s while France needed better relations with Algeria for both commercial and strategic reasons, especially as the United States had been demonstrating a growing interest in Algeria since 1998 and was seeking military co-operation. This worried Paris. ‘Thus, following US Defense Secretary William Cohen’s declaration in February [2000] that the US government intended not merely to continue but to expand military co-operation with Algeria, Paris immediately dispatched a senior official to Algiers to discuss French military co-operation with Algeria. And no sooner had the US Sixth Fleet held joint exercises with the Algerian navy in early May than Vice-Admiral Paul Habert, the French naval commander for the Mediterranean, visited Algiers for urgent talks.’6 Algeria, it seemed, was coming in from the cold, at least as far as its strategic position was concerned.
By this time an increasing number of Algerians were calling for the army to withdraw from its domination of the political sc
ene so that a true civil government could come into being. December 2000 witnessed an upsurge in violence when 300 civilians were killed by GIA in the first half of the month. The reaction in the private press was that Bouteflika’s peace initiative had failed. Violence in the form of massacres and bombs in Algiers continued in 2001 and was attributed to Islamist groups. There was continuing criticism of the civil concord in the Francophone press, especially after 11 September and the ‘eradicateurs’ criticized Bouteflika for maintaining the dialogue with the Islamists. The authorities, on the other hand, declared that they felt less isolated after the 11 September attacks in the United States because there was greater understanding in the West of their own battle against terrorism. President Bouteflika made two visits to Washington and joined the US coalition against terrorism. However, many Algerians condemned the bombing of Afghanistan.