by Robert Fisk
In Algeria itself, fear was becoming a disease. “I went to a relative’s funeral in Oran in December—he died a natural death—but in the funeral a sheikh mentioned an Algerian woman who had just been murdered along with her Belgian husband.” There was silence at the dinner table; this was not a moment to rattle our knives and forks over the hot spicy peppers and tomatoes. “The sheikh didn’t talk about the murdered Belgian—he ignored him. But of the woman, he said: ‘If she hadn’t married a foreigner, this wouldn’t have happened.’ ”
He paused for the horror of the statement to sink in. “How can we reason with people like this? How can we let people like this sheikh come to power? A lot of our problem here was our education system. The FLN taught children that history began in 1962, after the war of independence. They were not taught about Abdelkader, our warrior who fought the French. But the people rejected the FLN and their version of history. So the only thing that was true to them was the Koran— which gave the fundamentalist leaders increased power. They were like the sheikh in the Oran mosque; they could take any sentence from the Koran and light bonfires with it.”
The bonfires are everywhere. I do not tell our host that I have seen a post-mortem photograph of the Belgian man and his murdered wife. The Algerian government has issued a vile dossier of decapitated corpses, colour snapshot after colour snapshot of slit throats and bullet-punctured corpses from Algeria’s mortuaries. The grey-haired woman lies on a mortuary floor, a bullet hole on the right of her mouth, eyes partially opened, right breast exposed above a white shroud. Her husband, in only his underpants, has bullet holes in his chest, shoulder and face. His eyes are staring at the camera as they must have stared at the killers when they came to the family home at Bouira on 29 December 1993. Opposite them lies a young Frenchman, murdered at Bir Khadem on 23 March 1994, his short black hair still neatly parted, looking downwards at the two bullet holes in his chest. Is that, I ask myself, what he did at the moment of death? Did he feel the metal streaking into his chest and glance downwards in surprise to see what had smashed his heart?
Turn the pages and it gets worse. The Croat guest workers overwhelmed outside Oran had their throats cut. They are not neat little slits in the neck, an invisible razor blade that might have rendered death swift and merciful. Their throats have been hacked open, sawed through, the blood pouring over their chests. One of them, a young man, is grimacing in pain, his suffering written across his dead face, his lips pursed as he tries to cope with the pain. Whoever carved their way into his throat went on slicing away until they reached the top of his backbone. You can see the white of the bone at the back of his neck.
Other bodies are a butcher’s shop of blood and flesh, their faces hacked off, their arms stripped of flesh. In some cases, only the severed heads appear in the photographs. The left eye of Djillali Nouri, murdered on 28 August 1994 in Aïn Defla, is open wide, looking at the blanket upon which his head is resting, in horror, as he must have gazed upon the assassin’s knife. And after a while, this pornography of cruelty becomes banal. The head of Ahmed Haddad, murdered on 13 May 1994, is lying on a tiled shelf, blood dripping from the base of the skull, a human hand steadying the head with two fingers lest it roll off onto the floor. Halima Menad was a young woman, killed at Aïn Defla on 23 July 1994, her long dark hair and half-open eyes still containing a ghost of beauty, her ringlets bathed in the gore of her cut-open neck. Yamina Benamara, another young woman decapitated near Oran on 11 April 1994, was left lying on the floor of her home in her night-clothes. Her body lies on a cheap, orange and blue carpet, partially covered with a cushion. Her head, part of her neck still adhering to her chin, lies on another carpet, eyes closed. Other photographs record the burning of factories, the wreckage of schools, buses, trucks.
Everyone joins the porno market of death. In Middlesex, a FIS front organisation publishes its own grisly photos, a heavily bearded “Islamist” riddled with holes; “victim of torture,” it says in the caption, “whose body and neck were drilled with a sharp instrument. He sacrificed his life and everything dear to him.” The man’s eyes are open in a quite natural way, looking straight into the camera as if anxious to explain just how terrible his suffering must have been. There are carbonised corpses, a girl in her twenties bathed in blood, a bald man with a bullet hole in his cranium. Instead of wrecked factories, this booklet contains coloured photographs of the desert prison camps in which thousands of young Algerians are incarcerated, photographs of Algerian cops interrogating young men in the streets of Algiers. The government’s handbook of decapitation claims that 15,000 men and women have been murdered; most of them had their heads chopped off. The FIS pamphlet says that “since the Junta’s coup d’état, 60,000 Muslims have been killed.” Above the photograph of a young man lying in a halo of blood, it says: “As for those who are slain in God’s cause, never will he let their deeds go to waste . . . Holy Koran, 47, verse 4.”
It will be ten years before I see this kind of butchery again. For every one of these photographs could have been taken in the mortuaries of Iraq in and after 2003. So could the snapshots of burned trucks and destroyed factories.
And of course, before I start to ask just who carried out these crimes against humanity—for they cannot all be the work of the GIA or renegade FIS members— I ask myself a more prosaic, more obvious, more terrible question. What kind of man—for the killers are all men—could hold young Nabila Rezki, with her short frizzy hair and tip-tilted nose and lovely face, to the floor of her home in Aïn Defla on 23 July 1994, and carve open her neck as if she were a sheep or a chicken? What about the cries of horror, the shrieks of pain, the desperate, hopeless appeals for mercy that must have been uttered before the knife sank in? What about “the girl and the child and love”?
And after a few minutes, it dawns on me that the attention I pay to this horror, the detail I find in the photographs, makes me complicit in these crimes. I remember how the Iranian Revolutionary Guards would hand round photographs of the dead Airbus passengers in the refrigerated Bandar Abbas warehouse in 1988, studying the minutiae of suffering, the ant-tracks of blood on the bodies, the eyes still looking sightlessly from the faces. Again, they remind me of medieval paintings, of Hieronymus Bosch’s skewered corpses, of Goya’s raped and eviscerated victims of French cruelty, of praying, arrow-pierced saints. Once, in a Kosovo field, I found an Albanian man’s head lying in the grass, lopped off by an American air force bomb dropped on his refugee convoy, staring up at the sky; and I thought to myself, very coldly, that this must have been a common sight in Tudor England or anywhere in fifteenth-century Europe. Later, I met the young woman who had found the head and who had placed it on the grass because she thought that it would give the dead man more dignity if the face of his severed head was able to look at the sky.
We travel to Algeria now in fear, we few journalists. Lara Marlowe of Time magazine and I work out a routine. If we visit a shop, we must stay only four minutes to buy our fruit or teabags or books. Five minutes would give someone enough time to bring the killers. We hide our faces in newspapers when we are trapped in downtown traffic. We walk between the car and the front door of a family home with manic, Monty Python speed, the journalists of silly walks, characters in an old silent movie, our terror forcing us to move with high-speed normality. Ring the doorbell, watch the street in a casual, breathless way, curse the occupants for not answering the moment we ring. At dinner, we look at our watches. Curfew is at 11:30. The minute hand that creeps past eleven makes our smiles stiffen, our desire to flee all the greater. Cops want to escort us through the cities, policemen who sometimes wear hoods. “For your protection,” they say. Yes, but who wants to be seen travelling with a policeman wearing a balaclava, a cagoule, to be identified with the men who are arresting the young of Algiers and who are—the proof starts to mount in ever more horrifying evidence—tortured, quite often to death?
We travel to Blida, to the old French town in what we will soon call “the triangle of death.
” Yes, we love these racy names. Ten years later, in Iraq, we would start talking about “the Sunni triangle”—which wasn’t all Sunni and wasn’t a triangle at all—and then, inevitably, we would create in our pages an Iraqi “triangle of death.” The Blida version took only half an hour to reach. On 30 January 1994, the policemen there wore hoods and carried automatic rifles. The walls were spray-painted “FIS.” And the body of Sheikh Mohamed Bouslimani—two months in a mountain grave before his corpse was discovered—reeked of formaldehyde as it lay, wrapped in a brown and yellow blanket, in the colonial town square beneath the Atlas Mountains.
Sitting on the floor of the single-storey family home, up in the foothills above the plain of the Mitidja, his eighty-four-year-old mother, Zohra, tears gleaming on wrinkled cheeks behind old spectacles, tried to understand why her son had been murdered. “Thank God I was able to see him in the hospital and able to kiss him,” she said. “I hope we will see him in paradise. He was an obedient son. It was God in his mercy who gave him to us and God in his mercy who took him away from me. I must accept this.”
In Algeria, acceptance—of kidnapping, murder, head-chopping, death—is now a way of life. But who did kill Bouslimani? Who would want to kidnap and then assassinate a professor of Arabic who was leader of Algeria’s “Guidance and Renewal” charity, who only a year before had travelled to Sarajevo and brought back dozens of wounded Bosnian Muslims to recover in Algeria? “The hand of traitors took him away,” was the explanation of Sheikh Mahfouz Nahnah, the leader of the Hamas party of which Bouslimani was a founding member, as he preached in that small colonial square, weeping before eight thousand mourners.
So who were the “traitors” here? The murderers, certainly: the four men who took the balding, bearded sheikh from his single-storey villa on 25 November 1993, and allowed him just one brief telephone call to his family a few days later before silencing him for ever. In the study of his home, we could see the religious books he was reading when called to the front door, and the telephone line—now reconnected with black masking tape—which the kidnappers cut before they took the sheikh away in his own battered Renault car. Just for a chat, a few words, nothing to worry about, they told his wife, Goussem. He would be back soon. The usual tale.
Amid the hundreds of white-scarved women who sat below the eucalyptus trees and the ramshackle slum in which Sheikh Bouslimani lived, an old friend recounted the inevitable. “They let him make just one telephone call. His family asked: ‘Who is holding you?’ and he was silent. Then they heard a voice in the background saying: ‘Tell them it’s the GIA.’ Then he said: ‘You heard.’ His family asked the sheikh how he was, and he replied: ‘Sometimes you have to thank God, even in the worst of situations.’ And that was the last anyone heard of him.”
But not the last that was seen. Ten days before a hopeless “national conference” on Algeria which was supposed to resolve the country’s crisis, a rumour spread that the sheikh’s body had been found high in the mountains, buried beside trees near a cemetery at El-Affroun. No more was said until the conference, which Hamas briefly attended but which was boycotted by all major political groups, came to an end. At which point the Algerian authorities suddenly announced that the sheikh’s remains had indeed been found on the mountainside. And, with almost the same breath, that two men suspected of his kidnapping—Guitoun Nacer and Rashid Zerani—had been arrested. Nacer and Zerani, it was said, had been ordered by Djafaar el-Afghani, a FIS member who allegedly played a leadership role in the GIA, to abduct the sheikh in order to persuade Hamas to boycott the conference.
The government was happy to blame the FIS for all the country’s miseries. Tens of thousands of Islamist militants—and members of the armed groups at war with the pouvoir—lived in Blida. That is why its walls were covered in FIS slogans and why the town’s young men watched foreigners with the deepest suspicion. That is why the paramilitary police, clad in dirty khaki and fingering their Kalashnikovs, stood in the streets around us wearing woollen hoods, sacks with slits just wide enough for eyes to observe and orders to be shouted.
But there were friends of the sheikh—schoolfriends from his days at the Blida lycée where he taught Arabic—who were suspicious of the story. “All of a sudden, the government finds the body and the culprits just after the conference ends,” a Hamas member said. “What am I supposed to think of this? Hamas is more moderate than the FIS, but there are sympathisers of the FIS in our party. So why should the FIS kill him? I don’t know—though I’d like to hear the FIS denounce this murder; I would like to hear them say it wasn’t them. But there are those who say that the government wants to kill off Hamas—he is the second leader to be murdered—so that they can have an open war between the army and the FIS. And there are other parties like the Culture and Democracy Party who don’t want to see any party like Hamas because it shows that Islam can be humane and moderate. My suspicion is simple: everyone was ready to see the sheikh killed.” People die when everyone finds that their death is in their interest. The FIS lost a moderate opponent, the authorities were able to blame the FIS, while those who have no truck with religion in Algerian politics no longer have the annoyingly popular Bouslimani to contend with.
And the sheikh was a popular man in Blida. His funeral in the shadow of the ice-sheathed mountains was a dolorous, dignified affair. Mourners in the square wept themselves into unconsciousness, swooning into the arms of their friends, as Sheikh Nahnah announced that Bouslimani “did everything for the soil of Algeria and now the soil of Algeria is taking him back.” Bouslimani had no children—his brother died in the war against the French in which the sheikh himself was imprisoned for five years—but he and Goussem had been bringing up a sister’s daughter as their own. Asma lay crying in front of her adopted mother, wringing her hands in grief as the body was taken for its final burial in the town below the family’s poor suburb of Sidi el-Kebir. The broken-down hamlet was named after the sixteenth-century founder of Blida, Ahmed el-Kebir, who brought with him from Spain the Arabs of Andalusia—irrigators of fields and planters of orange orchards—long before the French arrived in Algeria to colonise a nation whose tragedy had still not ended.
Algeria’s next president was a colourless ex-general who knew about anarchy long before this latest war. As ambassador to Romania, General Liamine Zeroual witnessed the chaos that followed the overthrow of President Ceauşescu. A former artillery commander at Sidi Bel-Abbès, commanding officer of the 6th Motorised Regiment at Tamanrasset, director of the Cherchell military academy, former minister of defence and now the country’s sixth post-independence president, Zeroual was to be the latest “last chance” for Algeria. In grey suit and dark tie, he marched into the “Club des Pins,” past the FLN nomenklatura, past the ranks of crimson-and-green uniformed Spahi warriors, a frozen smile on his face, nodding to the row of generals and admirals whose golden crossed swords and palm-leaf insignia twinkled under the television lights. No live coverage for this installation, I noticed. No more live television of a president after Boudiaf’s live-time demise. So we all listened in pin-dropping silence on 31 January 1994 as Zeroual placed his hand on the Koran and promised “to find a way out of the country’s crisis through dialogue.”
Did anyone believe this? As Zeroual entered the auditorium, he must have heard what had just happened. Only three and a half hours earlier, yet another politician had walked to his front door in Algiers to be confronted by a man who, with deadly efficiency, cut his throat, left him dead upon the pavement and—like almost all Algeria’s murderers—made good his escape. Rachid Tzigani, the national secretary of a minuscule right-wing party which had long called for an army takeover, was leaving his apartment block in Badjdera to drive to his office at the Ministry of Public Works when he came face to face with his assassin. There were, of course, no witnesses.
A day later, French television journalist Olivier Quemener is filming in the Casbah. A gunman assassinates him and he is found with his wounded reporter lying beside h
im in tears. At Zeroual’s installation, I had helped to carry Quemener’s camera legs. We had travelled back together on the same bus to Algiers, chatting about the difficulties of working in this “democratic” police state, of the dangers that awaited us. And now he was added to the list of murdered foreigners. “He didn’t take a police escort with him,” a cop said with near-contempt at the Hôtel el-Djezair. No of course not, Quemener was trying to do his job, bravely and unprotected in the heart of Algeria’s war.
Within the steel-grilled office of Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, in the centre of old Algiers, the statistics are pinned to the wall. A recent total shows 243 security forces dead, along with 881 “Islamists” and 335 civilians—with an overall official death toll of 3,000 that no one, except the government “minders,” believes.119 Government courts have condemned hundreds of “Islamists” to death: 212 in Algiers, 64 in Oran, 37 in Constantine. Penned in each day are those individual killings that agency journalists are able to keep track of. Assassinats, it says in red ink. “March 16th 1993, Djillali Liabès, former minister of education . . . shot outside his home in Kouba; March 17th 1993 . . . Laadi Flici, doctor, writer, member of national consultative council . . . December 28th 1993 . . . Yousef Sebti, poet, writer, francophone, professor, killed by unknown men . . . ” Even the vice president of the Algerian Judo Federation is the victim of what the papers call a “cowardly assassination.”