The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.’

  “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 kham
is 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.