Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 1998, Pages 50-52

Special Report

The Horror Gripping Algeria Is Not Mindless Violence But Carefully Choreographed Chaos and Corruption

By Salim Saad

Across Algeria, there were a thousand civilians killed during the month of Ramadan, which ended in late January. Previous Ramadans also have witnessed horrific bloodshed, but this Ramadan was different not so much for what was done, but for what was said. Although journalists, police officers, security force members and political figures place their lives and those of their families at risk by speaking out, they are beginning to talk. Their stories reveal the truth of what is happening; and it is in confronting these truths that the solution to Algeria’s bloody crisis lies.

One of the latest to come forward is Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former Algerian prime minister now in exile in London. Speaking to Maroc Hebdo International, Brahimi declared that a trio of top military officers bears the sole responsibility for the repression of the Algerian people: the current chief of staff, General Mohammed Lamari; General Mohammed “Tewfik” Medien, the head of Military Security since 1990; and General Sma´n Lamari, the chief of Internal Security and creator of the “death squads”–elite counter-terrorist teams which are mobilized in emergency situations.

Brahimi noted that “the regular army, which numbers roughly 170,000 personnel, has been eclipsed by the creation of militia groups made up of 200,000 volunteers provided with better and more modern arms than those issued to soldiers....Now it is certain that the regular army…is innocent of the crimes committed in its name,” Brahimi said.

He added that with the creation of the militias, Algeria really has two armies: one for routine military activities and the second to deal with the Islamists. At the same time, the Islamists have one branch, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), for the “dialogue” and “cease-fire” championed by Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) leader Abbasi Madani, and another branch, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), for the “swords and knives” of Madani’s more militant colleague, Ali Belhadj.

But there is a third side to this triangle of violence: the special “death squads” which have been the principal instigators, if not the authors, of the seemingly endless series of civilian massacres. “The sinister GIA is infiltrated and manipulated by the security services,” Brahimi alleges. “Certain security squads have been created specifically to ‘frame’ the GIA.”

Hidden Hands

Although Brahimi seems well-informed, he neglects to mention another unique situation whereby two presidents chart Algeria’s course. President Liamine Zeroual is the man in front of the cameras who makes the public pronouncements. Behind high walls and closed doors, however, we find former President Chadli Benjedid, who officially resigned at the beginning of the national crisis precipitated by the cancellation of parliamentary elections in January 1992. Despite appearances, he is still at the center of power, and continues to influence events through a web of friends and former colleagues. (This is what is called in Algeria “continuity within change”!) Chadli’s friends are to be found throughout official Algeria, in the halls of government, military barracks and embassy salons.

Who are “Chadli’s men”? The aforementioned trio— of the two Lamaris and Tewfik Medien —at whose feet Brahimi places the blame for the current situation–are all cronies of Chadli, himself a military man two decades ago before he assumed the presidency. Chadli’s group also includes Generals Khaled Nezzar and Larbi Belkheir, who together led the initial military crackdown during the early years of the current crisis.

These two generals, along with Mohammed Lamari, compose the troika actually directing the current terror. Medien and Smain Lamari are more instruments of repression than real decision-makers. Other less prominent allies of Chadli are to be found scattered throughout the parliament, the security services, the ministries, the media and the world of business.

The regime’s duplicity, deception and deceit stand in direct contradiction to its self-proclaimed “struggle against Islamic terrorism in the name of democracy.” What real democracy is made up of so many hidden hands covered with so much blood?

At the same time, Algeria’s Islamists offer no reason for hope, as they are nothing but a savage parody of true Islam, rooted more in the jahiliyya (the “period of ignorance” which preceded Islam) than in the traditions of one of the world’s great monotheistic faiths.

Algeria’s problem is one of generalized ignorance. There is a pathetic intellectual, ethical and spiritual void, as well as a pathological lack of political imagination, among the country’s leaders. They are moved only by the ethos of force and the thirst for revenge. The results? Violence, treachery and cynicism, along with a state which exists only to provide immediate (and immense) personal profit, with the Algerian people paying the tab.

To come to a real understanding of what is happening today, one must retrace the steps that led to this point. Sadly, Algerian political analysis is like detective fiction: you have to look carefully and work backward to find the real culprits! What the clues reveal is that the horror gripping Algeria is not mindless violence but carefully choreographed chaos.

Roots of the Crisis

The roots of the current crisis are to be found in five critical issues which confronted Chadli and his colleagues a decade ago. First, how to cope with the worldwide winds of democratization unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet Union? Second, how to implement the privatization and economic liberalization plans mandated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, without sparking social revolt? Third, how could Chadli and the top ranks of the army avoid the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu, the strongman of Romania who was overthrown and then executed with his wife in December 1989? Fourth, how to take the sting out of the Islamist threat, as well as that posed by liberal democrats and other opposition movements? And finally, how to win over the West just as the Soviet bloc entered the terminal stages of its decline?

The regime responded in five stages over the last decade. The first phase was launched with the popular riots of October 1988. The socialist politicians of the National Liberation Front (FLN), at the time the only legal party in the country, were openly hostile to the “infitah” economic policies of Chadli’s regime, which were designed to privatize and liberalize the economy. These policies resulted in the enrichment of the president’s circle while widening the gap between rich and poor. The riots, fomented by Chadli’s secret services, were the pretext to remove the FLN’s longtime boss, Cherif Messadia, under the guise of “steps toward political pluralism.”

However, fed by genuine popular frustration, the riots quickly exploded beyond the control of the regime and grew into open violence. The army cracked down hard, killing some 500 during the course of containing the violence.

Mass arrests and torture were implemented, and the army chiefs—including Nezzar, Belkheir and Mohammed Lamari— took advantage of the shock and confusion to purge the regime of “questionable” elements. A number of civil servants, politicians, military officers and intellectuals were quickly marginalized and replaced by more pliable though less experienced and less qualified subordinates.

The generals’ weapons of choice were humiliation and suspicion. Accusations of corruption and whispered talk of “compromising documents,” coupled with professional derailment, were effective means of eliminating internal opposition, though at the cost of trading professionalism for subservience.

Phase two was launched almost a year later, in September 1989, with the legalization of parties based on religion and ethnicity, despite the fact that such parties had been explicitly barred from recognition under previous legislation. The move was a classic example of divide-and-conquer politics, pitting the Islamists of the FIS against liberal Berber parties such as the Rally for Culture and Democracy, or RCD. The Islamists were allowed to use mosques throughout the country to hold meetings and attract popular support, while other parties had to make do with cinemas and other “secular” meeting places. With the tacit permission and under the watchful eyes of the regime, the FIS quickly expanded its ranks and influence across the nation.

The third and most decisive phase came with the June 1990 elections for local and regional councils, the first step in the regime’s crash democratization program. Winning 54 percent of the vote, compared with 28 percent for the ruling FLN, the FIS took over an overwhelming number of councils, including the local council of every major city in the country. As a result of the FLN’s poor showing, Chadli crony Gen. Khaled Nazzar was catapulted to the forefront and was tapped as minister of defense–the first time since 1965 that anyone other than the head of state occupied the office.

Civil society quickly collapsed and was replaced with social chaos, characterized by bloody confrontations between Islamists and the security forces in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for the summer of 1991. In June of that year, however, a state of siege was declared and FIS leaders Madani and Belhadj were jailed. When the first round of elections was finally held in December 1991, the FIS drew 47 percent of the vote, compared with 25 percent for the Socialist Forces Front (FFS) of Hocine Ait Ahmed, a dismal 15 percent for the FLN, and a further 3 percent for independent candidates.

In Algeria, “democracy” is something that is utilized to maintain the privileges of the few, while Islam is cruelly disfigured by those who would kill in its name.

The second round, in which the top two first-round finishers in each district would compete, was, it seemed, certain to put an overwhelming FIS majority into parliament. Before the second round could be held, however, public demonstrations were held to protest the Islamists’ imminent rise to power. These demonstrations, cultivated and manipulated by Khaled Nezzar, laid the groundwork for the army’s intervention on Jan. 11, 1992 and the “resignation” of Chadli Benjedid.

Ensconced in his luxurious villa in the west of the country, Chadli neatly avoided Ceausescu’s fate, while his colleagues in the army, supported by French allies like FranÐois Mitter and and then-Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, maintained their hold on the reins of power–and the power of life and death–in Algeria.

The Islamists found themselves in detention camps in the Sahara, independent-minded journalists found themselves under fire, and the country found itself in the grip of a campaign by the new High Council of State to eradicate the Islamists totally. Mohammed Boudiaf, one of the “historic nine” who launched the Algerian revolution against France in 1954, was brought out of exile in Morocco to head the new government, only to be assassinated six months later by the very people who had put him into power, once they realized that Boudiaf really believed the rhetoric about cleaning up official corruption and bringing the crooks to book. The Islamists reacted to the crackdown exactly as the regime had expected: with violence directed specifically against those who collaborated with the government.

For all the regime’s attempts to win over the populace, however, the Algerian people remained steadfastly neutral, answering neither the exhortations of the Islamists to overthrow the regime, nor the regime’s calls to rally around the new authorities.

The regime’s solution was cynical and bloody. Under then-Prime Minister Redha Malek, one of the most radical of the “eradicationists,” the regime began to frame the Islamists with a series of civilian massacres. The unfortunate victims essentially were chosen at random, since the motive behind the killings was simply to push the population into the regime’s camp, not to silence its critics or eliminate its opponents per se.

The fourth stage of the plan involved the rehabilitation of the regime’s image. Luckily for the Algerian authorities, the world was willing to turn a blind eye toward events in the country and permit the government to get on with things. in the name of respecting Algeria’s sovereignty over its internal affairs.

There was a return to a civil government and a somewhat restricted form of multiparty politics under a “designated” general turned civilian president, Liamine Zeroual. He accepted the rules of the game laid down by the Nezzar-Belkheir-Lamari troika, but pursued the path of dialogue with the more moderate elements of the outlawed FIS. Yet each time Zeroual launched one of his reconciliation efforts, he was cut short by dissension within his own camp, a well-timed massacre or a well-placed bomb. The hard-line Islamist GIA, infiltrated by the security services, proved to be the military hard-liners’ own best ally in keeping the Algerian pot on the boil.

The Mathematics of Violence

In Algeria, “democracy” is something that is utilized to maintain the privileges of the few, while Islam is cruelly disfigured by those who would kill in its name. In 1992, before his assassination, Mohammed Boudiaf told members of the international media, who during a press conference had questioned him about the thousands of Islamists detained in desert camps without trial, that it was necessary to sacrifice half of the people so that the other half could live in peace. FIS chief Abbasi Madani used slightly different math, declaring that his party was “prepared to sacrifice two-thirds of the population to allow the remaining one-third to follow the path of God.” With such a willingness on both sides to sacrifice their opponents, no wonder the tolls of dead and injured have climbed so high.

Today, Algeria is in the fifth stage of the regime’s grand survival plan, in which the peasants and residents of the country’s most fertile areas, who comprised the core of FIS support, are being massacred. The rich plains of the Mitidja, south of the capital, Algiers, are the site of the “triangle of death” where the most recent and most horrific massacres have occurred. One should not be too surprised that many of the villages where the killings have taken place are not far from army barracks, though the soldiers there do not intervene.

From the regime’s perspective, things are looking up on the economic front. The country will be free of IMF tutelage in May 1998, and, thanks to a rise in oil and gas revenue, which accounts for 90 percent of the country’s gross income, and an easing of Algeria’s debt burden, the nation is enjoying financial stability. That hasn’t done the bulk of the population much good, however. Not a single public sector job has been created since 1990, and another 100,000 public employees were laid off at the end of 1997. Unemployment is rampant, and those who have work are often unpaid for months on end. Despite this, the government has leveled a new tax on wages, to raise funds “in solidarity” with the victims of the massacres!

So who really is to blame for the chaos gripping Algeria? The Islamist terrorists have already paid for their crimes in a war that takes no prisoners. Every killer of every assassinated writer, journalist, policeman, doctor, etc., has been captured and executed. The underground cells which planted bombs in the cities have been broken up.

Those who raze entire villages, however, remain at large. These killers must be made to stand trial for their crimes. To indict them, one doesn’t need the solemn pronouncements of the Eurpoean Commission’s “international committee of investigation.”

In fact, the Europeans’ willingness to provide support for the Algerian government’s heavy-handed tactics calls into question the West’s moral commitment to the ideals of democracy. One need not even rely on the reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Instead, one has the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of journalists, political figures and members of the security services, who refuse to take refuge in silence.

If it is legitimate to combat terror, as I believe it is, it is also necessary to disavow the repression which has taken hold across Algeria. If Abbasi Madani and Ali Belhadj are to be prosecuted for the crimes committed by their followers with their encouragement, the generals’ troika should also be called to account for the killings committed at their instigation. Only when those who bear the ultimate responsibility for the bloodshed are unmasked can hopes for peace and reconciliation in Algeria be brought to fruition. This is possible only when everyone realizes that there is but one solution to the present crisis: the military must rid itself of those elements in its midst which have polluted the ideals of Algeria, while at the same time the society is cleansed of those Islamists who are ignorant of Islam, and who in reality have submitted to bloody pre-Islamic tribal law.

It is ludicrous to imagine, even for an instant, that peace can be achieved through force and hate, by the language of vengeance and material cupidity, and by legalized violence. What is needed is a spirit of dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation—and a commitment to the truth.

More than 100,000 dead over five years? Enough! “To know or not to know...,” that is the question of the hour. Now is the time to peel back the layers of secrecy which shroud the bloody events in Algeria, so that no one can say later, “I didn’t know.”