The Great War for Civilisation (119 page)

The Algerian ambassador in London wrote a spiteful and abusive letter to the editor of
The Independent
, sneering at Saïda Kheroui, the young woman whose foot was broken under torture, because I referred to her “Princess Diana–style hair,” and suggesting that the thousands of “disappeared”—including the other young women who had been tortured to death—had “in most cases, joined the terrorist bands.”

Ambassadors are expected to lie for their country. The response of Western nations to the growing evidence of Algerian government complicity in the horrors of this war, however, was as pitiful as it was shameful. In May 1998, more than six months after
The Independent
had devoted so much space and resources to reveal the testimony of Algerian ex-security forces and human rights lawyers, the British Foreign Office published a policy statement on Algeria. It said that while there were reports of Algerian complicity in the massacres, “there is no credible, substantive evidence to support the allegations.” It claimed that “large scale and brutal violence”—rather than the suspension of democratic elections—was “the genesis of the terrible events” in Algeria.

Far from recognising the courage of those former policemen who were denouncing their country's crimes, Britain had in early 1997 rejected an asylum appeal by another former Algerian ex-policeman and forcibly returned him to Algeria in handcuffs. He was arrested at Algiers airport, brutally interrogated by his former comrades-in-arms about his Algerian contacts in London and then murdered by the security police. His body was delivered to his mother for burial two weeks after he was deported from London. He had changed his address in Britain and thus failed to receive his notice of leave to appeal the initial refusal of his asylum request. Scandalously, the UK authorities furnished the Algerian government with details showing he had been a police officer—which, of course, doomed him at once.
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When Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, tried to address the causes rather than the acts of violence in Algeria, the country's foreign minister, Ahmed Attaf, berated her. “What causes justify killing women and children?” he demanded to know. Mrs. Robinson then held her tongue. Far more obnoxious was the UN panel led by former Portuguese prime minister Mário Soares which embarked on an “information-gathering” mission to Algeria in the autumn of 1998. It produced a report that might have been written by the Algerian government itself. In an extraordinary act of moral cowardice, Soares allowed Algerian officials to read the UN report before it was published, entirely accepted the Algerian government's claim that it was “fighting terrorism” and concluded that “Algeria deserves the support of the international community in its efforts to combat this phenomenon.” In just nineteen pages, the report used the word “terrorism” or “terror” ninety-one times without asking who these “terrorists” were or why they opposed the government. It agreed with interviewees who said that “excesses” committed by the security forces could not compare with the “Islamists' ” “crimes against humanity.” Although around 20,000 Algerians were still being held on “terrorism” charges, the UN panel interviewed only one of them. No wonder Attaf distributed the Soares report to the local Algerian press for publication. When Amnesty International condemned the UN report as a “whitewash,” Attaf brusquely dismissed the charge.

An earlier European Union mission had behaved with even less heed to the evidence of torture and murder by the authorities. In just eighteen hours in Algiers, it never left the villas and government offices of the Algerian authorities. The vice president of the European Commission, Manuel Marin, urged the Europeans to “tread softly”; there were no questions about torture or the need for an international inquiry into the massacres. A few days earlier, the Irish foreign minister David Andrews had told radio listeners that the time had come for outsiders “to stop condemning Algeria from afar.”

Much the same sentiment was being expressed by President Jacques Chirac of France. Asked what France could do to stop the massacres, he replied: “Nothing by interference. We have to find a way of acting effectively from the outside.” It was a policy that suited the Algerian authorities perfectly. They were eager to accept French weaponry and military equipment to fight their civil war but refused to accept any demands for investigations on the grounds that this would constitute interference in their domestic affairs. For a time, even France's most boring intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, bought the Algerian government line. He said it was “obscene” and “an affront to the memory of the victims” of the massacres to ask who was killing whom in Algeria—because it was so obviously Muslim fundamentalists who were to blame. In so obscene and shameful way did Lévy ignore the thousands of victims of government torture. Abdelhamid Brahimi, a former Algerian prime minister who accuses the military of massacring thirty-one of his relatives in Médéa, was to claim that—by rejecting an international inquiry—Lévy and other French intellectuals “defend the regime by denying the responsibility of the
junta
in these massacres.”

The United States had largely kept out of Algerian affairs, save for several American diplomats in Algiers who awarded young Algerian women visas in return for their favours. Although Algeria gave financial support to the PLO during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—it sent $20 million in arms via the Soviet Union—the country was always sympathetic to America. During the Cuban missile crisis, Ben Bella was in New York and took a secret message to Fidel Castro from President John Kennedy, warning him of the seriousness of the confrontation with the Soviets. Ben Bella had not forgotten that Kennedy was alone in Congress in calling for Algerian independence during the war with the French.

But repeated claims by the Algerians that they were fighting foreign as well as FIS “terrorists” had its effect. The U.S. Justice Department tried to deport the FIS spokesman, Anwar Haddam—who spoke of the need for peace and reconciliation at a Rome conference—by using dozens of reports from the government-controlled Algerian press and misquotations from my own articles in
The
Independent. Although the U.S. State Department had acknowledged that “there is convincing evidence that the security forces carried out dozens of extrajudicial killings and often tortured and otherwise abused detainees,” the Justice Department largely relied on Algerian government supporters for its “evidence” against Haddam of “crimes against humanity,” “rape” and “beheading”—for none of which was Haddam held personally responsible.
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The American press either reported the mass killings of “Muslim militants” by “security forces sweeping through a western region wracked by recent massacres” without questioning how so large a number might have been killed in so short a period of time—this came from the Associated Press on 11 March 1998—or persuaded readers to believe that the slaughter of civilians somehow encouraged Algerians to support the government that might have been partly responsible for the killings. Thus John Lancaster in
The Washington Post
apparently discovered in 1997 that “the violence appears to have generated a backlash against the militants, even among those who once supported their cause.” Only an oblique reference was made in his dispatch to claims that the authorities might be involved in the massacres.

By the late 1990s, when the complicity of the Algerian military in the killings was already widely suspected, the U.S. Navy undertook manoeuvres with Algerian warships in the Mediterranean while American diplomats were encouraged to visit Algiers. Robert Pelletreau was a guest of the Algerian government in 1996. In 1998, the State Department sent a more prominent figure to the Algerian capital, none other than Martin Indyk, the point man for President Clinton's “peace process” team to the Israeli–Palestinian talks and a former director of research at the largest Israeli lobby group in Washington. Algerian radio heralded Indyk's arrival by announcing that American policies had changed “now that the White House has decided to support the struggle against terrorism and Congress has several times condemned the GIA.”

Given this indifference to the true nature of the massacres—and who might be responsible for them—Algerian officials now felt able to dismiss security force atrocities with near abandon. “It's not impossible, in the situation in which we find ourselves, that some excesses may have occurred on the part of individuals acting outside the orders of their commander,” the Algerian chief of staff and principal
éradicateur
General Mohamed Lamari blandly admitted. A further jump into the depths of insensitivity came from Algeria's former minister of higher education, Abdelhak Bererhi, who announced in 1998 that “to compare a rape in a police station to a rape by a GIA terrorist is indecent.” Even Lévy could not have equalled this.

The GIA was not itself an Algerian government creation, although its Afghan origins are unclear. While thousands of Algerians did travel to join the anti-Soviet
mujahedin
, some of whom gave their support to Osama bin Laden—I had, after all, met Algerians in al-Qaeda during my own visits to bin Laden in Afghanistan, and stood beside them as that prophetic comet soared above us near his camp in 1997—recent research suggests that even here the hand of the
pouvoir
was present. Algeria's military security, it is now reported, sent their own men to Afghanistan to maintain surveillance over the Algerian “Afghanis” who had taken up the jihad
—
posing as loyal Muslim fighters while reporting back to Algiers on the aims and methods of the army of “Islamists” who would eventually filter home to seek a conflict with its own corrupt “socialist” enemies. Algeria's military penetration of its antagonists was therefore accomplished at a very early stage.

When the GIA leader Djamel Zitouni was killed, supposedly in an Algerian army ambush, the authorities triumphantly announced that they had scored a tactical victory over their “terrorist” enemies. The twenty-nine-year-old son of a chicken farmer, who had worked in his father's shop in Algiers before coming under the influence of Mustafa Bouyali, he went underground in 1991 and was allegedly given the command of the GIA's “Phalangists of Death” squad, becoming the organisation's
emir
when its earlier leader, Cherif Gousmi, died in 1994. Zitouni personally claimed responsibility for the Air France hijacking and a wave of bomb attacks in France in 1995, and even wrote a 62-page book—possibly ghost-written by his colleagues—on the “duties of holy warriors.” But Zitouni, according to the GIA itself, had been banished from the movement on 15 July 1996, and would be judged for his activities. It was a statement from the GIA's
majlis e-shoura
council that announced his death the following day, adding that Antar Zouabri had taken over the leadership. So was Zitouni killed by the army or executed by the GIA? Or did these two possibilities amount to one and the same thing?

The Algerian government, for example, had long accused Zitouni of responsibility for the beheading of the seven French priests from the monastery at Tibherine in 1996. But two years later, a long investigation in
Le Monde
suggested that Algerian security forces were implicated in the executions after a double-cross by French secret servicemen—an act much resented by Zitouni's lieutenant, who was a former officer in the Algerian military security apparatus. The same article alleged that French diplomats believed the bomb that killed Pierre Claverie, the bishop of Oran, might have been planted by the Algerian authorities—because he might have known of secret negotiations between the French and Algerian governments over the kidnapped monks. In 2002, by which time up to 200,000 Algerians had been killed in the war, the army killed Zitouni's successor, Antar Zouabri— this time displaying his body, complete with bullet-broken head, as proof.

But international human rights groups now performed the task that both the UN and the EU—and, of course, the United States and other Western nations— had so disgracefully evaded: they actively demanded answers to the epic “disappearances” of the war. Human Rights Watch accused the authorities of kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial executions. A year later, Amnesty International did the same, listing 3,000 victims—a small proportion of them already named in
The
Independent
's investigation—who had apparently been murdered by the authorities, including hospital workers, civil servants, schoolchildren, secretaries, farmers and lawyers. When General Khaled Nezzar, one of the leaders of the 1992 military coup and former Algerian minister of defence, was visiting France in 2001 to publicise his new book on Algeria, a French court opened an inquiry against him—at the request of relatives of victims—for torturing detainees. Nezzar left France when the inquiry was dropped.
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Successive elections in Algeria, all designed to promote the idea that the country remained “democratic” despite the control of the military, threw up in 1999 another relic of the FLN nomenklatura, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, as president. Bouteflika's policy of “working for peace and civil concord” produced a Saddamite 98.3 per cent of the vote—a statistic that went unchallenged in the West—and he survived even widespread demonstrations when a Berber revolt in Tizi-Ouzou turned into a social insurrection against poverty and corruption. He wanted Algerians to forget what they had done to each other—and, by implication, what the government had done to them—and enjoy prosperity after the military had chosen seven prime ministers and four presidents since 1992. But the evidence of Algeria's “dirty war” built up against the regime.