Year After Failing Democracy’s Test, Algeria Remains a Nation Divided : Politics: Islamic militants and their secular foes agree on one thing--they don’t support the old regime.

The close-stacked tenements rise up along the outskirts of this whitewashed port city, and there is an uneasy murmur in their streets.

On a chilly winter’s dusk on a small block in Al Aarfa, hundreds of young men pour out the doorways and into the streets, gathering near street lamps, leaning casually against cars, standing on porch steps, lighting cigarettes whose bright tips glow in the gathering twilight.

They have come outside into the frosty gloom because, in a district where most families crowd a dozen or more people into an apartment of two rooms, it is better than remaining inside.

“It is necessary,” one young man explains quietly, “to disengage a bit.”

Just on the other side of the highway, in the more affluent Nasser City neighborhood, neatly tended apartments stand on quiet side streets. There are potted plants in the windows and Peugeot sedans parked outside. The warm light of dinner time glows in the windows. There is no one on the porches.

“There’s injustice!” exclaims a taxi driver who threads his car from one district to the next, explaining the social schizophrenia that has perched Algeria these past months on the brink of civil war. “Here you have Switzerland,” he says, pointing at the quiet buildings behind him, then jerking his thumb out the window behind him, “and there you have hell.”

Algeria, which only a year ago was one of the Third World’s most exuberant experiments in democracy, has become, instead, one of democracy’s failures. Algiers’ streets, a year ago resoundingly alive with campaign banners and rallies, now are traveled by truckloads of armed soldiers in black hoods, popularly known as the ninjas . Citizens retreat behind closed doors each night with the 10:30 p.m. curfew.

And then, as often as not, the killing begins: six police officers traveling in a van were shot to death by Islamic militants one recent early morning, and one of the officers was scalped; 12 militants and a young mother standing nearby were slaughtered by security forces the next night. In all, more than 530 people have died and nearly 600 others have been wounded since the worst of the violence began a year ago November.

“People are traumatized, they are terrorized. You wait in your house and listen to the gunfire. No one sleeps anymore at night. You wait for the night’s drama,” said one young man in the crowded, poverty-stricken quarter of Kouba, where radical preacher Ali Belhaj, now jailed, once presided over thousands of faithful praying and chanting in the streets.

Nearly a year after the army wrested control from President Chadli Bendjedid and pronounced an end to the electoral experiment that would have swept Islamic fundamentalists into power, even the government admits that the country remains as badly divided as ever.

On the one hand are the millions of young Algerians--most, like those who spend their evenings on the streets of Al Aarfa, without jobs, without homes of their own, without hopes for marriage or family. They turned to Islamic militancy when the ballot boxes opened. On the other hand are millions of secular, French-speaking Algerians who saw in Islamic fundamentalism so grave a danger that they were ready to cancel the country’s alluring flirtation with democracy to hold it at bay.

As the government prepares to decide whether to lift the year-old state of emergency this month, two things appear clear: The old regime that has dominated Algeria since independence in 1962 is supported by almost no one; and--its uncomfortable corollary--legalizing an Islamic party like the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and returning to the polls, even after a year of bloodshed that has discredited both sides, would probably mean another victory for the fundamentalists.

“The people aren’t with the government, and one of the reasons is that we made promises to the people, and they didn’t find them to come true,” Interior Minister Mohammed Hardi, the man who has led the crackdown on the Islamic militants, said in an interview.

“From the beginning, they created an Algeria for the benefit of 10% of the Algerians to the detriment of the other 90%, and there came the moment where we are today: an Algeria full of people who possess absolutely nothing,” Hardi said. “Now, people want two things. They want first that social justice be established. And second, they want everyone who stole their heritage to be punished.”

Since an assassin’s bullets cut down President Mohammed Boudiaf last June, a new government headed by Prime Minister Belaid Abdesselam has forged ahead with a declaration of “total war” on terrorism to re-establish national security and to pave the way for a new economic program designed to pull Algeria out of the fiscal misery that has fed much of the unrest.

Reeling under a $9-billion-a-year foreign debt repayment schedule that eats up three-fourths of the country’s foreign exchange, Abdesselam has moved to limit luxury imports and broaden the country’s petrodollar earnings.

At the same time, he has resisted calls for rescheduling the debt, a move that would bring with it demands by the International Monetary Fund to reduce subsidies for basic goods, cut back expensive social programs, privatize public sector industries swiftly and devalue the dinar by up to 50%. In the government’s view, these are recipes for revolution.

He has named a private businessman, Redha Hamiane, to head the Light and Medium Industry Ministry for the first time in socialist Algeria’s history. But critics say that Abdesselam, widely regarded as the architect of Algeria’s Marxist-style economy in the era of former President Houari Boumedienne, has slowed or even halted an inevitable move toward a free-market economy.

Even the government says it will take another three years, maybe four, for the 30% unemployment rate to begin dropping, for new housing to be built, for economic austerity to begin paying off.

“It’s difficult, but it’s a question of time, and it’s a question of proof,” Hamiane said. “The young, the unemployed, the disinherited, the marginalized have lost a little confidence and don’t give much credit to political discourse because the discourse never changes. If the government is going to endure, we must engage these people. We believe that we will regain the confidence of the people, but we need time to give them proof that what we say is going to happen.”

In one of the dozens of coffee shops that line the narrow streets of Kouba, the public is waiting.

Two bullet holes show in the glass above one wall. After the six police officers were shot in their van, patrons say, other police began firing indiscriminately, hitting the cafe twice.

“There were gunshots everywhere, and then the police burst in. The manager closed the curtains, and everyone was terrified,” recalled one young patron. He is 26 and spends nearly every day at the cafe because he has no job to go to.

“I haven’t worked for five, six years,” he said. “We are the unhappy. We go out everyday, it’s the same thing, a routine: we come here, we have coffee, we go home for lunch, we come back here in the afternoon. . . . This evening at 8, you’ll still find us here.”

Another young man leans over the table and interrupts confidentially. “People had to take up arms because the army prevented them from voting,” he said. “It’s not a question of the FIS. People have no confidence in the present government. . . . It’s just that.”

So do most people support terrorist attacks on security forces?

“I would like to pose a question to you,” said a third young man at the table. “Who started it, the government or the people? It was the government. . . . If the people chose the FIS, then bring in the FIS. Maybe you don’t like the FIS, but you must allow the choice of the people.”

A fourth man, overhearing the conversation, strode over to the table, leans across and whispered angrily: “Madam, this is the Third World. The Third World in general lives under military dictatorships. Why did we hope this would be different?”

He slammed the table and walked away.

In the mud-filled streets of Al Harrach on the other side of town, a restless crowd stands outside what only the day before was a house. Now, it is a pile of broken concrete. Police, apparently believing the suspects in the Kouba police attack were hiding in the house, attacked it with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The gunfire went on all night.

“After about three hours, we heard some really loud explosions, probably rockets. We tried to go out to see what was happening. The police who were on the roofs around us told us to go back inside and close the doors,” one man said. “ . . . When we went out in the morning, we found this, pieces of the house everywhere.”

Were Islamic militants hiding in the house? No one knew of any. No one knew much of anything.

“They prevent us from knowing what happened because, quite simply, they do whatever they want,” another man said. “The security forces come, they kill, they clean up and we know absolutely nothing, except that they say some terrorists are dead.”

In the bar of the fashionable Al Djazair Hotel, there are no Islamic Front supporters, only people afraid of what the Islamists would have done if they had been allowed to win the government and uncertain of what is going to happen next.

“A lot of people, even people outside the government, think too much democracy is not a good thing,” confided a young physician. “Last year, with the election, it was too much freedom, and now you see the result. Now, people realize that we should go slowly, even if it means two years of declared dictatorship.”

An Aug. 26 bombing at Algiers International Airport that killed nine people and injured 128 was enough to substantially discredit the fundamentalists for many Algerians and was probably a factor in a recent newspaper survey that showed public support for the Islamic Front to be only about 30%.

The FIS has denied responsibility for the bombing, claiming that the men who said the Islamic Front ordered them to do it had confessed under torture.

“People are fed up with this insecurity, this uncertainty, and some people prefer the power of the army to this kind of democracy,” a longtime Algerian diplomat said. “Look at those people! They killed a man, a shopkeeper, he was a veteran of the revolution and the ’67 war against Israel. They came to his shop and said, ‘You have two children who are police?’ He said yes, and they killed him in his shop. What people want now is to live in peace. . . .”

The government, opening a dialogue with some opposition parties, has hinted it might be prepared to consider new elections by the end of 1993. It says it began the current crackdown on terrorists in hopes of re-establishing the security needed to restart the political process.

“This government came, it was called on to stabilize the situation against all those who imperil the existence of the state,” said Hardi, the interior minister.

FIS officials, operating underground in Algeria and openly in exile in European capitals, say there is no choice for Algeria but a return to the democratic process and, thence, to Islam.

At the Press Club in Paris, several exiled front leaders gathered on a recent morning for espresso and pulled out a pile of newspapers documenting ongoing detention and torture of hundreds of Islamists in their homeland, among them FIS leader Abassi Madani, who is said to be badly ailing in prison.

Said Lahlali, who won a seat in Parliament in the aborted elections and who now directs the exiled organization’s parliamentary affairs, declares:

“We will install an Islamic state, God willing, by all means possible. We can’t do it politically, no. We tried it. What we got in return was repression. . . . The people will defend themselves. They will fight to regain the choice of the people. Algeria cannot go back behind the curtain again.”

But the people’s choice is not so clear-cut. Back in Algiers, Leila Boukhechba stands in the drizzle outside the hut that is her home, and her voice becomes shrill when she talks about the political debate. She is clutching the arm of her 8-year-old daughter, Nawal, the back of whose legs are covered with stitches. Nawal was accidentally shot the week before by Islamic militants targeting a police officer nearby.

“We are not with the FIS, and we are not with any of these parties,” Boukhechba said, shaking her head in disgust. “We are with the party of bread. Which one is that?”