Algeria’s New Lessons in War Imperil Region

In this farming community of perhaps 250 families on a high, silent perch in the Atlas Mountains, a band of about 30 Islamic militants crept by night into a compound of foreign contractors, herded 14 Christian Croats into a dry riverbed and slit their throats.

“We are the terrorists of the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), and we are here to kill,” one young contractor, who had his neck slashed but survived the Dec. 14 attack, said the militants told him and his colleagues.

He subsequently lay for hours in the silence of his slain companions.

“We all tried to pretend we were Muslims but, in the end, we didn’t know Arabic and we didn’t know how to pray,” he said.

Algeria, whose war of independence helped form modern notions of revolutionary violence and state retribution, is providing new lessons in urban warfare in the Middle East.

A long battle against Islamic fundamentalism--a war whose stakes could stretch to surrounding Arab nations in North Africa, including Egypt, and even Europe--has escalated to new levels of violence in recent months, leaving the future of Algeria’s shaky interim government in doubt.

In the latest incidents blamed on the Islamic insurgency, 11 people, including five police officers whose caravan was ambushed, were killed between Wednesday and Friday. And a suspected militant was killed while trying to steal a rifle from a villager near Tizi Ouzou, east of Algiers.

A total of 23 foreigners have been killed in the warfare since mid-September, most of them since a Dec. 1 deadline by which an Islamic outlaw group warned foreigners to leave the country or die. Violent deaths in Algeria now average seven a day--some of them, human rights activists believe, attributable to anti-fundamentalist death squads.

Algeria, long in crisis, has slipped into a shadowy limbo of suspicion and conspiracy, death and retribution.

“If the situation continues to deteriorate at the (present) rate,” one Western diplomat said, “there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when the regime collapses. And what happens after that is anybody’s guess.”

It has been a sad slide for Algeria over the last three years: Its sudden opening from Eastern Bloc-style socialism to multi-party democracy plunged the country from dizzy euphoria to the brink of civil war as an Islamic fundamentalist party, the FIS, swept the first national elections in the country’s history with more than 3 million votes.

In what surrounding autocratic Arab regimes have pointed to soberly as a lesson in the pitfalls of quick democracy in the Middle East, the FIS was stopped only when the army stepped in two years ago.

It toppled President Chadli Bendjedid and installed a constitutionally dubious five-member High Committee of State to rule. The committee was supposed to restore order, initiate political reconciliation and give way to new national elections this month.

Instead, it has found itself powerless to initiate a national dialogue among Algeria’s political factions, who seem to be able to agree on only one thing: the existing government’s illegitimacy.

The government announced that it was extending its lease on life until the end of January and said it hoped to convene a national reconciliation conference by then.

The outlawed FIS, holding forth from exile in France and Germany, has said it expects an “explosive insurrection” before the year’s end.

The even more militant Armed Islamic Group, which claimed responsibility for the slaying of the Croats and other attacks on foreigners, has threatened revenge against anyone who even thinks of engaging in talks with “the illegal junta.”

Other political factions, even those who most detest the Islamic fundamentalists, have proclaimed that any national dialogue is useless without the FIS.

Outside analysts say the prospects over the next several weeks include anything from outright civil war to a cosmetic attempt to placate the FIS to a genuine political accommodation, for the first time in North Africa, with Islamic fundamentalism.

This last option would be worst of all, in the belief of many Arab regimes also plagued with Islamic violence.

“There are some who believe that the army’s superior firepower will in the end be able to overcome the resistance. And maybe that is true,” a Western analyst said. “But the problem is that the military are doing everything in their power already to control the situation, and still it is getting worse.”

Ali Haroun, a member of the ruling committee, said in an interview: “We have reached one conclusion in all of our discussions: It is impossible to have elections at the end of 1993 because it is clear that to have elections at this time would be to risk provoking civil war.

“We are optimistic that a minimum consensus will be obtained in the next two, three, four weeks,” Haroun said. “But if we don’t arrive there, it will be necessary for us to take responsibility, to say that Algeria will go in the direction of democracy, of respect, of tolerance, of human rights and modernity. While I do not foresee a direct intervention of the army, I do say that when a country is threatened to the point that its very survival is at stake, at that moment, all political forces, all structures must be mobilized to take adequate measures to save the country.”

The FIS seemed to the outside world to have been largely defanged over the last two years.

Its leaders--Abasi Madani, Ali Belhaj and Abdelkadir Hachani--have been imprisoned. Thousands of its supporters have been jailed in detention camps in the Sahara. The party officially was dissolved by administrative decree. Its two newspapers have been banned, and many of its clerics have been silenced.

But by all appearances, the FIS and its more militant descendants are stronger than ever.

In strongholds in the quartiers populaires of downtown Algiers, in the mysterious Casbah of the central city, in the tenement-laden suburbs outside the city and in the villages of the Atlas, the FIS still holds sway.

In the Algiers district of Kouba, for example, Islamic militants have been going door to door in buildings with the ubiquitous satellite television antennas on their roofs, declaring that the parabolas are “unholy.” Now, the antennas can hardly be found.

In many areas of the countryside, the army penetrates Islamic strongholds only on occasional patrols, returning to barracks before dark.

Police sweep the streets of Algiers only on the backs of trucks, their faces shrouded in masks, machine guns bristling out the sides of their vehicles.

All but two of the massive detention camps that once housed up to 8,000 suspected militants have been shut down, not only because of pressure from human rights groups but because they had turned into breeding grounds for militancy.

FIS supporters have succeeded in imposing a strict Islamic regimen in almost all the nation’s prisons and detention centers, Algerian journalists say.

A campaign of assassination and terror against Algerian intellectuals, judges and journalists--disavowed by the FIS but endorsed by more militant groups--has left the capital in constant fear.

University professors open their mail to find a single bullet in an envelope or a drawing of a coffin. Journalists walk outside their offices or homes and are cut down with machine-gun fire.

Omar Belhouchet, publisher of the independent daily Al Watan, escaped a hail of gunfire recently in his car by ducking on the seat and gunning the accelerator. Often, he gets telephone calls and threatening letters.

“They say I work for the junta. I am a Communist. I am a Francophone. I work for the Jews,” Belhouchet said with a sigh.

Like other intellectuals, Belhouchet has for months spent each night in a different house, traveling to work on an unpredictable route at high speed.

More recently, he has joined dozens of compatriots at a heavily guarded coastal resort compound under army control. And he waits for a political resolution to the crisis.

“We are not ready to cede the playing field to fear,” he said.

Not so with foreigners, who have booked every flight to Europe through this month. After the killings, as well as the kidnaping of three French consular officials, most foreign embassies and companies are reducing staff and sending family members home.

The U.S. Embassy has advised all citizens to leave if they do not have a very good reason for staying.

Hidroelektra, a Croatian company, had been preparing to evacuate its staff from Tamesguida when the attack occurred Dec. 14 at the company compound on the outskirts of the village, less than a mile from an army outpost. A survivor recalled the nighttime attack:

“They tied our hands and made us walk outside in front of them, and then they made us lie down on the ground and covered us with blankets,” one of two survivors said. “They said, ‘Why didn’t (you) leave when we told you to? We told you you should leave.’ ”

They asked the Croats whether they drank forbidden liquor, then queried them about their nationality and religion, he said, noting: “We said we were Muslims, but they didn’t believe us. . . .

“Finally, they took the blankets off us and made us get up,” the survivor recalled. “Each of them took one man down with him, and they began slitting our throats. There was nothing we could do. You could hear the screams of the people ahead, but what could we do? They came to me and cut me with a knife. I started to cry and bleed, and they gave me another blow, and I fell. They thought I was dead. I stayed there for two hours, waiting for them to leave. Eventually, everything was silent. Then I heard the noise of tanks, which showed the army had arrived.”

The armed Islamists, who claimed responsibility for killing the 12 Croats, are led by a shadowy figure identified as Mourad Si Ahmed, 29, commonly known as “Djaffar the Afghani,” indicating that like other militants he is a veteran of the Islamic resistance in Afghanistan.

A previous leader, Abdelhak Layada, arrested recently in Morocco and extradited to Algeria, told interrogators that the group is made up of 600 heavily armed militants. The group has forsworn “all dialogue, all truce and all reconciliation.”

Algeria has also been unsettled by a wave of attacks against Islamic figures that no one seems able to explain.

On Nov. 9, mathematics professor Tidjani Boudjelkha, a leader of the “Djazara” Islamic group, was seized by hooded men and tortured for three days.

When he was released, a group calling itself the Organization of Free Young Algerians claimed responsibility and said Islamists “will pay the price of their support for those who are shedding the blood of Algeria’s children.”

Later in November, a senior leader of a moderate Islamic group was seized by four armed men and has not been heard from since.

Several young Islamists have been assassinated, prompting human rights groups to speculate that anti-Islamic death squads, perhaps with links to the government, are at work.

“Is it a spontaneous movement? Nobody here really believes that,” one European diplomat said. “We rather believe it’s inspired by the Algerian intelligence services or the authorities in some way.”

Indeed, nearly everyone in Algeria believes that it was some shadowy representation of Algeria’s corrupt network of politicians and business figures, and not Islamic fundamentalists, that was responsible for the assassination of former President and High Committee of State leader Mohammed Boudiaf in June, 1992.

Three members of the investigating commission that pronounced the killing “a plot” have been assassinated.

Likewise, there are suspicions about the August killing of former Prime Minister Kasdi Merbah, who headed Algeria’s secret security services for many years, even though the armed Islamists supposedly claimed responsibility.

The National Commission on Dialogue commenced in November to try to bring together factions to reach a consensus on how to govern Algeria over the next two to three years, after the ruling committee’s mandate expires and before new elections are held.

Everyone has set their conditions for participating in the conference, scheduled for Jan. 25-26; most say the talks will not go anywhere unless the FIS participates.

Political analysts say the government may fashion a cosmetic solution by finding some acceptable former FIS leaders to enter the dialogue; then it could propose a new three-member ruling committee that would include an Islamist such as Taleb Ibrahimi, a leader in the former National Liberation Front ruling party who is close to the fundamentalists.

Another scenario, say some Algerian analysts, is that the regime may finally decide to give the FIS a role in governing.

Meantime, the country’s external debt crisis and upcoming stringent economic reforms engineered by the International Monetary Fund promise to make the next few years among the grimmest in recent memory.

“The problem today is who will be crazy enough to accept these historical responsibilities--to force the Algerian population to pay the price of the public debt,” one academic said. “If one is Machiavellian enough, one could think that the government will maybe allow, for some time, the Islamists to direct the country--and pay the price.”