NORTH AFRICA : Islamic Radicals Target Singers as Algeria Seeks End to Turmoil

When Lounes Matoub was kidnaped from an outdoor cafe in the Algerian mountains this week, no one doubted that his 15 armed captors were radical Islamic fundamentalists. As they grabbed Matoub, one of Algeria’s most popular singers, they harassed customers for drinking alcohol and opposing “the law of God.”

Now Matoub’s ethnic Berber people, a fiercely independent force in Algeria, have vowed “total war” against Muslim fundamentalists if the 38-year-old singer is not released.

That threat, followed Thursday by the shooting death of another Algerian singer, Cheb Hasni, has further complicated the political scene, and Islamic militants are said to have issued death sentences for singers whose lyrics are considered vulgar.

Most worrying, political analysts say, is that an uprising by Berbers, the country’s largest ethnic minority, could undermine a “national dialogue” that President Liamine Zeroual has begun, at considerable political risk, with Muslim leaders.

“The situation is extremely fragile,” said Nicole Grimaud, a specialist on Algeria at the Institute for Political Sciences in Paris. “Everybody is very pessimistic that the outcome will be peaceful.”

Zeroual’s hope is to end the killing that has claimed about 6,000 lives since the government canceled parliamentary elections in January, 1992. But the government and the radical fundamentalists have added to the country’s bloody toll in recent days.

Government forces killed the head of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, which has claimed responsibility for killing 61 foreigners in the last year. On the same day, radical fundamentalists killed two journalists and a foreigner, a surveyor from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

By week’s end, Algerians and political analysts in France were uncertain whether the troubled nation was hurtling toward an escalation of violence, at best, or a coup d’etat, at worst.

Much depends on the government’s ability to bring leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, to the negotiating table, to control opponents of talks within its own ranks and to minimize the guerrilla threat of the Armed Islamic Group, which has ruled out “dialogue, truce or reconciliation.”

The FIS was heading for victory when the government halted elections and banned it two years ago. But Zeroual, under pressure from Western governments, freed the top two FIS leaders from prison earlier this month and invited them to join talks with more moderate Muslim leaders.

Now the FIS is demanding that the government legalize the front, free all political prisoners and include all rebel leaders in the talks. If the president agrees, Abbasi Madani, the FIS leader, will have to persuade his followers to go along with a cease-fire, a difficult task after two years of brutal government repression. Analysts agree that new elections are needed. But that seems a distant hope for now.

The success or failure of the fledgling peace process in Algeria has broad ramifications for France, home to tens of thousands of Algerian refugees and fearful of becoming home to more.

It also has implications for other Western powers, including the United States, which are concerned about the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and its frequent byproduct, terrorism.

Zeroual’s attempts to make peace with the fundamentalists will be a severe test of his ability to retain power. Many in his army, and among the powerful elite that put him in power, oppose reconciliation.

Even if a deal is struck, the peace brokers will have to deal with the GIA. It has refused to accept democracy, demanding instead an Islamic state.

The GIA campaign, though, may have been blunted by the firefight Monday that killed Cherif Gousmi, 26, the GIA leader, and his deputy, Abdessalam Djemaoune. Authorities had offered a $70,000 bounty for Gousmi, and Djemaoune was known as the group’s “throat-cutter,” suspected of slitting the throats of two French businessmen, a father and son, in Algiers.

The unknown fate of the singer Matoub, who had recently recorded an album satirizing the fundamentalists, could cause even more problems.