A Battle Ends, a War Goes On : Terrorist takeover of airliner was but one facet of Algeria’s civil conflict

French officials did what was required at Marseilles’ airport on Monday to end the hostage drama that had begun in Algiers two days earlier. Thanks to the skill with which police commandos carried out their rescue mission, many innocent lives were spared.

The four Algerian Muslim militants who seized the Air France airliner on Christmas Eve and soon afterward murdered three of its passengers were themselves killed by the commandos. While others aboard the airliner and some of their rescuers were injured, none died. Explosives found aboard the plane and comments by the terrorists indicated a plan to blow it up in flight, possibly above Paris, in a suicide-mass murder spectacle presumably intended to dramatize their cause.

The failure of this particular act of terrorism will not, of course, deter Algeria’s Muslim extremists from continuing their war against a regime that seized power almost three years ago. Indeed, within hours after the Marseilles rescue, four Catholic priests--three of them French, one a Belgian--were murdered in northern Algeria. Their “offense” was they were foreigners, a group specifically targeted by the militants. More than a year ago one of the radical organizations, the Islamic Armed Group, ordered all foreigners out of the country on pain of death. Thousands left. Of those who remained, 76 have been murdered.

Algeria’s civil war, as was the war for independence against France that began 40 years ago, is a merciless struggle, one that has already claimed up to 20,000 lives. The independence that Algeria finally won from a demoralized France in 1962 brought it a succession of largely inefficient, corrupt and authoritarian governments. Three years ago almost to the day--the timing of the Christmas Eve hijacking was no coincidence--the Islamic Salvation Front won the first round in the country’s first free parliamentary elections. The scheduled second round of voting was promptly canceled and a state of emergency was soon proclaimed. A civil war has been fought ferociously ever since.

It is not a war in which sides can easily be chosen. Algeria’s rulers hold power against the democratically expressed will of Algeria’s voters. But the Muslim militants, whose goal is to impose a strict Islamic regime, are no friends of democracy or exponents of tolerance. Besides killing foreigners because they supposedly represent corrupting outside influences, they also attack Algeria’s intellectuals and secular members of its middle class. Should they win, hundreds of thousands of Algerians will be forced to seek refuge abroad. Should they win, their militancy almost certainly will be exported to neighboring states. The Air France hijacking was but a skirmish in a vicious war, one whose end is tragically nowhere in sight.