Algerian Rebels Shift Desperate Fight to France

The spread of Algeria’s bloody guerrilla war to French soil, in a wave of bombings that has killed seven and injured more than 140 innocent people, reflects a growing sense of desperation among Islamic militants trying to topple their African nation’s military-backed regime, analysts say.

France has been singled out as the new target of terror, they say, because of its long colonial and financial ties with Algeria, its support for the Algerian government, and the deep resentment over police harassment of hundreds of thousands of Algerian youth living in poor, crime-ridden suburbs of Paris and other major French cities.

The confrontation between radical Algerians and the French government intensified Wednesday, as police carrying submachine guns patrolled train stations and well-known monuments in the capital a day after a subway bomb injured 29 near the Orsay Museum.

The Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, which has claimed responsibility for eight bombings, issued a four-point ultimatum to the French government. In a statement to an Arabic-language newspaper in London, the GIA repeated demands that French President Jacques Chirac suspend diplomatic relations with Algeria’s military rulers and curtail his country’s $1.2 billion a year in aid.

The GIA also insisted that Chirac cancel his plans to meet next week with Algerian President Liamine Zeroual and that he denounce the Nov. 16 Algerian presidential elections.

So far, French officials have flatly rejected the demands, vowing never to give in to terrorists.

The meeting with Zeroual in New York next week will go ahead, they say.

France, which controlled Algeria for 120 years until a bloody eight-year war brought independence in 1962, still is Algeria’s most important trading partner. About 1,000 small French firms are kept afloat by business with Algeria, and trade with the North African country of about 26 million people brings in $1 billion annually to France.

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But the relationship remains rocky. After GIA guerrillas hijacked an Air France plane to Marseilles in December and were killed by French commandos, the French government suspended its $5 million a year in military aid to the regime.

Now, as Algerian elections approach, with most Islamic groups refusing to participate, French support for Zeroual is proving embarrassing as well. A retired army general, Zeroual was appointed president by the army after it stepped in to cancel 1992 elections that an Islamic party was poised to win. He is expected to win the new round of elections.

“The election won’t work because you haven’t increased the dialogue,” said a Western diplomat in Paris who follows Algerian politics. “It’s just not going to resolve the problems of that country.”

Some French analysts believe, though, that the elections may help solidify Zeroual’s power and empower him to conduct more talks with Islamic opponents.

Zeroual is believed to be a proponent of negotiating with radical Islamic leaders, and French experts believe that he has been hampered in that effort so far by hard-liners in the military.

Although guerrilla attacks have increased in Algeria in advance of the election, three years of bloody war and an estimated 30,000 deaths have yet to budge the Algerian military from power. So, in a significant tactical change, the GIA has exported its attacks to France, hoping to end or at least blunt crucial French support for the Algerian government.

For more than a year, the conservative government here has been sure that Islamic militants have been using French soil to stage attacks in Algeria, and several dozen French expatriates in Algeria have been among the nearly 100 foreigners killed by guerrillas there.

But a major, yearlong police crackdown, which empowered police to demand identity papers from anyone they considered suspicious, has also embittered many Algerians in France and radicalized youth who live in the teeming suburbs that ring large French cities. Several dozen Algerians were deported.

Since the bombing wave began, with a subway attack that killed seven on July 25, that crackdown has intensified. Police say nearly 2 million people have been stopped on the streets and questioned, and most of them have been French citizens of North African descent.

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Tensions escalated late last month when police launched a huge hunt for Khaled Kelkal, a young Algerian-born man from the Lyon suburbs whose fingerprints were found on an unexploded bomb on the high-speed train track between Lyon and Paris.

Kelkal was killed in a gun battle with police, and the authorities were sharply criticized when television footage of the incident showed a police officer firing on the wounded Kelkal as he lay on the ground. One police officer was heard on the tape saying, “Finish him off.”

The French authorities were further embarrassed when they claimed that Kelkal was responsible for the wave of bombings in France. Hours after his funeral, another bomb exploded outside a subway station in Paris.

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Police say the device used in the subway bombing Tuesday, a steel canister filled with explosives and nuts and bolts, was of the same type used in most of the other bombs. In what may have been an attempt to mock the government’s efforts to halt the bombing wave, the explosion Tuesday occurred just six blocks from the site of the July 25 blast. Both blasts were on suburban train lines that run underground through central Paris.

Jean-Louis Debre, the French interior minister, told French television late Tuesday that the government “has mobilized like never before,” adding 12,000 police officers and 2,500 soldiers to patrol train stations, streets and the country’s borders.

“But we can’t prevent all bombings, because life goes on,” he said. “There are millions and millions of people who each day take subways, trains, buses and cars.”

Debre was criticized, though, by some French commentators for strong-arm tactics that have increased anger among disaffected Algerian youth. Although only a small number of France’s nearly 1 million Algerians are involved in the violence, the entire community has been subjected to almost daily searches.