Despite Carnage, Algeria Believes Terror Is Losing

Fifteen-year-old Ahmed Sahali stood in the ruins of this hamlet, a faraway look on his face, as though he could still hear the murderous rampage.

Three weeks earlier, he was asleep when 40 armed Islamic militants slipped down from the mountains, across the ripened wheat fields and through the orange groves to raid the 12 brick farmhouses that were Ahmed’s world.

For 30 minutes, while Ahmed huddled in a hole beneath the floorboards of his house in horror, he listened to gunfire, explosions and the shrieks of his neighbors before their throats were slit. In the short time it took the civil militia to arrive, 34 people in Haouche Faner had been slaughtered. An 80-year-old man and a young mother, still clutching her slain 4-month-old, were among those massacred by the Islamic militants.

“Not a single government in the world would tolerate these people,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohammed Sahali, who managed to protect his family through judicious use of an old double-barreled shotgun. “They hide out like rats,” he said of the militants, nodding toward the cedar-covered mountains in the distance. “They are rats.”

The barbarity of the war between Algeria’s government forces and Islamic extremists has shocked the world. Massacres of entire villages, assassinations by death squads, car bombings and mass arrests have turned the country into a place of near-mythic terror.

And yet with increasing confidence, authorities here believe that, through a combination of military might and moderate reform, Algeria has turned the corner.

This month--for the third time in three years--national elections were held in relative peace, as the military-backed government of President Liamine Zeroual methodically builds what it says will be a new democratic system. And while the country is permeated by fear, many people lead seemingly normal lives--going to the beach, attending parties and pursuing professions and studies with fatalistic determination.

No journalists have been killed in six months--progress in a country where 67 have been slain in the past five years. Government spokespersons now wax optimistic about a return of foreign investment and a revival of tourism--brave talk in a land where foreigners are targeted for death and more than 100 have been killed since 1992.

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While others were writing the government off, seeing it going the way of the late Iranian shah’s regime, Algeria’s rulers showed themselves ruthlessly willing to use their 100,000-member army, ample gendarmerie and other means at the disposal of an authoritarian state to keep the Islamists at bay.

At least 60,000 of Algeria’s 28.6 million people have died in more than five years of conflict. The killings have been blamed for the most part on the Armed Islamic Group and other militant Islamic organizations, whose targets have included working women, unveiled women, government employees, journalists, academics, Roman Catholic clerics and even Islamic theologians who did not meet these groups’ fundamentalist criteria.

The government response has been fierce. It has been criticized by international human rights groups for alleged torture and extrajudicial murders, and censured for acts such as the killing of about 100 inmates of Algiers’ Serkadji prison two years ago in what authorities said was an escape attempt.

Newspapers hostile to the government are often closed, or at least find that printers are no longer willing to accept their business. Thousands of people under suspicion of links to the militants have been arrested. Others have simply disappeared.

But the regime’s policy of “eradication”--shorthand for wiping out the violent Islamic threat--has been implemented simultaneously with cautious democratic reforms.

In 1995, the country got its first elected president; in 1996, a popularly endorsed amended constitution; and this month, its first multi-party parliament, with moderate Islamists and other opposition parties taking more than 40% of the seats.

Between the regime’s use of the iron fist, its halting steps toward democracy and the widening perception that extremist Islamic factions have been wallowing in mindless violence, support for the Islamists has ebbed and the government has bought itself time to improve living conditions and restore stability, some Western diplomats believe. “Repression works,” one diplomat commented wryly.

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A few years ago, extremists were mounting attacks on army garrisons, and a military defeat of the government was conceivable. The conventional wisdom was that an Islamic state in Algeria was a virtual inevitability.

Now, attacks against the armed forces are rare. More common is a car bomb that kills innocent shoppers and commuters or a headline-grabbing raid on an isolated farming community. While the death toll is still appalling--nearly 500 killed since January--and no one feels safe, the danger to the government itself is minimal.

Falling fortunes for the Islamist resistance do not necessarily translate into support for the government. The real story in Algeria may be the emergence of a centrist mood that rejects the violent tactics of both sides and urges a new national dialogue that would include the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front, whose anticipated electoral victory in 1992 caused the government to cancel elections, triggering the ensuing violence.

Eight of the nine opposition parties elected to parliament this month support negotiations rather than force to solve the country’s crisis, and the imperative to restore peace appears to have been uppermost on the minds of the voters.

Whether the country succeeds in defeating violence and restoring stability has ramifications beyond Algeria itself.

“To think of Algeria as a problem only on the far side of the Mediterranean is fairly shortsighted,” and not just because of the gas and oil it produces, one Western diplomat said.

Algeria is on Europe’s southern doorstep, only a little more than 300 miles from Barcelona, Spain, and 450 miles from Marseilles, France. Instability here has had terrorist echoes in France, while economic woes in the North African country add to immigration pressures on the Continent and stoke xenophobic, right-wing parties in Europe. And if a radical Islamic state took power in Algeria, that could set off a domino effect. Algeria’s pro-Western neighbors, Tunisia and Morocco, would certainly be alarmed, and ripples would probably be felt as far away as Egypt.

Senior Algerian government officials invoke such visions as they defend the decision to halt the Islamist takeover in 1992. They liken the Islamic Salvation Front’s use of the ballot box to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. If the Islamists had not been stopped, the argument goes, Algeria would have lost its only chance at democracy and been turned into a theocratic autocracy.

“On behalf of democracy, their aim was to kill democracy,” Lahcens Moussaoui, a secretary of state in the Foreign Ministry, said in an interview.

He said he feels that the government has been vindicated in its choices, and he portrayed the militants as isolated because their violence against civilians has boomeranged, estranging them from the people. Violence will continue for some time, he said, but in the long run the violent extremists will be defeated.

“The population is not following them; even more, the population is fighting against the terrorism,” Moussaoui declared. “Whole villages have been killed--old ladies and children. How can anybody be with them?”

Others see nothing but shadows within shadows. No one really knows who is doing what to whom, and why.

“You cannot make a judgment,” said one journalist wearing an Islamic head covering. Her husband, also a journalist, was assassinated in 1994, leaving her alone to bring up their child. “If someone asked me today who killed Omar, I would have to say I don’t know,” she said quietly.

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Sympathizers with the Islamic Salvation Front insinuate that much of the violence attributed to Islamists is committed by government forces. “Killers are numerous and everywhere,” said human rights lawyer Said Boukhalfa, who represents one of the most prominent Islamists. “All Algerians, without exception, live with fear.”

But you might not think it to see young people on the beach in Moretti, about half an hour’s drive west of Algiers. In Moretti, where the blue waves lap against white beaches lined with tidy tourist bungalows and pizzerias, you might forget there is a conflict.

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Mixed groups of sun-bronzed teenagers in scant bathing suits cavort on the sand, and couples kiss and hold each other. The scene would not be out of place in Europe or California but would constitute a scandal, and even grounds for arrest, in many Islamic countries.

Algeria’s puritanical extremist leaders would no doubt be apoplectic, which may explain why bombs have exploded recently on the street outside several cafes nearby. Roads leading to the beaches are controlled with concrete barricades and military checkpoints, but the young people seem to delight in the fact that they have salvaged this bit of fun from an otherwise grim reality.

“We go to the beach. We swim. We have parties. Everybody enjoys themselves,” Wassila, a 17-year-old high school junior, breezily explained.

Still, for two years, Wassila said, her family kept her indoors because they lived in Baraki, an area near Algiers that was “hot” with Islamists. Then last year, they had to move.

It happened this way, she said: In November, a nice-looking young man from their neighborhood knocked at the door and politely asked to see Wassila’s father, a mechanical engineer. Once inside, the young man took out a pistol and showed it to the older man. He issued a warning: Wassila’s father should refrain from smoking, and Wassila and her sisters should start covering their hair, as mandated in the Islamic holy book, the Koran.

Faced with the threat, her father decided they should leave. They departed before dawn the next morning and have settled in Ben-Aknoun, a relatively safe suburb of Algiers that is firmly in the government’s control.

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In contrast is the town of Chebli, a community of 26,000 about a dozen miles south of Algiers near the front line of the conflict with the armed groups. Rarely visited by outsiders, it reveals much about the state of the war between the government and the Islamists.

For a visit to the town June 7, journalists were put into military vehicles, with four Kalashnikov-wielding troopers to protect each two civilians.

As the vehicles left the main highway from Algiers, the soldiers locked and loaded their weapons and peered anxiously into the fruit groves alongside the road, as if expecting an ambush.

In Chebli, massive barricades encircled Town Hall and the mayor refused to give his name, apparently out of fear. The town had the look of a fortress, filled as it was with scores of soldiers and civil militia members. A machine-gunner covered the checkpoint at the town entrance, where soldiers stopped and searched each vehicle.

Algeria has known brutality before. Colonized by France in 1830, it was the site of one of the most grisly anti-colonial struggles. The eight-year war cost more than 1 million lives in a country whose population was then only about 12 million.

When then-French President Charles de Gaulle finally ordered a face-saving national referendum that led to French withdrawal in 1962, the National Liberation Front instituted a one-party state, with a Soviet-style managed economy, whose authoritarian rule was not challenged until the late 1980s.

But as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, winds of change were also blowing in Algiers. Serious street riots broke out in 1988, leading to an agreement by the ruling party to greater political openness.

The first multi-party elections were held in 1990 for provincial and municipal offices, and the Islamic Salvation Front, known by its French initials, FIS, won as the main force for change. The party was way ahead again in the first round of parliamentary voting in December 1991--racking up 188 seats to 15 for the ruling National Liberation Front. No one doubted that it would get the remainder it needed to rule in the second round, set for January 1992.

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As it turned out, the people wanted to take the country in one direction, but the military and secular elite voted no. The elections were canceled.

Ali Fodil, director of the newspaper Ech-Chourouk el Arabi, thinks it would have been better to let the Islamists have their victory. Even if the winners had become tyrants, Algerians could always have rebelled, he said. “We never accept dictatorship, no matter where it comes from.”

But at the beach, the young people were relieved that the Islamists so far have been blocked. “If there was an Islamic state here, I would kill myself,” declared Elias, a young man in sunglasses.

To which Elira, one of a clutch of teenage girls standing nearby, chipped in reassuringly: “Never, ever would we have an Islamic state. Someone will always stop them.”