A Healing Torturous as War

If you come here to the snug towns scattered like seed around the base of the vast green mountains, you will hear wild tales. They speak of babies burned to death in ovens and women who went blind from crying.

They tell of a man who wore a butcher’s plastic apron and drove around hacking people to death in his truck. They tell of bodies abandoned in ditches, of the time guerrillas swept down from the mountains, kidnapped 70 of the prettiest girls and bore them off to servitude and rape in the wilderness. They tell of thousands of men who went missing in broad daylight and were never heard from again.

This is the folklore of a civil war, a conflict so intimate and murky that its history remains shrouded. For more than a decade, the farmers and shopkeepers of these quiet villages not far from Algiers were trapped in a dirty war between Islamist guerrillas and the Algerian military. More than 150,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict, and to this day the killing hasn’t stopped, despite a cease-fire.

Life has trickled back to the fields and farmhouses of Ouled Slama. But this nation’s wound goes so deep that the healing is almost as torturous as the war itself.

Today’s Algeria, ruled by a government that favors forgiveness and shrinks from the investigation of war crimes, is a realm of collective trauma, of former killers living among victims, of thousands of women and children abandoned by the fighting.

The years of battling peeled the men away from Larashi Kerima one by one. Her husband was a plumber who set off for work one morning and never came back. The army executed one of her brothers, she says, for giving water and shelter to the guerrillas.

Another brother disappeared on his way back to the university, where he specialized in Koranic studies.

She is still playing with the pieces of her past, arranging and rearranging them in a hunt for a reason.

“What happened here? It depends,” said Kerima, a 30-year-old woman who looks older, peering at the world from beneath the brim of her veil. “Everybody has their own story.”

The twisting streets of Algiers are haunted by the homeless and the mad who poured into the city as their villages turned to killing zones. They came for safety, but many had no place to live, so they slept in the doorways of patisseries and under highway overpasses. They remain today, following their mutterings along littered sidewalks, past the tiled mosaics of bygone Berber heroes.

Psychologists say millions of people are suffering from mental disorders and that many end their own lives to escape their memories. The families hide the suicides, along with the rapes, because in a Muslim society these sorrows are shameful.

“The killers are generally the neighbors; they know each other very well,” psychologist Cherifa Bouatta said. “This is a crisis not of one person, but of a whole nation. We all have this idea that our neighbor won’t one day attack us. But here, that’s exactly what happened.”

Origins of Conflict

The fighting erupted in 1992. That was when the Algerian army called off a scheduled election, realizing that Islamists were poised to sweep to victory. Fearful that this vast, oil-rich land would become an Islamic republic, the military reasserted control. Enraged Islamists launched a war of guerrilla strikes and terrorist attacks against the regime.

Civilians were caught in the cross-fire, suspected by each side of collaborating with the other. Through the years, the war degenerated into a blood-soaked battle of terrorism, with Islamists using murder to frighten the populace into silence or cooperation and the government rounding up and executing people suspected of sympathizing with the Islamists.

Nobody knows how many have died -- there has been no thorough investigation and no national reckoning. The government acknowledges that more than 100,000 have been killed. Human rights groups say the toll is more than 150,000, and some put it closer to 200,000.

This bucolic seam between the mountain camps of the guerrillas and the suburbs of the capital saw some of the worst bloodshed. In a war so jumbled that people still don’t know who killed whom -- or so they say -- villagers in Ouled Slama would wake up in the morning to find as many as 50 bodies littering the village.

They talk reluctantly about the killing, which they describe as a strangely anonymous affair. Algerians use the French phrase “qui tue qui?” -- “who’s killing whom?” -- but many of them carry secret memories. Fear sticks to the village, pushing silence over the tongues of grieving families.

“They slaughtered, burned, hanged. Houses were bombed. All, all, all kinds of killing. It was hell here,” said Delila Zekkal, an Algerian volunteer working with the women of these farmlands. “Sometimes I ask the women what they saw and who were the killers, and they won’t say. They say, ‘We don’t know if it’s a civilian wearing military clothes or vice versa.’ ”

In Ouled Slama, the mountains are as irrefutable as an unpleasant memory. They spread high into the air over the fruit groves, the tiled farmhouses and the squat rooftops, fading into a vague blue suggestion of land and then finally to empty sky. Some of the wives know that their husbands climbed those hills, cast their lot with the Islamist guerrillas and never came back.

But most can’t be sure -- they don’t know whether their men were killed or killers, disappeared or kidnapped. Truth be told, they don’t much care, for in the end it’s the same -- the deserted bed, the children’s questions, the empty bellies and the long, listless days. They wear their wedding bands and raise their children on white lies.

“I’m living in a kind of rainbow. It looks like I’m something, but really I am nothing,” said Kerima. “I don’t exist. I don’t know how to explain to you how it feels.”

Her baby boy was 40 days old when his father vanished. Now he is 9, and when he asks about his father, Kerima tells him the truth: She doesn’t know.

“I don’t know anything about him; I didn’t investigate,” Kerima said. “This region has a lot of terrorists, so I couldn’t even ask. I was afraid somebody would say, ‘Why are you looking for him?’

“I don’t know whether he was kidnapped by the authorities or by the armed groups. But nobody told me he went to the mountain,” she said. “Not the mountain, no.”

Kerima was left homeless, unable to pay the rent on the house she’d taken with her husband. She trudged from one relative to the next, and finally came to live with an uncle in a squat set of rooms hugging a dirt courtyard.

In hopes of earning a little money, she meets other illiterate village women in a cool, tiled house near the mosque. They stitch velvet wedding dresses, sachets and jewelry boxes in the form of crimson hearts, then stick polyester roses and cheap gold paint on their crafts.

Kerima is weary, and worried. Her son refuses to speak in class. The teachers say he needs a psychologist.

“He’s getting very sensitive, and when somebody says ‘father’ in his presence, he gets upset,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain to him what is a disappearance.”

Move Toward Peace

In 1999, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika called for amnesty. The Islamist fighters could lay down their guns and come home, he announced, and many did. They slipped back into their villages, and took their place among their former victims. The villagers say there are still stashes of guns buried deep in the fields.

In April’s presidential election, which was cheered as a relatively clean exercise in democracy, the portly, dapper Bouteflika won a second term. His landslide victory was interpreted as a popular reward for slowing the pace of killings to about 150 a month.

Keen to maintain hard-won stability, Bouteflika has pushed pardon over investigation. War criminals have not been tried, and no light has been shed on the fate of thousands who have disappeared. Human rights groups believe that any investigation would incriminate prominent members of the military, and is thus a political impossibility.

“Making people disappear was state policy,” human rights lawyer Moustafa Bouchachi said. “It wasn’t an isolated act by one man at a police station; all over the country there are people missing.”

Bouteflika says there’s no point in widening the chasm dividing the nation.

“Reconciliation,” said Abdelmalek Sellal, Bouteflika’s campaign manager, “doesn’t mean investigations and commissions.” It was election day, and Sellal was reclining in the sun-flooded campaign headquarters, a villa draped with flowered vines in one of the wealthiest enclaves in Algiers.

“It means the great pardon among Algerians,” he continued. “To accept one another as we are. To fight extremism on both sides. To accept our history and accept our personality. Is it worth it to open the whole file? If it risks dividing the people again, it’s not worth it.”

A People Divided

But the people are already split. Between victims of Islamists and victims of security forces, tensions crackle over whose grievances are more righteous. The government has deepened animosity, victims say, by pressuring bereaved families to sign statements blaming Islamic “terrorists” for their loss. The documents neatly exonerate security forces, and make families eligible for cash, land grants and other graces of government charity, according to victims and human rights groups.

The countryside is incandescent in spring. The valleys brim with Mediterranean light, and blossoms grow like pale pink lace, frothing the wood in the cherry orchards. The song of owls pipes sweet and hollow through the trees.

But the villages are queasy with resentment. They are places of dirt floors, hard looks and fear in throats -- of making the wrong enemy, of saying the wrong thing, of war that might yet return.

Amar Toulaem was said to be a reverent man, a good Muslim. He worked as a carpenter, and every Friday he went to the mosque, but he never discussed politics. A quiet life took a sharp turn when he walked away from his house one afternoon and never came home again. His children cried; his wife stopped eating. At last, the neighbors gave the news to the eldest of the boys.

“He is in the mountains,” they said. “He has been seen there.”

The rumors roll down from the mountain like the runoff of melted snow. In their cramped house, the Toulaem family immediately felt the sting of isolation. They were left without so much as a photograph of Amar, and have been ostracized ever since.

“We have nothing,” 20-year-old daughter Zuore said. “Nobody’s helping us because we’re terrorists.”

The grocers wouldn’t give them credit. The neighbors didn’t bother dropping off bundles of clothes or offering any of the charity traditionally given to widows. The years went by. When he turned 16, the eldest son deserted the army and climbed into the mountains to join his father.

When the pardoned fighters drifted back down into the village, the family waited. Perhaps their men would be among them. But they didn’t come. Men who had been in the mountains told the children they’d seen their father lying dead.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead,” said Reda Toulaem, a 22-year-old son left behind by his father and brother. “But I don’t think he’ll ever come back.”

Stack was recently on assignment in Algeria.