Algeria's plague

Just two years ago, the first Algerian journalist was killed in a series of assassinations that reached 46 within the last week. There has been no assault on a nation's press like it. This plague of terror began after the army took over, to preempt an Islamic party's imminent electoral victory, in 1992. The military government itself has a sorry record of suppressing independent journalism.

But the murders seem mostly the work of the Islamic organizations fighting the government, especially the notorious Armed Islamic Group. Besides the journalists killed, they have forced several hundred more into exile and intimidated some, but far from all, of those who stay.

There is a chilling abstractness to this particular aspect of the generalized slaughter that is taking place across Algeria. Some journalists are being killed, as they sometimes are in other countries, for the outspokenness or unpopularity of what they report or write. "Those who fight us with the pen shall die by the sword," the Armed Islamic Group has said. But they also are being targeted simply as symbols of the secular state whose abolition is the guiding fundamentalist goal.

Here lies the larger peril. The media in Algeria, as elsewhere, constitute the society's means of communication. To eliminate them is to atomize the society and isolate its members from each other.

American journalists are fortunate enough to work in conditions where they are not called upon to pay for their calling with their lives. There must be immense respect for the personal courage and dedication of those facing a starkly different situation abroad, and a showing of professional solidarity across national lines.

Some 15 international media organizations have now joined in an appeal to halt the terror against Algerian journalists. All parties to the Algerian conflict -- official and opposition -- are urged to cease media intimidation and censorship and also to recognize the status of journalists as civilian noncombatants, to actively denounce attacks that do take place and to support the restoration of press freedom as an essential component of any solution to the Algerian crisis. This is a program not just for rescuing an embattled journalistic corps but for helping a torn society rescue itself.

-- The Washington Post