No end to Algeria's agony

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Before the end of June, the rubber-stamp Algerian parliament will pass an amnesty for the military wing of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the party whose looming victory in a free election in 1992 triggered a military coup and a seven- year civil war. FIS leader Abbas Madani has sent a warm letter to recently elected President Abdelaziz Bouteflika thanking him for this gesture of reconciliation, and various people have suggested that the Algerian horrors may be nearing an end. They are not.

No other war in the world today rivals Algeria's for sheer nastiness. The police torturers habitually use blowtorches; the favorite method of killing used by the terrorists to slaughter innocent villagers is the "big smile" (slitting the victims' throats one at a time) -- and it's never clear whether the terrorists are really Islamic fanatics, or just the regime's death-squads in disguise.

While the rate of killing has declined somewhat in the past year, the war is far from over. The FIS's army, for which the government is now passing an amnesty, has observed a unilateral ceasefire for the past two years, mainly because it has long since been overtaken as the regime's chief opponent by the more radical and ultra-violent Armed Islamic Group (GIA). And the GIA has no more intention of giving up the fight than the regime has of relinquishing its hold on power, however many sham elections it holds.

The killing in Algeria was actually unleashed by the country's one honest election, staged by a reformist officer in 1992. It aroused popular hope that the country would finally be freed from the corruption and incompetence of single-party rule (the National Liberation Front had run the country on pseudo-Marxist lines since independence in 1962). But when it became clear that the Islamists of the FIS were about to sweep into power on a massive protest vote, key generals intervened and canceled the second round of voting.

Endless rigged elections since then have failed to win the military-backed regime any credibility, and last April's presidential poll was no exception.

Like all three of his predecessors as president, former Gen. Liamine Zeroual was forced out of office last year, two years before his term ended, by the shadowy generals who really run the country. He had been getting too serious about seeking reconciliation with democratic forces.

The replacement they came up with was Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a former foreign minister who went into exile 20 years ago following allegations of embezzlement. Their hope was that he would be swept into office on a wave of nostalgia for the 1970s, when Algerians still lived moderately well and had hopes for the future. But when the wave failed to arise, they returned to the old stand-by of rigging the elections.

In an attempt to blunt international criticism and to lure influential Algerians into cooperating with the system, the regime now allows a number of opposition parties to run in elections. But when advance postal voting by the million Algerians in France made it clear that Bouteflika was heading for defeat last April, it deployed all the familiar machinery for stealing the vote -- and only sixteen hours before the polls opened, all six opposition candidates for the presidency withdrew in protest.

Bouteflika claims that 60 percent of the electorate voted for him anyway, but the opposition says no more than 25 percent showed up to vote. And it is this doubly soiled puppet president who now claims to be making peace with an equally marginal element of the fundamentalist armed opposition. Which means that Algeria's troubles are far from over.

The real power in Algeria is not Bouteflika but the men who run the military security department, in particular two little- known generals called Mohammed Mediene Tewfik and Smain Lamarri. Their job is to protect the interests of the (very wealthy) politico-military elite, and they are just as ruthless as their fanatical opponents in the GIA. Indeed, they are known in Algeria as the leaders of the "eradicator" faction in the military, who espouse the physical eradication of both their Islamic and all other opponents.

The war against the GIA has enabled them to wipe out large numbers of Algerian journalists, professionals, and political activists who oppose their tyranny, and blame the killing on the GIA. Even the village massacres are often done by military security agents in Islamic disguise: one Algerian human rights lawyer has estimated that around 70 percent of the killings (between 70,000 and 100,000 in the past seven years) were really done by the army.

"The Algerian junta is killing Islamists and blaming it on them," former prime minister Abdelhamid Brahimi (1984-1988) told the Observer two years ago. "It's Machiavellian. The massive killings are always among the fundamentalists, in the area where they are strongest."

That really is where they happen, and Brahimi's interpretation of the reason why is probably also true. But it is even more horrific and more Machiavellian than that. What began as a civil war has become a system: so long as there is a GIA to blame, the regime can kill anybody who threatens its power. And it does.