The dilemma of a persecuted Algerian press

By Ian Black

ALGIERS: Nassim Kouba faced a journalistic dilemma. It was Tuesday evening when a call came through from Saida province that seven members of one family, including four handicapped children, had had their throats cut and their bodies mutilated.

For the news editor of one of Algeria's leading papers, Liberte, the question on the day three European Union ministers were expressing mounting concern about violence was whether to print this terrible but routine story.

"We were quite sure that it was true but, with the EU mission in town, we felt it was hard to report yet another atrocity that seemed to show the state is incapable of protecting its citizens," he said.

Kouba and his colleagues agonized and then ran the piece under the byline of A. Berber, the nom de plume of the paper's local stringer -- anonymous because of fears for his life.

Liberte, with a circulation of 120,000, is one of a dozen French and Arabic dailies that have steered a dangerous course since the army canceled the 1991 elections and drove Islamists underground.

Its dingy offices are in a quiet residential part of town, but many papers are housed centrally in the Maison de la Presse, where there are armed guards at the gate.

More than 70 journalists have been killed, apparently by terrorists. Some suspect, but cannot prove, that elements of what everyone calls "Le Pouvoir" -- the powers that be -- may have been responsible too.

Zineddine Allian, one of four Liberte employees killed, believed it would be the government that would get him. Police checkpoints near his home disappeared the day he was shot in 1995.

"There are shadows that we cannot penetrate," said Kouba. Violence is just one problem. Officials say they censor only items bearing directly on security. But the instinct for self- censorship -- and perhaps self-preservation -- that Liberte resisted in the case of the Saida story is strong.

Compared to every Arab country but Lebanon, Algeria's press is far from tame. It is certainly less so than the country's servile state-run TV.

"They can control pictures, but not words," said the respected editor of Al-Watan, Omar Belhoucet.

It was Belhoucet who dared publish an exile's accusation that 90 percent of the killings were carried out by the government.

"These papers are showing signs that they might become really independent, but for the moment they don't want to jeopardize their chances," observed one diplomat. "Certainly, if a general was responsible for massacres that wouldn't get published."

That is why human rights groups have urged Algeria to end censorship, allow free access to local and foreign media, and break down what Amnesty International calls "the wall of silence and indifference".

Some of them been neutralized. Salima Ghezali, winner of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for human rights, had her Nation newspaper closed on the pretext that it had not paid its debts to government-owned presses.

According to one school of thought media attacks may not bother Le Pouvoir. "What is a threat is a bubbling up of uncompromising, populist Islamist indignation," a foreign observer argued. "The government can deal with dissenting elites."

Newspapers cope with the crisis partly through black humor. Last Sunday Liberte ran a cartoon showing the American ambassador visiting the scene of a massacre. "Welcome excellency," mouths a decapitated head as the wincing envoy shakes hands with a severed arm. "I hope I don't have to give him a kiss," the envoy says.

Life may be less dangerous now for Algerian journalists as the savagery moves on to peasants and the poor and unemployed.

Some journalists live in the relative safety of the Club de Pins outside Algiers, a well-guarded location for the government and social elite. But the fear is always there.

"Every time I leave home I'm not sure I will come back," says Kouba.

-- The Guardian