Time of troubles in Algeria

With its constitutional referendum last week, the Algerian government went far toward finishing the wrecking job on democracy it began nearly five years ago. The new constitution outlaws Islamic parties, strips power from the parliament and allows the president to rule by decree. The government said it had been approved by 86 percent of Algerians, but no independent verification of the vote was allowed.

The government called its new powers necessary to combat a fanatic Muslim organization called the Armed Islamic Group, which kills intellectuals, government workers, journalists, women who refuse to cover their heads and others deemed hostile to Islam. Tuesday's commuter rail bombing in Paris seemed similar to terrorist attacks in Paris last year that the Armed Islamic Group said it had conducted.

The Algerian government has matched terror with terror. State security forces kill and abduct civilians. Torture is widespread. More than 50,000 Algerians have been killed in this conflict since a military coup in January 1992.

A month before the coup, Algeria, then a pluralistic nation with virtually no political violence, held the first round of what were probably the freest parliamentary elections the Arab world had ever seen. The Islamic Salvation Front, a coalition of nonviolent Islamic groups, won a plurality. Three weeks later, the military staged a coup, arguing that if the Islamic Front had been allowed to take power, those elections would be Algeria's last. Western nations winked at the suspension of democracy.

No one knows whether a government formed by the Islamic Front would have ended Algeria's democracy. Islamic Front mayors, including the mayor of Algiers, were governing democratically.

Algerians might well have preferred an Islamic Front government to what they got instead. The military dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution. In March 1992, it outlawed the Islamic Front and imprisoned thousands of its members. That strengthened its radicals, who argued that violence was now their only option, and formed the Armed Islamic Group. Today, their terror is condemned by the Islamic Front's spokesmen in exile. But the Islamic Front's most important leaders are in secret detention and cannot speak.

In 1994, Defense Minister Liamine Zeroual was appointed president. Last year, he won election to the office with vague promises to end the war, which many Algerians assumed meant talking to the nonviolent opposition. He has not done so. When the peaceful opposition parties met in Rome in 1994 and 1995, the government refused to send a representative.

Zeroual's choice of indiscriminate repression over dialogue continues to enjoy the tolerance of the West, including the United States, and the active support of France, which is frightened of more terrorism and the wave of immigrants that might flee fundamentalist rule.

The strategy is desperate and shortsighted. Zeroual must use the legal system, not death squads and torture, to punish terrorism. He should also free the Islamic moderates and allow all politicians who renounce violence full participation in the parliamentary elections planned for next year, including access to television. Even this late, Algeria may have a chance to end the spiral of violence if Zeroual chooses the route of dialogue and participation.

-- The New York Times