Nostro inviato a Algeri

The inscription Gendarmerie has been retouched, and now it reads Gensdemerderie, bunch of shit, in other words. Another one draws the equation: gendarmerie, that is the army, equals murderers.
A third one includes an additional factor: Gendarmerie = Gia = Assassins. Soldiers and fundamentalists, ninjas, commandos and the barbus, the Afghan slaughterers, are all the same thing.

Deep ravines, alpine landscapes, villages clinging to the top of a mountain, olive trees all around, and then citron trees as you climb up, the small white and pale blue sanctuary of a local marabut, the graves next to it, the Fort Napoleon built by the French around mid seventeenth century to control the villages on the crests, barefaced women, long skirts and brightly-coloured tops in orange, yellow, red and green, spirit shops, barred barracks and abandoned barracks. “Assassins à 20 mètres”, reads an arrow pointing at burnt down barracks.

“Welcome to Cabila”, Azzedine tells me, as he gets out of the car. “Here, if you speak Arabic, you will get no reply: either Berber of French. Here women don’t cover their faces, people drink wine; there’s no room for fundamentalism. What they say here is that they have always been in Algeria, time before the Arabs confiscated the country to share out the power. This is why they hate the State”.
Cabila, one third of the population, represents the other great problem Algeria has. It has always been and it’s getting worse and worse. “If you wish to go there, then avoid weekends”, I had been told by the Chairman of the Amis de Casbah Association, who is also from Cabila. “Each Friday Tizi Ouzou, the capital, is blocked because of a demonstration. The roads are closed, students pour into the streets, barricades are put up, the army intervenes, in other words: it’s chaos. This has now been going on for months. What is at stake is the autonomy and the protection of linguistic identity”.
The “Cabila Spring” started when a twenty-year old student from Beni Doula, in the Tizi Ouzou municipality, Guermah Mohamed known as Massinissa (Cabila corresponds to ancient Numidia in the Roman period), was collected to be questioned at a police station. He did not leave the police station alive, and the official version was “accidental death”.


A soldier accidentally dropped his automatic gun and seven bullets hit the young man. On 29 April, the town came out into the street, the rebellion expanded and 40 people got killed. Two months later, the local authorities, the aarchs, the wise men, prepared a package of requests and organised a march on Algiers, to hand the town back to the President of the Republic.
Outcome: four people killed, 400 people injured, and the exit from the Government of one of the two Cabila political parties, Rassemblement pour la culture et la démocratie (Rcd), bringing the charge against the government itself that it had conspired by means of its securities, to murder the party’s leader, Said Saadi. This coupled with the schizophrenic attitude of the other party, Front des Forces socialistes (Ffs), which first took part in an official ceremony during which members of the army where decorated, and then it charged the a^archs with “tribal archaism”. Hence the people’s rejection and boycott, the birth of an underground movement outside the political parties and against the government, which is increasingly difficult to keep under control. There had already been a “Cabila Spring” twenty years earlier, and it had been brutally repressed. And when independence was just dawning, there had also been a “Cabila Autumn”, which had been put down with bloodshed too.
The Beni Armane ravines, which the French call the Palestro ravines, mark the boundary of the region as you arrive from the Atlas. During the war of liberation, they represented for the French troops a cursed spot, and with Islamic terrorism they have become the “ravines of death”. Nowadays, you can see army positions everywhere, guarded police stations and factories, trees cut in front of every military settling, to avoid ambushes, as well as sighting stations and towers.
“It is better not to pass by early in the morning and after sunset”, my guide tells me. “There still are active terrorists here”.
Here in Cabila the contempt and hatred towards the “bearded men”, the fundamentalists, goes hand in hand with the contempt and hatred that are felt towards the central State.

Three years ago, when Matoub Lounes, the “Berbers’ living legend”, the singer who had rewritten the words of the Algerian national anthem, and had called the statesmen traitors, was hit by a shower of bullets in an ambush on the road that connects Tizi Ouzou to a town nearby, the idea that his assassination may have been organised by the securities rather than by terrorists immediately caught on, and in time it has radicalised. These suspicions a closely linked to the other great problem, that of blind areas, of compromise, of spies, of the deviations which have peppered this ten-year Algerian tragedy. To deny these facts or reject them in democracy’s name or to allow no concession to terrorism is both stupid and dangerous, because it would involve the same blindness which accounted for France’s loss of Algeria, not only in political but also in moral terms. Massive resort to torture to crush anti-colonial resistance represented one of the most despicable pages in that overseas adventure, and having won in that way the “Algiers battle” did not prevent him from losing the independence war.
The barbarism of this last decade is nothing new. At Melouza, in 1957, the Fln people cut the throat of all the 174 inhabitants of the village, two by two, because they were responsible for supporting the Mouvement national algérien rivals, the other anti-French party. Their leader was Mohamedi Said, who was to become one of the Fis leaders thirty years later.
The fight between the two factions resulted in ten thousand Algerian casualties. Immediately after the achievement of independence, 57 thousand harkis, the “repatriated Muslim French”, were slaughtered.
“Nose, ears and lips cut, evirated, buried alive in lime or cement, burned, crucified on the doors”, read the reports drawn up by prefecture members as they prepared to leave the country.
Nose, ear and lip cutting was called the “mask of death”, a huge red hole in the face. Nose is nif and to have nif meant to have honour. Having it cut meant dishonour, and being beheaded meant being prevented from having eternal rest, having one’s throat cut meant being sacrificed, being evirated meant having one’s manliness denied. The war of liberation is full of episodes of this kind, whereas, on the French side there was asphyxiation, red-hot irons, bottles in the anus, force-feeding with water and salt and blows on the back of the neck “Fundamentalists are not total strangers, aliens who have suddenly descended upon Algeria”, tells me the Chairman of the Amis de Casbah Association. With only a few square kilometres for a population of sixty thousand inhabitants, Casbah is a human swarm and a wreck as far as buildings are concerned. The terrible rains of these last few days have worsened a situation made of sudden collapses, a devastated maze where nothing works, the State is absent and hogra, the untranslatable Arabic expression which stands for rage, desperation and hatred, grows every day. It was here that the war of liberation reached its highest point and was plastically represented. Ambushes, flights from one balcony to another, complicities, secret conduits from one house to the other, streets that ended up into empty spaces, and streets which turned into corridors, courtyards or underground spaces.
A huge bloodshed, saluted by rivers of rhetoric.
But thirty years later, nothing had changed, no governmental intervention, no development plans, no schools and no hospitals. It is therefore no surprise that, during terrorism, it was a recruitment and resistance centre, a safe place for hiding. 50 per cent of Algerians is under 15, and is therefore insensitive to the myth of an independence that has been strived for; they can see the results and acknowledge the failures.
Half of the population lives in towns and unemployment exceeds 30 per cent. Is it really that difficult to understand why whatever is not owned, and is therefore denied, becomes a vice to be fought? Is it really that strange that the average age of the barbus who become an outlaw or join the guerrillas, is twenty years, that the generation of “hittists”, of those who hold the wall (hit), young men with a diploma which is of no use, obliged, due to the housing shortage, to share a room with parents, brothers, sisters and relatives devoted, in the best of cases to trabendo, that is contraband? Violence, terrorism and horror are also generated in this way, and it is not possible to influence barbarism if you do nothing about the factors which have caused it to break out.


"La sale guerre" is the title of book, forbidden in Algeria, which a former officer, Habib Souaidia, has written about the behaviour of the Armed Forces during that decade, some sort of parallel war aimed at settling old scores, increasing the level of fear, promoting slaughters by providing no protection to inhabitants and charging opponents with assassination attempts and murders.
In France, this book has caused sensation and trials; even if only one tenth of what it says were true, it would be enough to explain how the fundamentalist phenomenon had been aided and fomented by the military regime, and, once it had become uncontrollable, it was crushed with a repression which took advantage of emergency caused by some sort of indiscriminate counter-terror, which was to leave behind more hatred and desires for revenge.
What we are sure about is that the family code which restricted women’s rights was voted in 1984, with the Fln party alone in power, the same party that in 1990 was to pass a law which authorised men to vote for their wives; we are also sure that the 1988 revolutionary risings, which lead to the defeat of the regime and to the first multi-party elections in Algeria, involved 400 casualties among civilians; that immediately after the coup d’état with which the electoral process was interrupted, forty thousand people were deported; that the president Mr Bouiaf, one of the heroes of the war of liberation, who had been in exile in Morocco for thirty years, and was appealed to by the army who needed a usable name, was assassinated, as his wife recalled, “by a clan of soldiers, the die-hard conservatives from the old single party, who had realised that he wasn’t simply a puppet that could be used at will – and had most certainly not been killed by the Muslims”; that whereas the 1991 elections, during which the Fis triumphed with 47 per cent, displayed a 40 per cent abstentionism - which led to the statement that, after all, that party did not represent more than 25 per cent of Algerians, and therefore it could not be viewed as representing the people’s will -, the near winner Fln which was later to support the coup d’état, proved even less representative: its 23 per cent was in fact a 12 percent… In the evening, on the Duemila harbour, at about 20 km from Algiers, in one of those cheap restaurants overlooking the sea where Algerians take their families to eat freshly fished mullets and crayfish, I thought about what I had been told by the director of El Watan, Omar Belouchet: “We have not had a fight between civilisations, but between modernity and reaction, a tragedy that is within the Muslim society. What has happened has nothing to do with hatred towards the West”.

He is right, and Gilles Kepel, the author of “Jihad, Ascent and Decline. The History of Muslim Fundamentalism” is also probably right, when he states that Islamism, as a social movement, was “defeated and depleted” at the end of a decade which had seen its threatening rise. The extent of the slaughters, the blindness with which fundamentalists have tormented what was left of the country up to the point of excommunicating society itself, the takfir, death sentence for impious act for all Algerians who had not committed themselves in helping them, has left behind such a trail of blood that their return is now impossible. What holds is modernity, or rather its caricature.
A blocked political system, an import-import economy, which is what they here call the enrichment of the State through monopolies over importation, a ruling class that is a power clan, a mass urbanisation process which the State has been unable to discipline and assist, a weak social legislation, a military power that is a separate body, locked up in military quarters, in military holiday resorts and in militarily shopping centres.

The future of Algeria depends on the possibility of rebuilding to its foundations the false modernity that paralyses it. This is not a future one would bet on light-heartedly. (traslated by Interpres)