A most uncivil war - Algerian civil war

National Review, August 15, 1994

When Algerians leave their country, their most common destination is Paris, which is where I heard what happened to the mayor of Ain-Fezza. (Given the current climate in Algeria, his family would rather I not use his name.) He was a pious man of about 40 whose family had given several martyrs (as they are still called) to the independence cause in the 1954-62 war against France. The family was rewarded with persecution by the victorious FLN (National Liberation Front) - not an uncommon turn of events after the "revolution."

The mayor was elected on the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) ticket in 1990, as the Islamist party, in the country's first multi-party elections, swept town halls across Algeria. Today FIS is joining names like "Hamas" and "Hezbollah" in representing the kind of militant, fundamentalist Islam that is bent on eradicating Western influence from the Muslim world. Divided by doctrinal and leadership rivalries, the movement finds a common inspiration in the notion that the problems of Islamic societies are best addressed by establishing theocratic republics based on the Koranic law.

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl considers radical Islamic regimes armed with ballistic missiles the number-one security threat to Europe, ahead of the potential for "fascism" or spreading anarchy in the East. Many Algerians agree with him. In a demonstration in Algiers on June 29, leaders of the democratic parties called for a war to the end against Islamic fundamentalism.

In this they are going against the tendency of the Clinton Administration, which has indicated that it favors an opening to the "nonviolent" Islamists - to which category the mayor of Ain-Fezza decidedly belonged. To be sure, he entered politics because of what his family had suffered at the hands of the FLN. But he was also disturbed that in the villages that make up Ain-Fezza there was not a single paved road until 1989. Electricity came in 1990. The water system was a fountain built by the French during the colonial period. To get water, you went to the public square with a couple of jerry cans.

The mayor could ask himself: For this my relatives died? To build support, all the FIS had to do was ask people if they felt the FLN had treated them right. It is commonly alleged in Algeria that the personal accounts of the FLN elites in political and military circles are about equal to Algeria's foreign debt.

So men like the mayor of Ain-Fezza were, in a very real sense, the voice of the downtrodden masses. The problem is that most frustrated young men in a country like Algeria do not go into politics to get a proper water system for their home town. Most frustrated young men want to make a clean sweep of things, proving their own worth in the process. The effective leaders of the FIS are not local reformers but fanatical preachers and gunmen trained in part with money from U.S. taxpayers. These are the "Afghans," former allies of the mujahedin.

There have been some spectacular shootouts in Algeria's hills and the slums of the big cities. Each time, the army claims it has "cornered the leaders" or "finished off the MIA" (the FIS's armed wing). Each time, the fighting resumes. At present, between three and four hundred people a week are being killed in a civil war that is approaching the Lebanese scale in its savagery.

When it outlawed the FIS in mid-1992, the army allowed Ain-Fezza to stay in the hands of the freely elected Islamists. But the Afghans are not men of water supplies. They ambushed soldiers on patrols, severed their heads, and left them at crossroads. After the last Ramadan, in February, they announced that women without the Islamic veil would be targeted. Secularists said they would retaliate against veiled women. Partly because of such violence, women were among the leaders of the June 29 demonstration, which was attacked with bombs.

In these conditions, the army hardliners, despite the conciliatory gestures of the Algerian president, General Lamine Zeroual, are not inclined to seek Islamists with whom to make deals. They are inclined rather to engage in "exemplary repression."

When you want to make an example, it is always easier to choose reasonable men as targets. The soldiers came for the young mayor of Ain-Fezza at three in the morning. They took him to the village square with four of his relatives and about a dozen others, and shot them all.

It may prove increasingly difficult to find "nonviolent" Islamists for the West to make "contacts" with. Several weeks ago Afghans murdered the president of the Algerian League for Human Rights, an austere, righteous lawyer named Fathallah, in his office in central Algiers. It was odd, on the face of it, because he had insisted on fair trials for "terrorist" suspects and had defended quite a few himself. But neither the Afghans nor the soldiers, at this point, believe there is anything anything that can be settled through the rule of law.