On a whitewashed wall high above Algiers Bay, up in the graceful districts of the capital where the rich have their villas and the winding streets are lined with palm trees, a baffling graffito captures Algeria's national psychosis. "Kasdi Merbah, Save Us," it saysin French, in scrawled black letters.
Kasdi Merbah was Algeria's head of state security, an object of fear, "the man of the files." He was assassinated one year ago, after he joined the secular opposition. The government blames his murder on the Islamic radicals who have mounted a bloody three-year challenge to the regime. A second theory holds that Algeria's military rulers had Merbah killed because he favored negotiations with the Islamic opposition. Still others think Merbah was silenced because he knew too much about government corruption. The truth may never be known, but the rumors reveal how Algeria is plunging into a shadow war of assassination and execution -- of fear, conspiracy and paranoia, of detention camps, torture, hate and revenge.
The scene of a classic "war of national liberation" against France in the 1950s, Algeria is now at the forefront of another epic struggle, this time between Islamic fundamentalism and the one-party socialism that has dominated much of the Arab world since colonialism collapsed. Algeria's military canceled elections in 1992 to prevent a certain fundamentalist victory; a government crackdown that followed has splintered the dominant Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and spawned a number of violent extremist groups led in part by Algerians who had fought in Afghanistan or trained in Iranian-funded paramilitary camps in Sudan. At least 4,000 people, including 56 foreigners slain since last September, have died. In the last month alone, 19 foreigners have been killed, including five engineers from Eastern Europe and seven Italian sailors who had their throats cut in an Algerian port.
Fear of contagion. As the fundamentalist challenge to Algeria's secular regime intensifies, the country's neighbors are worried that a radical Islamic state would be an inspiration -- and a potential source of arms and funding -- for militants in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and elsewhere. An Islamic victory also could mean hundreds of thousands of refugees added to the nearly 1 million Algerians already in France, at a time when anti-immigrant feeling is swelling.
The deaths of three French gendarmes and two consular officials in an attempted car bombing in Algiers earlier this month prompted French officials to start rounding up suspected Islamic militants and catapulted the issue toward the top of the European Union's agenda. Israeli officials, meanwhile, are fearful that a militant victory in Algeria could distract the United States from Mideast peacemaking and slow the thaw in relations between Israel and several Arab states, notably Morocco and Tunisia. "We do not have an interest in seeing `Tehran West,'" says a senior U.S. official in Washington.
While the radicals vow to rid Algeria of "Jews, Christians and miscreants," Algeria's rulers are fighting back with mass arrests and death penalties imposed by special courts staffed by anonymous judges and, critics charge, by abetting death squads. "There's been a radicalization," says Becher Mecheri, an Islamic sympathizer and lawyer who favors negotiation. "If one speaks of stability or nonviolence, the young refuse, saying you're on the side of the [government]."
A terrified population cowers in the middle. "In Algeria," says newspaper editor Omar Belhouchet, the target of one assassination attempt, "we're between the hammer and the anvil." Hundreds of journalists, judges, soldiers and professors have been gunned down; so were two Algerian schoolgirls who were not wearing Islamic head scarves as the radicals demand.
U.S. officials think the only way Algeria can avoid a protracted civil war is by including the country's Islamic movement in a negotiated political solution, and American diplomats have been telling the Algerian government that the harsh crackdowns of the past two years are self-defeating. The American calculation is that Algeria's Islamic movement is not strong enough to take over and eventually will be forced to compromise with the government. But France has reluctantly backed the military regime, most recently by successfully lobbying for rescheduling $5 billion in debt that had been due this year.
Dead-end dialogue. The Algerian government's dialogue with the Islamic movement has produced few results. President Liamine Zeroual, appointed by the military last January, when a regime-sponsored reconciliation conference failed, has had contacts with jailed Islamic figures. But they have proved fruitless so far, and some analysts fear his maneuvering room is limited by hard-liners in the military.
The U.S. contacts with Algeria's Islamists have taken place with exiled figures in Washington and Germany, and administration policy makers hope to use them to forge a moresustainable approach to the region's Islamic movements. In the past, attempts at dialogue with the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas and with Egypt's Gamaat Islamiya were so controversial that the State Department was forced to break off contacts when they became public.
For all the alarms it has set off, the crisis in Algeria is almost entirely homemade, the product of a failed government and a fractured identity. Diplomats say the nation of 28 million is ruled by an elite of fewer than 5,000 people, for the most part those who seized power shortly after independence in 1962. Their one-party socialism, marked by personal connections and official corruption, created a sclerotic economy, and its underpinnings were knocked away when oil and natural gas prices plummeted in the mid-1980s. That has left a bloated public sector, double-digit inflation and a jobless rate of at least 30 percent. Most of the country's population is under 30, an entire generation for whom the system has failed and there is no hope.
Many Algerians have seized upon radical Islam as an alternative. "These are people who are thrown onto the streets, who have no housing, no work, no status in society, no money, nor even parents," says Said Saadi, a leading opponent of political Islam. "Maybe if I hadn't had a chance to go to school, I'd be [a fundamentalist] myself."
The economic crisis has exacerbated Algeria's identity crisis. Eight years of bitter warfare beginning in 1954 led to independence, but at a price of 250,000 dead and the flight of more than 1 million pieds noirs, or white colonists, and 132 years of French colonization left a deep imprint on society. Today, women wearing Islam's modest hejab head coverings emerge from bakeries with bundles of French-style baguettes.
Clash of civilizations. But while the Algerian elite remains instinctively Francophile, the poor majority has historically drawn its schooling, language and culture primarily from Arab sources. When the economy soured, the stage was set for a clash not just over power but between alien sectors of the same society. "I went to France as a student," says a young, French-speaking activist for the beleaguered democratic movement. "I came back, and I didn't recognize my country. Where did these people come from?"
The Clinton administration's search for moderate Islamic figures with whom to negotiate generates heated controversy. "There is no moderate Islamist," says Saadi, who heads one of the leading opposition parties. "A moderate Islamist is like a moderate Nazi or a moderate advocate of apartheid. ... There is no debate possible on the problem of fundamental liberties and precepts of a modern state."
Today, the Algerian Army and Islamic guerrillas are battling in the mountainous interior, and the populous north-central coast around Algiers is under nightly curfew. The capital's streets empty of pedestrians and traffic long before curfew, and gunfire erupts sporadically, even in the best neighborhoods. In the tough B
