17

The Algerian Intifada

In Algiers on the morning of 5 October 1988, groups of young men began to gather in the districts of Bab-el-Oued, El Biar and Belcourt. Most of them were local, but there was also a sizeable contingent of country lads, who spoke with a different accent from the algérois. They had no leaders and belonged to no organization but were coming together with one single aim: to march into the centre of the city to show how much they hated the government. Some of them carried stones, sticks, machetes or iron bars, knowing that the police or the army would give them no quarter. As they set off many of them drew scarves over their faces, partly in imitation of the rioters from the French banlieues they had seen on television, and partly in homage to the young Palestinians they had seen taking on the Israeli army – and in their minds the whole world – in the Palestinian intifada, which had been declared some twelve months earlier.1

This was a generation which had known nothing but poverty and boredom. Since the late 1970s the Algerian economy had been in free fall. As the population grew larger and younger, the government – now led by President Chadli, who had come into power on the death of Boumédienne in 1978 – had imposed austerity measures which had made unemployment the defining fact of life for Algerian youth in the 1980s. Emigration was an impossible dream if you had no money or connections. Everybody knew that Algeria was rich, thanks to the oilfields, and nobody believed the government when it said that the hike in oil prices meant that the cost of bread and sugar had to rise. But no one knew exactly where the money went; people speculated that it went to a corrupt government and its cronies, known as ‘le pouvoir’ (the Power).

The packs of young men arrived by bus, taxi or on foot, and by mid-morning had converged on the city centre, coming together at the head of the rue Didouche Mourad, the long, elegant spiralling street that takes you down to the heart of Algiers and the Grande Poste. The authorities had known that trouble was coming, but they did not know what form it would take. Tensions had been rising across Algeria for months – that summer, in the Aurès, women from peasant families had led street protests against water rationing. The local police had openly clubbed them down and then thrown them into jail. In Annaba, in early September, striking workers had deliberately wrecked hundreds of refrigerators on their way to be exported to Tunisia. ‘Why should we make them, when we can’t afford to buy them or even buy any food to put in them?’ said one striking militant.

On 4 October the word had gone out that there was to be a general strike in Algiers. The big joke was that it was hard to strike when you were chronically unemployed. Still, the message was passed on by word of mouth and on tatty Xeroxed pamphlets, which would land you a beating and a prison sentence if the police caught you with one.

The violence started as soon as the first wave of young men began to march down the rue Didouche Mourad. None of what happened had been planned, but for the protesters the very sight of shop fronts, advertising hoardings, travel agencies, fashionable arcades and cafés – all mean and wretched by First World standards – was too much to stop the anger rising to their throats. These were the most visible emblems of what le pouvoir had stolen from the people, things which no one else could dream of touching or possessing. ‘The President is Killing our Youth!’ and ‘Young People Stand Up!’ the battle cries went up. The anger made everyone fearless – they threw themselves on to the bonnets of police cars and threatened the small groups of armed police, who did not know what to do.

The city was suddenly wide open to these angry young rioters and they did not hesitate to rip it apart. Windows were smashed, cars torched and, within an hour or so, as the marchers hit the Grande Poste, the centre of Algiers was in flames. The targets included the Blue Note nightclub (known for its prostitutes as much as for its Western music) and the shopping centre at Riad El-Feth. This was a grim, concrete 1970s-style mall which was supposed to be a celebration Algerian modernity; for this reason it was built alongside the monument to the martyrs for independence on the heights above the city (when I visited it was mostly empty, bleak and smelling slightly of damp). As fire and smoke wreathed the lower floors, on a nearby government building a cynic had replaced the Algerian flag with an empty couscous sack. It was a forlorn image which perfectly captured the mood that had propelled the uprising in the first place.

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Over the next few days, these scenes were replicated in towns and cities across Algeria. The enemy was President Chadli. In the ten years since he had come to power, Chadli had presided over a country which had lost its way: the FLN government had ossified into a decadent and pampered élite which let its own people starve; the liberators of the Algerians had become their jailers. Special hatred was reserved for Chadli’s wife Halima, who – according to popular folklore – had cut his balls off. The events of October 1988 were a very male affair, characterized by roaming gangs of young men eager for a fight. They made up songs and rhymes in Arabic which endlessly made Chadli out to be a queer, a eunuch or a thief, or all three at once.

Afters days of chaos in Algeria, the army’s response was vicious. Chadli declared a state of siege – something which had not happened even during the worst moments of the War of Independence. All civilian authorities were placed under military control. The army was unleashed. Organized death squads patrolled the streets and fired at will into crowds, at individuals, into mosques. The death toll rose by the hour. There were fresh reports of torture. At the same time, staple foods which had been unavailable – oil, flour, semolina – suddenly reappeared in the shops. For nearly everyone, this only confirmed the wicked duplicity of the government.

The demonstrations continued. After Friday prayers on 7 October, a group of about 8,000 believers, chanting ‘Islamic Republic’ and ‘God is Great’, took on the police in the streets of Belcourt. These were not the angry street kids who had started the rebellion, but fighters led by known Islamic radicals: the first public sight of Islamists organizing against the authorities on the streets of Algeria.

On Monday 10 October, as public anger rose to a crescendo, a march of 20,000 people orchestrated by the Islamist imam Ali Behdadj marched down to the sea front, where they were met by military blockades. The Islamists flung insults at the soldiers – many of whom were semi-literate peasants – calling them worse than Jews or Zionists. Shots were fired, then there was tear gas. By now 500 people had been killed during the revolt. This stand-off between Islamists and the military was the turning point when a political crisis gathered the deadly momentum that would take Algeria to civil war.

‘Everything is Broken’

This moment had been a long time coming. For the previous decade Chadli had played a dangerous game with the rising tide of Islamists in Algeria. On the one hand, he wanted to show Algeria off to the world as a modern, dynamic nation, but he also courted the Islamists, partly because he needed their political support and partly as a way of controlling so-called ‘street Islam’ – a concoction of superstition, magic, notions of the evil eye and other folklore. This was obviously a threat to official state Islam, and allying himself with the Islamists was a way of bringing it under some kind of jurisdiction.

The essential flaw in this strategy, however, was that Islamist ideology was at odds with the easy-going forms of Islam indigenous to Algeria. Much Islamist thought and practice was based on Wahhabism, a puritanical import from Saudi Arabia that was opposed to all forms of Western modernity, from dancing and drinking to gender rights, consumerist culture and democracy. Wahhabism was a movement on the move; its clerics talked about the necessity for the rebirth of Islam as the supreme religion in the ‘post-millennial age’ (by which they meant the collapse of the West). Wahhabism is indeed a chiliastic version of Islam – a religion in which believers scorn the world as it is and prepare for the world to come. As such, it is the perfect theological underpinning of the ‘political’ Islam of Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brothers, whose mission is to rid the world of Jahiliya (barbarity) in the ‘Lands of Islam’.

One of the more absurd confrontations between the Islamist movement and Western values took place at the El Bey University in Constantine in 1985. At the annual Islamic Book Fair, the organizers set up an exhibition on Punks and New Romantics to terrify Algerian youth with the dangers of bisexuality and drugs. Most of the images were taken from French pop magazines and were pinned up alongside texts that warned of the chilling and degrading effects of listening to music made by homosexuals. The featured artists included, predictably, Boy George, David Bowie, Soft Cell and the Thompson Twins. A special hatred was reserved, however, for Marilyn, the one-hit wonder and junkie pal of Boy George. His photo – not so much androgynous as quite feminine and sexy – deeply troubled young Algerian males, whose macho stance was compromised by this ‘man-woman’.2

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The contempt for Western pop music, at least in this softened form, was not solely due to Islamist objections. Most young people in Algeria in the 1980s were not Islamists, but were simply disaffected, trapped in a city and a country that felt like a prison. The false promises of Western pop music, from Michael Jackson down, belonged to the ‘chi-chis’, the gilded youth of Algeria who had some family or political connection to le pouvoir, and who flaunted their wealth and privilege with their fast cars, fashionable clothes and international travel. Most galling of all for ordinary Algerian young men, the chi-chis (nicknamed for their posh and effete way of speaking) had access to Europeanized girls who offered glamour and easy sex.

During this period, the streets of downtown Algiers were also thronged in the daytime by so-called ‘hittistes’. These were young men, usually with university qualifications, who spent most of the day propped up against a wall (hit, in colloquial Arabic), smoking, chatting, hustling. The hittistes had their own subculture – they spoke in a slang made up of French, Spanish and Arabic words, engaged in low-level criminality, dealing in drugs or trabendo (contraband goods), smoking hash and drinking zombreto, a potentially lethal cocktail of fruit juice and illegal industrial alcohol.3 Their code was summed up in the word zaguet, meaning ‘everything is broken’. They measured out their lives in what was forbidden, or, in Algerian Arabic, la yadzouz. The hittistes hated the chi-chis and went out of their way to rob them or insult them, a small way of getting back at le pouvoir.

These rebels also had their own music. This was ‘raï music’ (the slang word raï means ‘argument’ or ‘opinion’), which had its origins in Oran in the 1930s. It was traditionally made by chebs (from shabab, meaning ‘young’), who sang about social or political issues, rather than by the sheikhs (meaning ‘old’), who sang about love or religion. By the 1980s, raï was a fully fledged underground movement with its own heroes, such as Cheb Hasni or Cheb Khaled, who toured a circuit of clubs, selling home-made cassettes and attacking the government in their songs. It was the Algerian equivalent of rap, reggae or punk, given an extra edge by the politics and the raucous, hard electric sound of the music.

The football terraces were one of the few public spaces for expressing anti-government feeling. The supporters of teams in Algiers, Oran and Constantine took their cue from Spanish football and the rivalries between Madrid and Barcelona – the Catalan team was the model of a team expressing contempt for the ruling state. Violence was inevitable and frequent between the poor young men who followed football, but it was also easily contained by the heavy-handed and well-armed police force; for now, at least, neither music nor football were considered seriously subversive by le pouvoir.4

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However, beyond the streets, terraces and the illegal drinking clubs where zombreto and raï came together, the forces were gathering which, within a few short years, would see Algeria brought to its knees and bring North African terrorism back to the streets of Paris in the mid-1990s.

From the outside, this swift fall from grace seemed incomprehensible. Despite the chaos of the 1980s, until the riots of 1988 Algeria had been the strong leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, whose global authority and status had helped bring back the US hostages from Iran in 1981. With its prestige then high in the West and the Third World, Algeria was the only country which could have accomplished this diplomatic feat. Algeria’s influence in the Arab world, and indeed in the post-colonial world, came from the fact that independence had been forged in a revolutionary movement – a mixture of Islam, Socialism and, most potently, Fanonism. This was the political philosophy derived from Frantz Fanon, which had made the quest for ‘authenticity’ the defining feature of the state. By the 1980s, as the FLN stagnated and decayed, Fanonism, like its corollary in the Soviet Union, had become a justification for privileging national identity over ethnic identity, the collective over the individual. This was, of course, legitimized by the recent revolutionary past and enforced with violence if necessary.

The breaking point for the Algerian government came in 1992. There had been a brief period of reform and political openness in 1989, when Chadli had allowed multi-party elections for the first time. Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, Algeria suddenly became the focus for optimism as parties were formed from across the political spectrum, from Feminists to Islamists.

Among the new parties, one emerged that had the popular support to threaten the government. This was the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), a hard-line Islamist party led by two men: Abassi Madani, a veteran of the War of Independence, with a PhD from the University of London, and Ali Benhadj, a teacher in Bab-el-Oued who had been a key figure in the revolt of 1988. The stance of the FIS was to replace ‘popular sovereignty with divine sovereignty’. All of sudden, as support for the FIS grew and they accelerated towards power, the hard-fought-for Republic of Algeria stood poised to dissolve into an Iranian-style theocracy.

Support for the FIS came from the poorest in society, who were sickened by the corruption they saw around them: the most literal form of al-Jahiliya (pagan barbarity). They believed Algeria to be cursed, because the people did not follow religion. The answer was simple and preached in mosques across the nation – the FIS would deliver Algeria back to the Algerians and its religious mission. Most powerfully and convincingly, the FIS argued that parliamentary democracy had been invented by the French to confuse Muslims and make them deviate from the true path of righteousness. They were prepared to take part in democratic elections, but only to destroy the concept of democracy itself.

The FIS were violently anti-French. In their rhetoric, the French were crusaders, sometimes Jews, but always waging war against Islam. The French fought this war not just with arms but with culture. On the one hand, this took the form of Algerian writers and journalists expressing themselves in French – the heroic author Kateb Yacine was a particular hate figure for the FIS. On the other hand, the FIS also hated the French pop culture that was imported into Algeria on satellite television; they railed against game shows, advertising and soft porn as the work of Satan and the French. Most of all, the FIS targeted women who wore Western fashions and make-up, who read books and had careers: this, they argued, was how the French would seduce and weaken the Algerian male.

Unsurprisingly, the FIS attracted precisely the bored, angry and repressed young men who had no access to Western pleasures anyway. As followers of the FIS, they imagined themselves as warriors for Islam, taking on the forces of the French and the Zionists, terms which were now applied to anybody in Algeria who was not an Islamist and a follower of the FIS. The most popular figure was Ali Benhadj, who had the stern charisma of the true fanatic, and whose language, fiery and imperious, spoke directly to the young men who wanted to go into battle for Allah. From the outset, Benhadj evoked armed struggle as the way forward: ‘We do not underestimate the value of arms,’ he said in 1991; ‘the impious pouvoir and the miscreants do not deserve to be killed with bullets, for during the war of liberation one cut the throats of the traitors, one did not shoot them.’5

The FIS cause was further bolstered by the Gulf War of 1990–91. Officially, Algeria supported the anti-Iraq coalition, but on the streets Saddam Hussein was an anti-Western superhero, defying the forces of Imperialism and Zionism. The FIS described the Algerian army as a eunuch and the government as apostates. Soon all Algerians who did not support the FIS were denounced as apostates and as such became targets for execution.

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It was against this background that the Algerian government lurched uneasily into elections in 1991. An announcement was made on 15 October that there would be two rounds of voting – in December 1991 and January 1992. The stakes could not have been higher. In the months leading up to the election, the FLN was weak and growing weaker, while the mainstream opposition party, the FFS (Front des Forces Socialistes), was increasingly despised by pious Muslims as the voice of the Francophone middle class. Meanwhile, the FIS argued that to vote against them was to vote against God.

This rapidly deteriorating situation was alarming to the army, who began to envisage Algeria as a fully fledged Islamic state – effectively Iran on the Mediterranean. The fears of middle-class Algerians were fuelled by constant intimidation from the FIS: wherever they could, they forced women to wear veils, banned music, and launched a wholescale assault on the nature of everyday life in Algeria.

In an attempt to decapitate the FIS, the army arrested Benhadj and Madani on 30 June 1991, on the grounds that they were plotting to bring down the Algerian state. This much was true – the policy of the FIS was to use democratic methods to bring down democracy. The problem was that under le pouvoir the concept of democracy had been degraded, as the morale of most Algerian people, especially the unemployed youth and impoverished working classes, ebbed away. As more and more young men were locked up, the country seemed more than ever like a prison camp rather than an independent nation.

The arrest of Benhadj and Madani only increased the prevailing bitterness. Young men began to make for the hills, where they started to train as an organized resistance force. Between boredom and poverty on the one hand, and armed struggle on the other, the choice was clear. By the end of the summer, the mountains of Zbarbar to the south-east of Algiers were dense with fledgling armed groups and known cynically to the algérois as ‘Zbarbaristan’.6

If anything, Benhadj became even more influential in prison. His tracts were smuggled out and distributed in their tens of thousands, the voice of a real martyr and hero. At a massive FIS demonstration on 1 November in the Place des Martyrs, a Koran was held aloft on a chair to show that only God could occupy the space of president. In a PR master stroke, Benhadj’s five-year-old son addressed the crowd. As soon as he became visible, the crowd was transported by a wave of religious emotion and the child’s voice was drowned out by cries of ‘God is Great!’

During this period the atmosphere in Algiers for non-Islamist Algerians was tense and occasionally terrifying. The unemployed young men who had found their vocation in the FIS now dressed differently – they did not wear modern ‘Western’ clothes, nor traditional Algerian outfits, but adopted the ‘Afghan look’: short trousers, tidy beards, Pakistani-style headgear. They intimidated the middle classes, who were now identified by their European-style clothes, by making throat-cutting gestures and a hissing sound. Journalists, schoolteachers, ordinary businessmen – none of them rich or properly corrupt like le pouvoir – were the ‘near enemy’, who had already been sentenced to death. The elections, in the Islamists’ imagination, would provide the mandate to carry out the executions.

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In the event, the FIS won a stunning victory in the first round on 1 December 1991. The figures were overwhelming – they took 188 of the 231 seats. There were 199 seats to be won in the second round; if the FIS repeated the performance, they would hold a clear two-thirds majority in parliament.

The non-Islamist population of Algeria now began to understand the nightmare that was unfolding in front of them. On 3 January 1992, 300,000 people took to the streets chanting ‘Neither police state, nor Islamic state, but a democratic state!’ By this time, the army generals had already taken their decision. On 11 January, four days before the scheduled elections, President Chadli publicly resigned on television. Power was transferred to the Haut Conseil de Sécurité (HCE), the High Security Council – a coalition of senior politicians and military men. The head of the HCE was named as Mohammed Boudiaf, one of the great leaders of the uprising of 1954, who was cajoled back to Algeria from his retirement in Morocco by senior generals. Effectively, the army had now taken power and the next Algerian civil war had begun.