18

The New War with France

The immediate response in the region to the army takeover of the Algerian government was relief. In Libya Colonel Gaddafi welcomed the move, while President Mubarak in Egypt warned the international community to stay out of the fray. Closer to home, President Ben Ali of Tunisia fulsomely approved of the new regime; the Tunisian newspaper Al-Sabah, a propaganda mouthpiece for Ben Ali, described the manoeuvre as ‘a last-minute change of direction by a train heading for the abyss’.1 All of these governments raised the spectre of Islamism to justify their hold on power, and made it clear that this was a game that the Western powers could neither control nor understand.

The coup d’état had, however, a special resonance in France, which now had a population of some three million Muslims of Algerian origin. Opinion was divided in this community about how to respond. Algerians who were frequent visitors to the country reported back on the fear and panic that had gripped the nation; although many older Algerians in France privately despaired of the corruption of le pouvoir, they did not want an Islamist state. A younger, harsher generation in the banlieues of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles and other major cities listened keenly to imams who had recently arrived from Algeria and who declared that they would die for the FIS as martyrs. The French government continued to give visas to key members of the FIS, both hard-line and more moderate elements, with the rationale that this allowed the French secret services to infiltrate and monitor Islamist traffic between France and Algeria. The reality was that the FIS was now gaining a foothold in mainland France, where in most mosques they claimed the war against the generals was also a war against the West, against Jahiliya – the barbarity which they could see every day on the streets of French cities, which was both an insult and a humiliation to the true Muslim.

The French government, aware of the sensitivities among the Muslim population, watched events in Algeria nervously but said little. François Mitterrand encouraged ordinary Algerians to ‘take up the threads of democratic life’ as soon as they could, but this didn’t really mean anything. The ambiguous nature of the official French response was compounded by the fact that one of the leading figures in the new government was Sheikh Tedjin Haddam, rector of the Paris mosque and perceived by most radicals to be a tame, Frenchified Muslim. In the meantime, the French set about restructuring Algeria’s 25 billion dollars of debt, effectively underwriting the new government. Within two months the money had been so badly handled (or stolen) that food prices again began to rise beyond the reach of even middle-class Algerians.

The French were furious that the money, which was meant to provide social stability, had been so easily squandered. So, too, was Boudiaf, an honest broker who saw his role as returning dignity to the revolution he had fought for. Boudiaf immediately announced a high-level anti-corruption campaign – beginning with the arrest of a senior general and the liberalization of the oil and gas sectors, which provided most of Algeria’s wealth. This, however, was to effectively write and sign his own death warrant, as dark forces in Algeria now began to awaken, concerned above all with preserving a deeply entrenched system of bribes and state theft.

*   *   *

To this day nobody knows who organized the killing of Boudiaf. The simple facts are that shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 29 June 1992, Boudiaf began to address an audience in a conference hall in Annaba and at the very moment when he used the word ‘Islam’, a grenade was thrown behind him, exploding with a loud crack; within seconds, in a blast of gunfire, Boudiaf was shot, his body slumped over a table as he lay dying. The audience cowered on the floor, taking cover where they could. A terrified silence hung in the air for almost a minute. All of this was broadcast live on television to a stunned nation.2

The official line was that the killer was a deranged Islamist who had acted alone but whose actions showed how much the nation needed a strong government. He was named as Lembarek Boumaarifi, a middle-ranking army officer who had been part of Boudiaf’s security force. He confessed on national television, claiming that he was acting on his own conscience. Nobody was convinced. For one thing, as the newspapers pointed out, there were glaring lapses in security around Boudiaf that morning which made the murder appear to have been quite carefully choreographed. Most tellingly, the armed guards around Boudiaf failed to act when the shooting started and were outside the conference hall. They did not react to the shooting, even as Lembarek Boumaarifi was fleeing the scene. A senior officer did, however, manage to shoot and wound the only policeman who had pursued Boumaarifi. Even more sinister was the fact that there were no other ministers at an important conference where there would have normally been representation at the senior level.

Straight away journalists began to speculate about whether the killing had been organized within the government. Their suspicions were compounded by the fact that there was no autopsy on Boudiaf’s body. At the funeral at Al-Elia, hundreds of Islamists gathered at the gates, chanting anti-government slogans and proclaiming the greatness of God. Everybody talked about how ‘they’, le pouvoir, had killed him. Boudiaf had been the last hope of a corrupt and broken nation, which now splintered visibly into Islamist and pro-government factions. Many middle-class and professional Algerians started to plan a life abroad as the shadow of civil war loomed large over the towns and cities. In the run-down areas, particularly in Algiers, young men began to gather and plan revenge on the state which hated them. Their leaders were in jail, but this did not stop them arguing and plotting. The next move was to retreat into the purity of the mountains – like the Prophet – away from the impious life of the plains. They did this in the summer of 1992, moving in small, disciplined groups to begin weapons training.

*   *   *

The first shot of the new war against France was fired on 26 August at Houari Boumédienne airport in Algiers. This was one of the busiest days of the year for the airport, when thousands of Algerians were packing up after their summer holidays and returning to France. In the morning the airport authorities received several calls warning of a bomb; the last was received at 10 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, as a hundred or so passengers were making for the airport terminal, a huge bomb exploded, ripping through the building. Ten people were killed and 128 people injured. Over the mess of dismembered corpses, witnesses called for the death of whoever had done this.

The problem was that nobody really knew who had planted the bomb. The Algerian government, now under the presidency of General Liamine Zéroual, immediately blamed Islamist factions, as did many ordinary Algerians. In the event some fifty-five Islamists were found guilty of involvement. Privately, however, the French intelligence services wondered about the incongruities of the case – the botched warnings, the lack of official response – and, most importantly, the bigger political game that the bombing served. Put simply, it was cautiously and discreetly argued in some diplomatic quarters that the bombing at Algiers airport was the excuse the government needed to move into a new, more repressive phase in the war against the Islamists.

One of the problems that the government faced was that the Islamist movement was by now not a single organization with a straightforward command structure. By driving the FIS underground, they had unwittingly caused it to break up into small, agile groups which had no formal connection to each other and so were almost impossible to monitor and police. However, this fragmented ‘army’ comprised some 22,000 men: a real and visible threat to the state – a state made up of ‘monkeys, Jews and Crusaders’, in the language of Islamist doctrine.

Action Heroes

The Islamist groups came together under a French name, the Groupe Islamiste Armé (GIA). It had no central committee but instead operated as a matrix of autonomous units, each with its own lethal speciality, such as placing car bombs, or murdering journalists, university teachers or government officials. However, the GIA was unified by a guiding theory: that the dream of an Islamic state was under threat from the Hizb Franca, the Party of France. In Islamist doctrine, these were the new harkis or pieds noirs: the Francophone Algerian élite who spoke the language of democracy but whose goal was to colonize the ‘real’ Muslim Algeria with European ideas and values.

The defining feature of the GIA’s war was its ultra-violent methods. The terrorists did not simply kill people but turned the murders into a form of performance or ritual. As in the original War of Independence, throats were slit and heads cut off. But now spectacular refinements were introduced: often the victim’s tongue was cut off and tied around a severed head (this was in homage to a technique employed by Colombian drug cartels); heads were also impaled on poles at crossroads and along the roadside, where trees and bushes were draped in entrails as a grotesque and chilling decoration. Policemen were welcomed home by the sight of their wife’s head hanging from a pole by its hair. The carnage carried a message: Algerians who did not fight for the Islamist cause were non-Muslims and deserved to die.3

There was also a cruel logic which impelled the Islamists ever deeper into the spiral of extreme violence. It was partly driven by the social background of the young men who joined the GIA – they were the unemployed and dispossessed inhabitants of the backstreets and banlieues of the big cities. Like the fighting on the football terraces, which had been the first act of defiance for many of these young men, competitive rivalry with other gangs rather than organized revenge against the government motivated them. As such, each group within the GIA sought to outdo its rivals in how far they were prepared to go in ‘killing Devils’ in the name of God.

The GIA fighters often identified themselves with action heroes such as Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone, and in the big cities sported fashionable jeans, slicked-back hair and an insolent manner in the face of authority. Some became the stuff of legend, with nicknames to match their ruthlessness; in Algiers these included Lyes ‘l’égorgeur’ (the throat-cutter) or ‘Flicha’ (the arrow), so-called for his elegant swiftness in killing cops and whose name soon became a terrace chant. But murder was not just fashionable: the very act of killing also induced a sense of ecstasy and purification as powerful as any drug. These men were warriors who had absolute righteousness on their side in their battle with the forces of evil. And the most evil force of all was the French.4

It was inevitable that the violence should reach France. This much had been presaged by regular attacks on French citizens in Algeria. No less significant was the way the French language had become a divisive weapon which split Algerian society: as the stand-off between the Islamists and the government became more tense, the choice of which language you used on the street in Algeria – Arabic, Berber or French – could be an act of life or death.

The first attempt to attack the French mainland began on 24 December 1994. At Algiers airport four armed GIA men, disguised as cleaners, managed to sneak on to an Air France airbus destined for Orly. There were 240 passengers on board, forty of whom were French citizens. The hijackers began by collecting passports and then shot three passengers – an Algerian policeman, a Vietnamese diplomat and the cook from the French Embassy – to show they meant business. They demanded that the FIS leaders be released from house arrest.

Their plan was to fly to France and crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower, but for the next two days the plane remained on the runway in Algiers as the French and Algerian governments sought a way out of the stand-off. Initially, the Algerians refused any offer of military assistance from the French, but eventually, as the tension mounted, they gave in and allowed the plane to be flown to Marseilles. After a day of frustrating negotiations, the French Special Forces launched an assault on the cockpit and at the rear of the plane, shooting the GIA gunmen dead in minutes.

The violence came to Paris in July 1995, when Abdelbaki Sahraoui was killed in the rue Myrha. Sahraoui was in his eighties, a fluent French speaker, the imam of the local mosque and a founding member of the FIS. He had been in Paris since 1991 and travelled regularly to London to meet members of the FIS in exile. At around 6.30 p.m. on 11 July, two men walked into the mosque and began praying. After prayers they asked to speak to Sahraoui. They met in a small office at the back. Within a few minutes, one of them had taken a rifle out of a bag and shot Sahraoui dead. The mosque was normally under the watchful eye of the French intelligence services, but today they were strangely absent. A friend of Sahraoui tried to stop the men leaving the mosque but was shot dead in turn. The killers ran out on to the street, where they hijacked a car at gunpoint, before abandoning it a few kilometres up the road.

With Sahraoui’s assassination, the French secret services had lost a vital link to the FIS high command. Most intelligent observers blamed the GIA, who no longer heeded their elders, and who had been condemned by Sahraoui for their excesses. In London, at the notorious Finsbury mosque, Abu Hamza proudly declared, ‘We killed him because he was a democrat.’ In Paris, the faithful at the rue Myrha blamed the murder on the Algerian secret services. The political consequences were what really mattered, however: Sahraoui had been the guarantor that the war would not come to France; his killing was a declaration that this was now precisely what would happen next. In Algiers, Paris and London, the GIA distributed tracts which showed the Eiffel Tower in flames. They now began actively to seek recruits among the Algerian population of France, sending willing volunteers to train in Afghanistan.

Parisians’ fears deepened on the discovery of two bomb factories in the same district of Paris. Then, just two weeks after Sahraoui’s death, on 25 July, a bomb exploded at the Saint-Michel metro station in the heart of the Latin Quarter of Paris. The bomb went off at the height of the rush hour on the RER line, the train which connects the suburbs to the city. Ten people were killed and fifty-seven injured. On the evening news that night, the French nation was confronted with images of bodies being carried across the familiar café terrasses of one of the most popular tourist spots in the world.5

The bombing at Saint-Michel was followed three weeks later by a bomb at the Arc de Triomphe. This time seventeen people were injured. By now there were troops on the streets and the fear was clearly visible on the faces of ordinary Parisians on the metro and in other public places. Nor was this a good time to be North African in Paris. For those who remembered the last Algerian war, Muslims were once again the enemy. ‘I am not a racist normally, but in the summer of 1995 I hated the Arab faces that I saw, even people I had known for years,’ I was told by one Parisian, a respectable left-leaning teacher. The sense of unreality was heightened by a bizarre note which had been sent to the French ambassador in Algiers, calling on President Jacques Chirac to convert to Islam, signed by the alleged head of the GIA.

On the surface, it seemed that the GIA’s strategy was to export the Algerian war to French soil so that the French people would quickly tire of terror and put pressure on the government to sever its close links with le pouvoir in Algeria.6 This strategy was a total failure; if anything, the French were at pains to reinforce le pouvoir as a counterweight to the rise of Islamist influence in France. Another more nuanced theory was that the GIA had been infiltrated by the Algerian secret services, who organized the terror campaign in France to secure even more robust French support for the Algerian government. None of this has ever been proved. In any case, these strategies would not have concerned the foot soldiers of the terrorist groups in France, who fought out of rage and despair.

Orphans

On 27 September 1995 a group of mushroom pickers in Malval, a small wood on the hills above Lyons, reported seeing a wanted man. His name was Khaled Kelkal and he had been identified as the mastermind behind all the terrorist attacks that summer, including the murder of Sahraoui. His image – a startlingly accurate police drawing which captured angular, angry features – had been distributed all over France.

The police tried to apprehend him and were met by gunfire from Karim Koussa, Kelkal’s friend and accomplice. Kelkal slipped away, only to be tracked down two days later by police in the suburb of Vaugneray, just outside Lyons. His pursuit and capture were filmed by a crew from the TV channel France 2, and the killing was shown on prime-time news the following day. The police claimed that, although Kelkal had already been shot in the legs, he aimed his weapon at them. France’s entire population was able to listen to a senior police officer who instructed his men to shoot, saying, ‘Finish him off! Finish him off!’7

Kelkal immediately became a hero in the banlieues across France. This was not just because he had defied the police and the French state, but also because of his life story. He had been born in Algeria but came to France as a child, to the suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin. In 1984, at the age of thirteen, he had watched and joined in the first riots and ‘rodeos’ – learning that the police could be taken on and defeated on his home ground. He was clever and attended a good school, La Martinière Monplaisir de Lyon, but he soon drifted. Kelkal was partly influenced by his elder brother Nouredine (who would eventually serve a nine-year prison sentence for armed robbery), and felt alienated from his mainly white peers. He was a classic example of what young North Africans in the banlieues called a gris (literally a ‘grey’), meaning an immigrant who is caught between two cultures and is neither black nor white.

By the age of eighteen, Kelkal was serving time in prison for robbery. He was befriended by an Algerian cellmate called ‘Khélif’, an Islamist who had escaped prison in Algeria, only to find himself locked up in France. Khélif’s mission was to recruit young Algerians to the Islamist cause, promising them that this would allow them to find their true selves. The next step was to act on this discovery, fighting against France and its proxy in Algeria. Kelkal listened to all of this, began to study the Koran and Arabic (which he never quite mastered). On his release Kelkal returned to Vaulx-en-Velin a fully fledged radical; in his local mosque he made contact with a certain Ali Touchent, a hard-core Islamist who soon had Kelkal delivering guns and money on trips to Algeria. Kelkal felt that he had found meaning in his life, as well as excitement and glory. It was not long before Touchent convinced him of the need for military action in France.

By chance, Kelkal gave an interview in 1992 to a German sociologist, Dietmar Loch, who was writing his doctoral thesis on the youth of the French banlieues. In this interview Kelkal came across as an intelligent, sensitive, articulate and reflective young man. He was anguished about his place in French society. ‘There’s no place for me here,’ he said to Loch. He could only feel at home in Vaulx-en-Velin; the world outside – the city centre of Lyons – was a foreign country from which he was excluded on grounds of his class and race. ‘In the banlieue we are separated from France by a wall, an enormous wall.’8

Loch concluded that Kelkal’s bitterness came from disappointment: he sought dignity and recognition in French society but, at a crucial point in his adolescence, he felt rejected. Crime, prison and then Islam were the negative reflection of this society and the only context in which he could feel ‘at home’. By 1995, there was a whole generation of young men who felt like Kelkal on both sides of the Mediterranean, in Algeria and France.