The French intifada

The monastery at Tibhirine was founded in 1938 in the heart of a wild and mountainous region called Médéa, some ninety kilometres south of Algiers. Like other missions in North Africa, it had been established not with the purpose of bringing Christianity to the native population – the Vatican had long recognized that this was more or less impossible in Islamic North Africa – but rather as a place for meditation, reflection and spiritual study. The surrounding area, harsh and beautiful in equal measure, provided a suitable environment for leading the monastic life, close to nature and far from civilization.

The presence of the monks at Tibhirine had never been a source of controversy in the area: the local people admired them for their simplicity and piety, their fluent Arabic and knowledge of Islam, and they valued the medical expertise which they brought to this remote region. It was, however, the monks’ misfortune that this area was one of the strongholds of the GIA. This became clear in 1993, when twelve Catholic workers from Croatia had their throats cut in the vicinity of the monastery. The monks were then visited by the local chief of the GIA, a thug with a reputation for having killed 145 people, who asked for money and medicine. The monks refused to comply, but from now on they knew that their lives were in severe danger.

They had seen the fear on the faces of the country people and villagers, the tense convoys of motor vehicles which braved the so-called ‘triangle of death’ – the arc between Algiers and Médéa. They had seen buses and cars set alight and had first-hand experience of the brutality of local GIA bosses, who took it in turns to swagger into the monastery and demand some favour or other. Still, they voted to stay. This was not simply because they were exceptionally courageous, but because they saw it as their Christian duty never to back down in the face of evil. To capitulate would be to undo every act of charity they had ever performed.

As the winter of 1996 gave way to an early spring and the violence in Algeria escalated, the risk to the monks was growing every day. Between 1994 and 1996, nineteen Christians in religious orders were killed by Islamist factions. Djamel Zitouni had declared that it was the duty of every Muslim to ‘cleanse’ the country of Christians and Jews, who were plotting to undermine Islam. On 26 March the monks held a meeting of Lien de Paix, a group devoted to finding links between Islam and Christianity. On the following night, they were visited by the GIA.

The first they knew of this was when windows were smashed and the telephone wires cut. Twenty armed men then strolled into the monastery, casually pointing their guns at the monks they came across. They ransacked the building for medicines, cameras and anything else they could use. Seven of the monks were forced into stolen taxis, which were driven into the mountains, and then the group continued the journey on mules deeper into the wilderness.1

The kidnapped monks were held for fifty-six days. On 18 April the GIA issued a communiqué asking for the release of Abdelhak Layada, one of its founders. Two days later a cassette tape of the monks talking was delivered to the French Embassy in Algiers. There were no negotiations. On 23 April the GIA issued another communiqué which declared simply: ‘We have cut the monks’ throats.’ Their severed heads were found on 31 May. Their bodies were never recovered.

This was the largest whole-scale massacre of French nationals since the violence had begun in 1992, and the few French citizens left in Algeria began to fear more intensely for their safety. The French public, shaken by events, watched the televised scenes of the funeral Mass for the monks at Notre Dame d’Afrique in Algiers, where thousands of Algerians filed past the coffins to pay their respects. As the coffins were lowered for burial, one Algerian soldier cried out in Arabic: ‘These men loved God and Algeria more than any of us.’ On Pentecost Sunday a Mass was held at Notre-Dame in Paris; as part of the ceremony, the Archbishop of Paris snuffed out seven candles which had been brought from Tibhirine. And bells rang out across France.

Behind the rituals and spectacle of death and mourning, there were mysteries, however. The Catholic Church had been seeking a way to negotiate with the GIA during the crisis, but complained they had found their efforts inexplicably hampered by the French Embassy in Algiers. Some elements in the French intelligence services suspected collusion between the Algerian secret services and the GIA. The strategic value of this bloodbath, however, was never quite clear. French intelligence suspected that the kidnapping might have been intended to undermine the Algerian government and reinforce the power of the army. The FIS in exile claimed that the kidnapping was organized by Algerian Special Forces to raise tensions between Paris and Algiers and to teach the French to stay out of the internal politics of Algeria.

The French foreign minister, Hervé de Charette, went to Algeria on 31 July for an official visit, aiming to build bridges between Algiers and Paris. As part of his mission, Charette met the Bishop of Oran, Pierre Claverie, a pied noir whose family had been in Algeria for four generations and who was an outspoken critic of the secrecy, lies and murder which had engulfed Algeria. Not long after the minister’s departure, the bishop (who had no doubt shared his views with Charette) was killed by a car bomb. The Algerian government condemned the killing and blamed Islamist insurgents. Other observers noted that there were no known armed groups in operation in Oran, and that this was a carefully planned, sophisticated operation well beyond the expertise of the known Islamist gangs.

Something like the truth about the killing of the monks emerged much later in the French newspaper Libération in 2002, which published the testimony of a former Algerian intelligence officer, Abdelkader Tigha, who had been involved in infiltrating armed groups of Islamists. The story was that the monks had been kidnapped by the GIA, led by Djamel Zitouni, who had taken them to his base in the caves at Tala Acha. The government had wanted revenge on the monks because they were alleged to have given medical aid to ‘terrorists’ from the GIA. So, up to a point, the kidnapping was under the direct control of the Algerian secret services. However, Zitouni had fallen out with a rival GIA group, independent of the secret services, who had demanded that he hand over the monks. Zitouni himself was conveniently killed in an attempt to seize back the monks, who were then clumsily killed by the GIA.

By 1996 nobody had a clear sense of what was really happening in Algeria. This was true of the French government, who, through diplomacy and intelligence work, were being lured deeper into a conflict they had no control over and which they did not really understand. As winter turned to spring, Algeria was caught in a terrible vortex of violence, which seemed as unstoppable as it was insane. President Zéroual was determined to hold on to power at all costs in the elections which were scheduled for June 1997. In the run-up to the elections, horror was piled upon horror, with massacres reported in villages across the country. Foreign reporters could not easily gain access to these areas and relied on the government for information, which, they realized, was all too often disinformation. Rumours abounded that the government was behind some if not all of the massacres, implementing a classic, deadly strategy to terrify Algerians into turning away from the Islamists.

Perhaps the most grotesque event of all was the massacre in September 1997 at Bentalha, a small town on the Mitidja plain, some twenty kilometres south of Algiers. At around 11.30 p.m. on 22 September, around a hundred men entered the town, some wearing military uniform, others wearing tunics, carrying knives and axes. They banged on doors, shouting that they were the military and ordering the inhabitants to open up. If the villagers didn’t respond, they blew up the doors with TNT or hacked them open with axes.

The men had a list of names, but they killed everyone they came across. It was a dark night: space and time were suspended in an orgy of murder. The killers seemed to revel in the balletic drama of their tasks – mutilating the corpses, wiring them with explosives, throwing babies into ovens. ‘We are coming,’ they hissed in the blackened streets. ‘We will cut all of your throats. It is our duty.’

The killing went on for six hours. Before dawn broke, the drivers of the trucks which had brought the men to the town sounded the horns as a signal to leave. The murderers made their way to the edges of Bentalha, using children to carry the loot, hacking them to death when the job was done. The night’s work left four hundred dead. What shocked the journalists who arrived later that day, driven there by the government to witness Islamist terror at first hand, was the sheer scale of the butchery. The town was a slaughterhouse, the streets running with blood and everywhere stinking of shit and death.

Who did this? The government blamed ‘evil terrorists’, but none of the Algerian or foreign journalists on the ground were able to find definitive evidence that this was the work of the GIA or any other armed group. In any case, Bentalha was known to be home to many families who were sympathetic to the GIA. The government’s description of who had done what and why was unclear.

In 2000 Nesroullah Yous, a native of Bentalha who moved to Paris after the attack, published a book called Qui a tué à Bentalha? (Who killed at Bentalha?). Yous described how men silently made their way into the town through the outlying alleys, some of them wearing combat fatigues and others dressed in kachabia, the Afghan-style clothes worn by Islamists. Some wore hoods or beards and they spoke in the accent of Eastern Algeria. They were armed with automatic rifles.

Men and women sought safety and refuge together. A group gathered in Yous’ house and began to fortify the walls and doors, throwing home-made firebombs at the killers. They held out as long as they could but were eventually overcome. Yous found himself at the centre of the carnage:

Those who didn’t want to follow the criminals were executed with axe blows or were thrown to the ground to have their throats cut. Suddenly I saw one of the killers tear a child from his mother. The woman tried to hold the child but he hit her with a machete. He took the child by the foot and, making a half turn, smashed its head against a concrete pillar. The others followed suit, gripped with a frenetic laughter.2

There were rumours that the killers took cocaine and other drugs before setting out to do their work. This explains the viciousness, the laughter and the terrible theatricality of these actions.

Yous, like other victims and journalists, asked why the massacre had been allowed to happen only a few hundred kilometres from a military base. Why did searchlights seem to light the way for the attackers? How did they have such good local knowledge? How was it that the local militia who normally guarded the town had been called away on the orders of the local chief of police? The accumulated details in Yous’ account were compelling: if this was not prima facie evidence of government collusion, it was still a case to answer. Le pouvoir, then as now, remained silent on the matter. Ordinary Algerians, whatever their political views, now felt as if they were surrounded by demons on all sides.