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Extermination of the Algerian intelligentsia (1993-1998) - On the massacre of intellectuals by armed Islamists
Posted by mouradpreure on December 3, 2018
It can be considered by convention that the guerrilla war of Algerian Islamists actually begins February 13, 1992, date of the attack on the Bouzrina street (Casbah, Algiers), which killed the lives of six policemen, lured into an ambush. It is exactly one year and one month later, on March 14, 1993, that the first intellectual (Hafid Sanhadri, a member of the Ministry of Employment) falls under the murderous bullets of armed fundamentalists. And since then, the murders of artists and intellectuals continue until 1998, sometimes at a rate of several per month. This indicates the existence of a pre-established plan, with certified lists of intellectuals to be shot down, sorted because of their critical disposition against the Islamist ideology ...
Between 1993 and 1998, we witnessed the implementation of a real plan to exterminate Algerian intellectuals by armed Islamists of all stripes. It was a "programmed genocide". We did not only attack the French-speaking intellectuals, who were considered by them as an evil continuation of the French presence, but even to the Arabic speakers who made the sound of a different bell sound. A term of Afghan origin, loaded with negative values, was used to designate the members of the non-Islamist intelligentsia: they are "communists" ( chouyou'iyoune)! In the Islamist ideology, a "communist" represents the enemy par excellence, an enemy at once powerful and unjust, as were the Russians (communists) for the Muslim Afghans. But it is also an "atheist", a "secular" or an "apostate", which means indiscriminately in their eyes kafir (disbeliever), deserving to be executed for offense of disbelief. In addition to being unjust, apostate and enemies of religion ( 'adouw allah ), these intellectuals are also in the eyes of Islamists the most objective " henchmen" of Tâghout , the power designated by the term "Tyran". We remember that the declaration of jihadIkhlef Cherati targeted not only the power but also "his supporters" and "supporters of Westernization" in general. We also remember the words of Ali Benhadj, reflected in the organs of the FIS, describing the journalists as "Judeo-Zionists".
These convictions are shared by all the tendencies of the maquis. One of the first emirs of the GIA, Jaafar al Afghâni (September 1993 - February 1994), pronounces a terrible sentence in an interview given to an Arab newspaper"Journalists who fight Islam by the pen will perish by the blade" (Zerrouky, 127). To fight Islam was to refuse the order that fundamentalists wanted to impose. However, the independent press and the critical intellectuals, who had access to a great freedom of expression (especially written) after 1989, are mainly opposed to the project of constitution of a theocratic state in Algeria. They expressed it through their publications and their positions, and this is what directly pointed them to Islamist vindictiveness. In January 1993, leaves of Minbar al Djoumou'a, a clandestine publication of the FIS, hung at the entrance of the mosque "The Plateau" in Algiers, drew up a list of intellectuals and journalists to murder. The GIA literature called for the liquidation of the "mercenary press" it accused of altering the reality of the armed struggle and leading "a media war against jihad ".
The first targeted personalities are the intellectuals CNSA ( National Committee for the Protection of the Republic), who had called, remember, the interruption of the electoral process after the victory of the FIS in the first round of legislative elections of 24 December 1991. On March 14, 1993, in the city of Garidi (Algiers), falls Hafidh Sanhadri , a member of the Ministry of Employment , CNSA spokesman, murdered near his home. Two days later, on March 16, the sociologist Djilali Lyabès , former minister under President Boudiaf , was assassinated . On March 17, Dr. Lhadi Flici, pediatrician, is in turn shot dead in his office in the Casbah.
All political parties condemn these killings, apart from the so-called "moderate" Islamists, who did not take up arms, such as the Hamas party of Mahfoud Nahnah and the Nahdha party of Djaballah. Instead of taking urgent measures, the then head of government, Bélaid Abdesselam, launched an attack against "laity-assimilationists", an insulting label by which he designated members of the democratic parties and intellectuals.
On March 22, 1993 , the head of the powerful UGTA state union, Boualam Benhamouda, who had escaped an attack, called for a protest march against these killings and terrorism in general. 500 thousand people courageously marched in Algiers, chanting slogans asking to judge the killers.
The popular mobilization did not, however, slow down the executors of the project of extermination of the people of pen. A
woman, Karima Belhadj , part of the police administration , is murdered on April 3 and April 10; El Hachemi Cherif , former colonel of the NLA, leader of the left-wing party Ettahadi [the Challenge], miraculously escapes an attack. The Communists (the real ones this time) and the politicians suspected of being "leftist" are particularly targeted because they are assimilated to the disbelieving Russians. May 17, the director of the Al Watan newspaper , Omar Belhouchet, symbolic figure of the free press in Algeria, escapes an assassination attempt to Bab Ezzouar (Algiers), in front of his son, while he led this one to his school. The same day, terrorists roamed around the headquarters of the newspaper Le Matin , armed with enlarged photos of journalists to kill. Alerted, the police eliminated them, not without pain.
The assassination that caused a deep stir was that of one of the greatest writers of independent Algeria, Tahar Djaout , probably because it revives in the popular memory the memory of the assassination of another writer , Mouloud Feraoun, by the OAS in 1962. Former professor of mathematics at the University of Bab Ezzouar, poet, journalist and writer of international notoriety, Djaout (author among others of: The vigils, The invention of the desert, The Researchers of bone, The expropriated, The last summer of reason , see bibliography) had previously taken tough positions against fundamentalism, which he termed "theocratic fascism." He had written in one of his chronicles a premonitory sentence that became the slogan of the independent press in Algeria: "If you speak, you die, if you shut up, you die, then write and die! ". On May 26, 1993, two young people waiting for him on the stairs of his building shot him in the head before fleeing. The unfortunate succumbs to these blows a few days later. His funeral in Kabylie was moving and grandiose.
On June 15, 1993, at 9:30, Mahfoud Boucebci, emblematic figure of Algerian psychiatry , president of the Algerian Society of Psychiatry, vice-president of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry(author of Psychiatry in particular) , Society and Development and Mental Illness and Mental Disability ) , known for his opposition to Islamism, is stabbed at the entrance of Drid Mohamed Hospital where he was serving. A week later, June 22, the sociologist Mhamed Boukhobza, who had worked with Pierre Bourdieu, renowned for his research on the disappearance of the pastoral society in Algeria, is tied up as well as the rest of his family in his home Telemly (Algiers). Isolated in a room in his apartment, he was slaughtered like a sheep and stabbed. "One by one, the thinking heads of Algeria are coldly liquidated" (Hassane Zerrouky, 132).
The assassinations continued during 1994, with the murder on March 5 of the director of the school of fine arts in Algiers , Ahmed Asselah and his only son, Rabah. This man had made his school one of the best in Africa. A little more than a month ago, on January 30, Rachid Tigziri , leader of the
Democratic Party RCD (Rally for Culture and Democracy, is considered "impious" because advocating secularism) is killed . The 1 st February Olivier Quemeur , cameraman for ABC , was riddled with bullets in the Casbah, while his colleagues, Yves Menari and AustralianScott Allan White , are seriously injured. Armed Islamists' aversion to art continues with the assassination on March 10 in Oran of Abdelkader Alloua , the greatest Algerian playwright , host for more than 30 years of a theater in popular Arabic (he had scene El Ghoula of Rouiched, The Sultan embarrassed Tewfik al-Hakim, Numancia Cervantes, etc. he has also played as actor in several plays and films and adapted in Algerian Arabic Gogol and Gorky with his friend Medjoubi).
The independent newspaper Hebdo Libéré , fiercely anti-Islamist, was targeted on March 21 by a terrorist attack resulting in the death of two journalists and a driver. Professor Salah Djebaïli , renowned researcher in ecology , specialist of desert regions and rector of the University of Bab Ezzouar (Algiers), was shot dead on May 31st. He refused to open prayer rooms inside his school. Ferhat Cherki , journalist, and Youcef Fathallah , president of the LADH (Algerian League of Human Rights), were respectively murdered on June 7 and 18. The director of the Veterinary School of Algiers (ENV),Mohamed Bekkouche , is killed on July 10 inside his school, located in the eastern suburbs of Algiers. The Islamologist and professor of sociology Rabah Stambouli, promoter of a tolerant and progressive Islam, was shot dead on 23 August at the exit of the University of Tizi - Ouzou. Antar Zouabri kills with his group the journalists Ahmed Issaad and Lakhal Yasser on November 31, 1994. Saïd Mekbel , director of the independent daily Le Matin
, author of a corrosive chronicle against the power and Islamists, is assassinated December 4 while sitting in a pizzeria located not far from the offices of his newspaper. He leaves behind him a short and beautiful text, written on the day of his death and entitled "this thief who ..." (*), a ticket that summarizes alone the state of the journalistic corporation, caught between the repression of the regime and bearded arms. The filmmaker and director Djamel Fezzaz [who has directed The Great Attempt , The Poster - which starred the actor Rouiched -, Lahn al amal ( The melody of hope ), El Waciyya(The Testament), etc.] was shot in Bab El Oued on February 8, 1995. Azzedine Medjoubi , director of the Algerian National Theater [adapted The diary of a madman of Gogol under the title Hissaristân , Les bas-fonds de Gorky, The good soul of Se-Thouan of Brecht, etc. ; mounted Aalam el Baaouche (The world of insects), El Houinta (The shop); and played in a large number of plays such as Hafila Tassir (Bus in Motion), Bab El Foutouh , etc.] was killed in front of his school on 13 February. February 15 falls in 
Tizi-Ouzou a Democratic activist, Nabila Djahnine , architect, feminist leader of the association "Cree Women" ( Thighri Netmettuth ). These "debauchery" feminists ( mutabaridjat , an almost untranslatable term) are serious threats to Islamic morals and society, according to fundamentalists.
In Oran, is assassinated February 17 a great name in the history of the Raï, Rachid Baba Ahmed producer of music and impresario of several stars of this music deemed "satanic" by the Islamists, [it is he who made known Cheb Khaled, who launched Chebba Fadela, Cheb Sahraoui and Cheb Anouar]. Djamal Zaïter , a journalistwho was gathering at his mother's grave, was surprised and murdered in the cemetery. The killings, which we will not be able to name all (see a list of 100 journalists murdered between 1993 and 1997 ), continue with the attacks against public figures, celebrities of the song and against anybody expressing an opinion anti -Islamic or having an activity deemed subversive or not in conformity with the fundamentalist canons. On 8 September 1994, Abderrahmane Rebiha , professor of agronomyat the University of Blida, died under the bullets of the GIA. September 26 comes the turn of Abderrahmane Fardeheb , academic, economist
, author of several books. The researcher knew he was threatened and was trying to obtain a visa for France, which he was denied three times. On September 29, 1994 is assassinated an idol of rai music . After summoning him several times to stop his "demonic" and "debauched" music, Cheb Hasni, a prolific and beloved
singer , is murdered in front of his parents' home, in the "Gambetta" district of Oran, despite his immense popularity. His funeral gathered huge crowds and upset the Algerian youth. At the same time, in Kabylie, thepoet and singer of the Berber cause, Matoub Lounès, is kidnapped on September 25 and sequestered by an armed group led by the emir of GIA Aït Ziane. The poet was tried by an "Islamic tribunal" of the maquis and finally "acquitted" and released thanks to the pressure of a formidable popular mobilization. But the respite was short, since it will be riddled with bullets June 25, 1998, in circumstances not elucidated, while he was back home after a long exile in France.
A climate of terror is instituted by Islamists among intellectuals. With each return of burial, they ask who will be the next turn. Threat letters reach hundreds of newspapers and homes. Fear sets in and people learn to speak their tongues so as not to suffer a disastrous spell, especially since sympathizers of armed Islamists were everywhere. The walls had ears. The armed groups could indeed count on a small group of supporters, employed as informers, as "informers" or solicited to ensure the logistics of the jihad
. Some artists and intellectuals change apartments, others move. Many of them change their routes and habits or completely disguise themselves to leave their homes. Some, like Rachid Mimouni, a writer who had the courage to write in 1992 an enlightened analysis of the fundamentalist phenomenon ( Of barbarism in general and fundamentalism in particular ), and Omar Belhouchet, journalist and director of the newspaper Al Watan , were literally hunted down, before being the target of failed attacks.
The Algerian government was unable to protect its intellectuals and citizens when it did not repress them on the market. It is in this atmosphere of helplessness in the face of crime that one of the most irreparable consequences of Islamist guerrilla warfare occurred : thousands of intellectuals are on their way to exile,without any hope of return. Universities are gradually emptying and the country's executives flock to France, Europe and Canada. This is how Algeria is gradually emptied of its intelligentsia. But armed Islamism, whose aim was to silence any discordant voice, has failed to reduce Algerian journalists and thinkers. The independent press continued to violently criticize Islamism while intellectuals were more than ever determined to denounce the "fascist" side of the fundamentalist movement.
The assassinations also targeted other public figures and executives of the UGTA, official union but, paradoxically, popular among the workers. The "trade union center", as it is called in Algeria, opposed head-on Islamism and had early clashes with another competing union, the SIT (Islamic Labor Union, an organization set up by Abassi Madani whose goal is to regiment the workers in the task of founding the Islamic Republic.The UGTA will lose nearly 800 trade unionists, murdered by Islamists between 1993 and 1997.
Who are behind his assassinations? Those who perpetuate them do not hide from it, far from it. They claim them as feats of arms that can ensure their authors an honorable place in the future Islamic Republic . In an interview with AFP, Anwar Haddam, Islamist leader enjoying the hospitality of the United States and England, claimed the assassination of Boucebci by calling it "execution of a sentence by the mujahideen " . Etebcira
, the clandestine bulletin of the FIS, claims the assassination of Tahar Djaout and justifies it by "his communism and his visceral hatred of Islam", at the moment he motivates the attack against Belhouchet by "his outrageous Francophonie". Haddam resumes his argument of justification of the murders of intellectuals in October 1993, by launching: "Who are these so-called intellectuals? »,« We know them one by one, they are not innocents! ". He reproached journalists for "their murderous editorials" (quoted by Zerrouky, pp. 132-133).
Mourad Dhina, an Islamist leader active in FIS networks abroad, says years later about the murdered intellectuals: "no one cried our dead among those there". He adds: "Some have chosen a way of confrontation, a way of provoking a youth, and they have paid this price. That these left-wing intellectuals have the courage to take their action, that they say we are engaged in a war and that some of us [have] paid with their lives. May they make martyrs for them! (Mourad Dhina, in Aoudia and Labat). Thus, the political position was simply assimilated by the fundamentalists and their politico-media supporters to the military engagement in a war, without any embarrassment as to the demagogic fallacy of their formula.
During the meeting of Rome (1995), Ali Yahia Abdenour, FIS lawyer and president of the LADH, will say: "we kill journalists and intellectuals who have a position and an opinion"; he will add: "we are against the killing of journalists, military and police who are not engaged in the struggle" (El Watan, January 12, 1995) [note the confusion between intellectual or political stance and military commitment, between the pen and the weapons].
The Islamic Jihadist Armed Front (IFAD)
All jihadists agree on the principle of assassination of intellectuals, assimilated to "communists" and "apostates". Some people down lists , crafted by informed sponsors, circulating in the bush. The performers themselves sometimes ignore the identity of their victims. They kill "Taghout support" because his name appeared on a list. This division of labor in criminal work allowed sponsors to have clean hands and performers to have a clear conscience.
Some of these murders are committed by the GIA. The majority remains, however, the fact of a particular organization, urban settlement, specialized in the assassination of opponents of Islamists, intellectuals, journalists and public figures. This is IFAD, Islamic Jihad Armed Front. It is a group that was founded by jazarist members of the FIS, led by Mohamed Said. He recruits mainly from Islamist students and teachers. Very active at the universities of Algiers, Blida and Constantine, he drew in particular from former activists of the University Movement for the Defense of People's Choice (MUDCP). Nothing surprising to find at its head mainly academics, such as Thâbet El Aouel, professor of physics at the University of Algiers, Mohammed Boudjelkha and Mustapha Brahimi, physics teachers at Bab Ezzouar (Algiers). The group operates discreetly, circulates without a beard and with false identities and takes residence preferably in the beautiful districts of Algiers, like Hydra. "Abroad, writes Hassane Zerrouky, [IFAD] is represented by Thabet El Aouel, Anwar Haddam, and Mourad Dhina, all academics" (Zerrouky, pp. 136-137)
The emirs of the organization are:
- Abdelwahab Lamamra (1993 - end of 1995)
- Mustapha Brahimi, known as Abu Houmam (1995 - 1996)
- Mohammed Djebarra (May 1996 - January 1997)
- Abdelkader Seddouki (January - March 1996)
- Amine Haddad (March 1997 - October 1998)
IFAD has claimed a number of killings through its illegal publication, Al Fida, including that of Tahar Djaout, Djilali Liabès, and Ahmed Aselah (among others).
After the attempt to unite the armed movement of Mohamed Saïd, IFAD joined the GIA in 1994. But Djamel Zitouni, the origin of the execution of the jazarists , also eliminates the Emir of IFAD, Abdelwahab Lamamra and his sidekick, Hamid Boucha. From then on, IFAD moves away from Djamel Zitouni's organization and turns to future AIS and LIDD (Islamic League for Da'wa and Jihad). His dismantling by the security forces led them to accept Bouteflika's amnesty and lay down his arms. Its members benefited from the complete pardon of the president.
The involvement of an academic organization in the assassination of intellectuals suspected of "Westernization" or "apostasy" testifies to the transposition, by some of the Algerian Islamist elite, of differences that existed at the intellectual, on the armed field. The problems that are settled elsewhere by the debate, with pen and polemics, Islamist academics have solved them with knives and guns.
Why were these intellectuals killed? What logic does their death answer? (**) The precondition for founding an Islamic Republic in Algeria has been the destruction of non-religious thought through the physical elimination of its authors. We understand this provision when we remember that for the Islamist ideology it is a question of retaining from the universal thought only the technical aspect, supposedly neutral, by rejecting the immense intellectual production on the society, the art, the psychology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. These latter areas are purely abolished and replaced by religious faith and so-called Islamic legislation. The assassination of intellectuals is from this point of viewthat the translation into concrete facts of this ideological clause: to abolish non-religious knowledge about society (in the broad sense), it is indeed necessary to physically remove its promoters, writers, intellectuals, sociologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, etc. This obscurantism is directly inherited, let's face it, from the post-independence nationalisms, whose concern was to preserve a so-called "personality" (Islamic, Algerian, etc.) against "the Western cultural invasion" [which this intelligentsia was the point], opposing the most decisive achievements of contemporary thought.
The establishment of an immutable Islamic order , supposedly wanted by Almighty God, is characterized by a unanimity that goes from Unity all- round (one God, one Dogma, one Interpretation, etc.) to communion. in the Faith. The time in which the future Islamic societywould evolve is that of the abolition of history. Nothing will move, once the divine order is established on earth. The discordant voices will be de facto in the camp of the out-the-religion-of-God, the traitors to the divine order, their carriers will become miscreants liable to assassination. The fundamentalist order leaves no room for margins, for difference, diversity (sexual, intellectual, religious, social, etc.), dissent, dissonance; it is a center that aspires and grinds everything in its path.
The Islamist ideology gives itself the monopoly of the true religion and arrogates to itself the power to excommunicate anybody judged not to be in conformity with its designs. Thanks to this takfirist power [which allows it to declare kafir , "disbeliever" or "apostate"], it reduces its victims to the status of "disbelievers" whose murder becomes lawful.
In this action against the intelligentsia, armed Islamism has also distinguished itself by particularly atrocious methods, pushed to the height of barbarism (eg slaughter an intellectual after having humiliated and undressed in front of his wife and children ). This contempt for human rights also flows from the theological foundations of fundamentalist ideology. Islamism does indeed have to do rights stated by humans ( bacharwhen he proclaims himself to be "the arm of God," that is, the earthly performer of divine verdicts. Human conceptions pale before the Divine Command and man is an usurper when he begins to legislate instead of the Almighty. Now, the God of the Islamists is not made of clemency, but of terror towards his enemies, those who derogated from the Right Way. He is not the Merciful, but the Avenger ( Al Mountaqim ) and the Dominator [who crushes] ( Al Qahhar ). To win one's favors is to apply without bending his just sentences against the enemies of religion, and they are all the more just because they are terrible.
The problem of the moral responsibility of all the small people of the Algerian sympathizers of Islamism is otherwise more delicate. "The baker, the unemployed, the workman, the pimply teenager, the next-door neighbor with whom you joke in the morning before going to work, all people conceiving themselves as good and honest," writes Anouar Benmalek, "were transformed little by little. little, perhaps unwittingly, into wolves capable of killing. Or, at least, capable of helping to kill, by denouncing at the mosque, the moral and material support to the "jihadists", and the complacent - and no less criminal - approval when the head of a journalist neighbor will be deposed before the home of his parents: "Ah, he had looked for him, this miscreant, to put himself all the time through the plans of the defenders of the true faith! ". I do not invent anything unfortunately, I have heard many times this spitting verbal, in this form or another.
Posted by mouradpreure on December 3, 2018
It can be considered by convention that the guerrilla war of Algerian Islamists actually begins February 13, 1992, date of the attack on the Bouzrina street (Casbah, Algiers), which killed the lives of six policemen, lured into an ambush. It is exactly one year and one month later, on March 14, 1993, that the first intellectual (Hafid Sanhadri, a member of the Ministry of Employment) falls under the murderous bullets of armed fundamentalists. And since then, the murders of artists and intellectuals continue until 1998, sometimes at a rate of several per month. This indicates the existence of a pre-established plan, with certified lists of intellectuals to be shot down, sorted because of their critical disposition against the Islamist ideology ...
Between 1993 and 1998, we witnessed the implementation of a real plan to exterminate Algerian intellectuals by armed Islamists of all stripes. It was a "programmed genocide". We did not only attack the French-speaking intellectuals, who were considered by them as an evil continuation of the French presence, but even to the Arabic speakers who made the sound of a different bell sound. A term of Afghan origin, loaded with negative values, was used to designate the members of the non-Islamist intelligentsia: they are "communists" ( chouyou'iyoune)! In the Islamist ideology, a "communist" represents the enemy par excellence, an enemy at once powerful and unjust, as were the Russians (communists) for the Muslim Afghans. But it is also an "atheist", a "secular" or an "apostate", which means indiscriminately in their eyes kafir (disbeliever), deserving to be executed for offense of disbelief. In addition to being unjust, apostate and enemies of religion ( 'adouw allah ), these intellectuals are also in the eyes of Islamists the most objective " henchmen" of Tâghout , the power designated by the term "Tyran". We remember that the declaration of jihadIkhlef Cherati targeted not only the power but also "his supporters" and "supporters of Westernization" in general. We also remember the words of Ali Benhadj, reflected in the organs of the FIS, describing the journalists as "Judeo-Zionists".
These convictions are shared by all the tendencies of the maquis. One of the first emirs of the GIA, Jaafar al Afghâni (September 1993 - February 1994), pronounces a terrible sentence in an interview given to an Arab newspaper"Journalists who fight Islam by the pen will perish by the blade" (Zerrouky, 127). To fight Islam was to refuse the order that fundamentalists wanted to impose. However, the independent press and the critical intellectuals, who had access to a great freedom of expression (especially written) after 1989, are mainly opposed to the project of constitution of a theocratic state in Algeria. They expressed it through their publications and their positions, and this is what directly pointed them to Islamist vindictiveness. In January 1993, leaves of Minbar al Djoumou'a, a clandestine publication of the FIS, hung at the entrance of the mosque "The Plateau" in Algiers, drew up a list of intellectuals and journalists to murder. The GIA literature called for the liquidation of the "mercenary press" it accused of altering the reality of the armed struggle and leading "a media war against jihad ".
The first targeted personalities are the intellectuals CNSA ( National Committee for the Protection of the Republic), who had called, remember, the interruption of the electoral process after the victory of the FIS in the first round of legislative elections of 24 December 1991. On March 14, 1993, in the city of Garidi (Algiers), falls Hafidh Sanhadri , a member of the Ministry of Employment , CNSA spokesman, murdered near his home. Two days later, on March 16, the sociologist Djilali Lyabès , former minister under President Boudiaf , was assassinated . On March 17, Dr. Lhadi Flici, pediatrician, is in turn shot dead in his office in the Casbah.
All political parties condemn these killings, apart from the so-called "moderate" Islamists, who did not take up arms, such as the Hamas party of Mahfoud Nahnah and the Nahdha party of Djaballah. Instead of taking urgent measures, the then head of government, Bélaid Abdesselam, launched an attack against "laity-assimilationists", an insulting label by which he designated members of the democratic parties and intellectuals.
On March 22, 1993 , the head of the powerful UGTA state union, Boualam Benhamouda, who had escaped an attack, called for a protest march against these killings and terrorism in general. 500 thousand people courageously marched in Algiers, chanting slogans asking to judge the killers.
The popular mobilization did not, however, slow down the executors of the project of extermination of the people of pen. A
woman, Karima Belhadj , part of the police administration , is murdered on April 3 and April 10; El Hachemi Cherif , former colonel of the NLA, leader of the left-wing party Ettahadi [the Challenge], miraculously escapes an attack. The Communists (the real ones this time) and the politicians suspected of being "leftist" are particularly targeted because they are assimilated to the disbelieving Russians. May 17, the director of the Al Watan newspaper , Omar Belhouchet, symbolic figure of the free press in Algeria, escapes an assassination attempt to Bab Ezzouar (Algiers), in front of his son, while he led this one to his school. The same day, terrorists roamed around the headquarters of the newspaper Le Matin , armed with enlarged photos of journalists to kill. Alerted, the police eliminated them, not without pain.
The assassination that caused a deep stir was that of one of the greatest writers of independent Algeria, Tahar Djaout , probably because it revives in the popular memory the memory of the assassination of another writer , Mouloud Feraoun, by the OAS in 1962. Former professor of mathematics at the University of Bab Ezzouar, poet, journalist and writer of international notoriety, Djaout (author among others of: The vigils, The invention of the desert, The Researchers of bone, The expropriated, The last summer of reason , see bibliography) had previously taken tough positions against fundamentalism, which he termed "theocratic fascism." He had written in one of his chronicles a premonitory sentence that became the slogan of the independent press in Algeria: "If you speak, you die, if you shut up, you die, then write and die! ". On May 26, 1993, two young people waiting for him on the stairs of his building shot him in the head before fleeing. The unfortunate succumbs to these blows a few days later. His funeral in Kabylie was moving and grandiose.
On June 15, 1993, at 9:30, Mahfoud Boucebci, emblematic figure of Algerian psychiatry , president of the Algerian Society of Psychiatry, vice-president of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry(author of Psychiatry in particular) , Society and Development and Mental Illness and Mental Disability ) , known for his opposition to Islamism, is stabbed at the entrance of Drid Mohamed Hospital where he was serving. A week later, June 22, the sociologist Mhamed Boukhobza, who had worked with Pierre Bourdieu, renowned for his research on the disappearance of the pastoral society in Algeria, is tied up as well as the rest of his family in his home Telemly (Algiers). Isolated in a room in his apartment, he was slaughtered like a sheep and stabbed. "One by one, the thinking heads of Algeria are coldly liquidated" (Hassane Zerrouky, 132).The assassinations continued during 1994, with the murder on March 5 of the director of the school of fine arts in Algiers , Ahmed Asselah and his only son, Rabah. This man had made his school one of the best in Africa. A little more than a month ago, on January 30, Rachid Tigziri , leader of the
Democratic Party RCD (Rally for Culture and Democracy, is considered "impious" because advocating secularism) is killed . The 1 st February Olivier Quemeur , cameraman for ABC , was riddled with bullets in the Casbah, while his colleagues, Yves Menari and AustralianScott Allan White , are seriously injured. Armed Islamists' aversion to art continues with the assassination on March 10 in Oran of Abdelkader Alloua , the greatest Algerian playwright , host for more than 30 years of a theater in popular Arabic (he had scene El Ghoula of Rouiched, The Sultan embarrassed Tewfik al-Hakim, Numancia Cervantes, etc. he has also played as actor in several plays and films and adapted in Algerian Arabic Gogol and Gorky with his friend Medjoubi).The independent newspaper Hebdo Libéré , fiercely anti-Islamist, was targeted on March 21 by a terrorist attack resulting in the death of two journalists and a driver. Professor Salah Djebaïli , renowned researcher in ecology , specialist of desert regions and rector of the University of Bab Ezzouar (Algiers), was shot dead on May 31st. He refused to open prayer rooms inside his school. Ferhat Cherki , journalist, and Youcef Fathallah , president of the LADH (Algerian League of Human Rights), were respectively murdered on June 7 and 18. The director of the Veterinary School of Algiers (ENV),Mohamed Bekkouche , is killed on July 10 inside his school, located in the eastern suburbs of Algiers. The Islamologist and professor of sociology Rabah Stambouli, promoter of a tolerant and progressive Islam, was shot dead on 23 August at the exit of the University of Tizi - Ouzou. Antar Zouabri kills with his group the journalists Ahmed Issaad and Lakhal Yasser on November 31, 1994. Saïd Mekbel , director of the independent daily Le Matin
, author of a corrosive chronicle against the power and Islamists, is assassinated December 4 while sitting in a pizzeria located not far from the offices of his newspaper. He leaves behind him a short and beautiful text, written on the day of his death and entitled "this thief who ..." (*), a ticket that summarizes alone the state of the journalistic corporation, caught between the repression of the regime and bearded arms. The filmmaker and director Djamel Fezzaz [who has directed The Great Attempt , The Poster - which starred the actor Rouiched -, Lahn al amal ( The melody of hope ), El Waciyya(The Testament), etc.] was shot in Bab El Oued on February 8, 1995. Azzedine Medjoubi , director of the Algerian National Theater [adapted The diary of a madman of Gogol under the title Hissaristân , Les bas-fonds de Gorky, The good soul of Se-Thouan of Brecht, etc. ; mounted Aalam el Baaouche (The world of insects), El Houinta (The shop); and played in a large number of plays such as Hafila Tassir (Bus in Motion), Bab El Foutouh , etc.] was killed in front of his school on 13 February. February 15 falls in 
Tizi-Ouzou a Democratic activist, Nabila Djahnine , architect, feminist leader of the association "Cree Women" ( Thighri Netmettuth ). These "debauchery" feminists ( mutabaridjat , an almost untranslatable term) are serious threats to Islamic morals and society, according to fundamentalists. In Oran, is assassinated February 17 a great name in the history of the Raï, Rachid Baba Ahmed producer of music and impresario of several stars of this music deemed "satanic" by the Islamists, [it is he who made known Cheb Khaled, who launched Chebba Fadela, Cheb Sahraoui and Cheb Anouar]. Djamal Zaïter , a journalistwho was gathering at his mother's grave, was surprised and murdered in the cemetery. The killings, which we will not be able to name all (see a list of 100 journalists murdered between 1993 and 1997 ), continue with the attacks against public figures, celebrities of the song and against anybody expressing an opinion anti -Islamic or having an activity deemed subversive or not in conformity with the fundamentalist canons. On 8 September 1994, Abderrahmane Rebiha , professor of agronomyat the University of Blida, died under the bullets of the GIA. September 26 comes the turn of Abderrahmane Fardeheb , academic, economist
, author of several books. The researcher knew he was threatened and was trying to obtain a visa for France, which he was denied three times. On September 29, 1994 is assassinated an idol of rai music . After summoning him several times to stop his "demonic" and "debauched" music, Cheb Hasni, a prolific and beloved
singer , is murdered in front of his parents' home, in the "Gambetta" district of Oran, despite his immense popularity. His funeral gathered huge crowds and upset the Algerian youth. At the same time, in Kabylie, thepoet and singer of the Berber cause, Matoub Lounès, is kidnapped on September 25 and sequestered by an armed group led by the emir of GIA Aït Ziane. The poet was tried by an "Islamic tribunal" of the maquis and finally "acquitted" and released thanks to the pressure of a formidable popular mobilization. But the respite was short, since it will be riddled with bullets June 25, 1998, in circumstances not elucidated, while he was back home after a long exile in France. A climate of terror is instituted by Islamists among intellectuals. With each return of burial, they ask who will be the next turn. Threat letters reach hundreds of newspapers and homes. Fear sets in and people learn to speak their tongues so as not to suffer a disastrous spell, especially since sympathizers of armed Islamists were everywhere. The walls had ears. The armed groups could indeed count on a small group of supporters, employed as informers, as "informers" or solicited to ensure the logistics of the jihad
. Some artists and intellectuals change apartments, others move. Many of them change their routes and habits or completely disguise themselves to leave their homes. Some, like Rachid Mimouni, a writer who had the courage to write in 1992 an enlightened analysis of the fundamentalist phenomenon ( Of barbarism in general and fundamentalism in particular ), and Omar Belhouchet, journalist and director of the newspaper Al Watan , were literally hunted down, before being the target of failed attacks.The Algerian government was unable to protect its intellectuals and citizens when it did not repress them on the market. It is in this atmosphere of helplessness in the face of crime that one of the most irreparable consequences of Islamist guerrilla warfare occurred : thousands of intellectuals are on their way to exile,without any hope of return. Universities are gradually emptying and the country's executives flock to France, Europe and Canada. This is how Algeria is gradually emptied of its intelligentsia. But armed Islamism, whose aim was to silence any discordant voice, has failed to reduce Algerian journalists and thinkers. The independent press continued to violently criticize Islamism while intellectuals were more than ever determined to denounce the "fascist" side of the fundamentalist movement.
The assassinations also targeted other public figures and executives of the UGTA, official union but, paradoxically, popular among the workers. The "trade union center", as it is called in Algeria, opposed head-on Islamism and had early clashes with another competing union, the SIT (Islamic Labor Union, an organization set up by Abassi Madani whose goal is to regiment the workers in the task of founding the Islamic Republic.The UGTA will lose nearly 800 trade unionists, murdered by Islamists between 1993 and 1997.
Who are behind his assassinations? Those who perpetuate them do not hide from it, far from it. They claim them as feats of arms that can ensure their authors an honorable place in the future Islamic Republic . In an interview with AFP, Anwar Haddam, Islamist leader enjoying the hospitality of the United States and England, claimed the assassination of Boucebci by calling it "execution of a sentence by the mujahideen " . Etebcira
, the clandestine bulletin of the FIS, claims the assassination of Tahar Djaout and justifies it by "his communism and his visceral hatred of Islam", at the moment he motivates the attack against Belhouchet by "his outrageous Francophonie". Haddam resumes his argument of justification of the murders of intellectuals in October 1993, by launching: "Who are these so-called intellectuals? »,« We know them one by one, they are not innocents! ". He reproached journalists for "their murderous editorials" (quoted by Zerrouky, pp. 132-133).
Mourad Dhina, an Islamist leader active in FIS networks abroad, says years later about the murdered intellectuals: "no one cried our dead among those there". He adds: "Some have chosen a way of confrontation, a way of provoking a youth, and they have paid this price. That these left-wing intellectuals have the courage to take their action, that they say we are engaged in a war and that some of us [have] paid with their lives. May they make martyrs for them! (Mourad Dhina, in Aoudia and Labat). Thus, the political position was simply assimilated by the fundamentalists and their politico-media supporters to the military engagement in a war, without any embarrassment as to the demagogic fallacy of their formula.During the meeting of Rome (1995), Ali Yahia Abdenour, FIS lawyer and president of the LADH, will say: "we kill journalists and intellectuals who have a position and an opinion"; he will add: "we are against the killing of journalists, military and police who are not engaged in the struggle" (El Watan, January 12, 1995) [note the confusion between intellectual or political stance and military commitment, between the pen and the weapons].
The Islamic Jihadist Armed Front (IFAD)
All jihadists agree on the principle of assassination of intellectuals, assimilated to "communists" and "apostates". Some people down lists , crafted by informed sponsors, circulating in the bush. The performers themselves sometimes ignore the identity of their victims. They kill "Taghout support" because his name appeared on a list. This division of labor in criminal work allowed sponsors to have clean hands and performers to have a clear conscience.
Some of these murders are committed by the GIA. The majority remains, however, the fact of a particular organization, urban settlement, specialized in the assassination of opponents of Islamists, intellectuals, journalists and public figures. This is IFAD, Islamic Jihad Armed Front. It is a group that was founded by jazarist members of the FIS, led by Mohamed Said. He recruits mainly from Islamist students and teachers. Very active at the universities of Algiers, Blida and Constantine, he drew in particular from former activists of the University Movement for the Defense of People's Choice (MUDCP). Nothing surprising to find at its head mainly academics, such as Thâbet El Aouel, professor of physics at the University of Algiers, Mohammed Boudjelkha and Mustapha Brahimi, physics teachers at Bab Ezzouar (Algiers). The group operates discreetly, circulates without a beard and with false identities and takes residence preferably in the beautiful districts of Algiers, like Hydra. "Abroad, writes Hassane Zerrouky, [IFAD] is represented by Thabet El Aouel, Anwar Haddam, and Mourad Dhina, all academics" (Zerrouky, pp. 136-137)
The emirs of the organization are:
- Abdelwahab Lamamra (1993 - end of 1995)
- Mustapha Brahimi, known as Abu Houmam (1995 - 1996)
- Mohammed Djebarra (May 1996 - January 1997)
- Abdelkader Seddouki (January - March 1996)
- Amine Haddad (March 1997 - October 1998)
IFAD has claimed a number of killings through its illegal publication, Al Fida, including that of Tahar Djaout, Djilali Liabès, and Ahmed Aselah (among others).
After the attempt to unite the armed movement of Mohamed Saïd, IFAD joined the GIA in 1994. But Djamel Zitouni, the origin of the execution of the jazarists , also eliminates the Emir of IFAD, Abdelwahab Lamamra and his sidekick, Hamid Boucha. From then on, IFAD moves away from Djamel Zitouni's organization and turns to future AIS and LIDD (Islamic League for Da'wa and Jihad). His dismantling by the security forces led them to accept Bouteflika's amnesty and lay down his arms. Its members benefited from the complete pardon of the president.
The involvement of an academic organization in the assassination of intellectuals suspected of "Westernization" or "apostasy" testifies to the transposition, by some of the Algerian Islamist elite, of differences that existed at the intellectual, on the armed field. The problems that are settled elsewhere by the debate, with pen and polemics, Islamist academics have solved them with knives and guns.
Why were these intellectuals killed? What logic does their death answer? (**) The precondition for founding an Islamic Republic in Algeria has been the destruction of non-religious thought through the physical elimination of its authors. We understand this provision when we remember that for the Islamist ideology it is a question of retaining from the universal thought only the technical aspect, supposedly neutral, by rejecting the immense intellectual production on the society, the art, the psychology, anthropology, philosophy, etc. These latter areas are purely abolished and replaced by religious faith and so-called Islamic legislation. The assassination of intellectuals is from this point of viewthat the translation into concrete facts of this ideological clause: to abolish non-religious knowledge about society (in the broad sense), it is indeed necessary to physically remove its promoters, writers, intellectuals, sociologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, etc. This obscurantism is directly inherited, let's face it, from the post-independence nationalisms, whose concern was to preserve a so-called "personality" (Islamic, Algerian, etc.) against "the Western cultural invasion" [which this intelligentsia was the point], opposing the most decisive achievements of contemporary thought.The establishment of an immutable Islamic order , supposedly wanted by Almighty God, is characterized by a unanimity that goes from Unity all- round (one God, one Dogma, one Interpretation, etc.) to communion. in the Faith. The time in which the future Islamic societywould evolve is that of the abolition of history. Nothing will move, once the divine order is established on earth. The discordant voices will be de facto in the camp of the out-the-religion-of-God, the traitors to the divine order, their carriers will become miscreants liable to assassination. The fundamentalist order leaves no room for margins, for difference, diversity (sexual, intellectual, religious, social, etc.), dissent, dissonance; it is a center that aspires and grinds everything in its path.
The Islamist ideology gives itself the monopoly of the true religion and arrogates to itself the power to excommunicate anybody judged not to be in conformity with its designs. Thanks to this takfirist power [which allows it to declare kafir , "disbeliever" or "apostate"], it reduces its victims to the status of "disbelievers" whose murder becomes lawful.
In this action against the intelligentsia, armed Islamism has also distinguished itself by particularly atrocious methods, pushed to the height of barbarism (eg slaughter an intellectual after having humiliated and undressed in front of his wife and children ). This contempt for human rights also flows from the theological foundations of fundamentalist ideology. Islamism does indeed have to do rights stated by humans ( bacharwhen he proclaims himself to be "the arm of God," that is, the earthly performer of divine verdicts. Human conceptions pale before the Divine Command and man is an usurper when he begins to legislate instead of the Almighty. Now, the God of the Islamists is not made of clemency, but of terror towards his enemies, those who derogated from the Right Way. He is not the Merciful, but the Avenger ( Al Mountaqim ) and the Dominator [who crushes] ( Al Qahhar ). To win one's favors is to apply without bending his just sentences against the enemies of religion, and they are all the more just because they are terrible.
The problem of the moral responsibility of all the small people of the Algerian sympathizers of Islamism is otherwise more delicate. "The baker, the unemployed, the workman, the pimply teenager, the next-door neighbor with whom you joke in the morning before going to work, all people conceiving themselves as good and honest," writes Anouar Benmalek, "were transformed little by little. little, perhaps unwittingly, into wolves capable of killing. Or, at least, capable of helping to kill, by denouncing at the mosque, the moral and material support to the "jihadists", and the complacent - and no less criminal - approval when the head of a journalist neighbor will be deposed before the home of his parents: "Ah, he had looked for him, this miscreant, to put himself all the time through the plans of the defenders of the true faith! ". I do not invent anything unfortunately, I have heard many times this spitting verbal, in this form or another.
