Hijacking born in oppression

OUR IGNORANCE of Algeria - and our incomprehension of its war - were neatly encapsulated in a report on Sky News last Sunday. At Orly airport in Paris, we were told, anxious families waited for news of their relatives in the hijacked Air France j et "thousands of miles away" in Algiers. The passengers had become caught up, the report said, in a war in which up to 30,000 people had been killed by "Muslim fundamentalists".

We may, of course, wish that Algiers was "thousands of miles" from Paris, but in fact it is only 831 miles from the French capital and less than 300 miles from the French coast; which is why the Algerian war poses such a threat to Europe. As for the conflict itself, the casualties, which Sky obligingly attributed to "fundamentalists", have been slaughtered by the Algerian army and police with almost as much gusto as they have been by Islamist opponents of the Algerian military regime. But ma ybe our ignorance is wilful.

For three years now, both the Algerian authorities and European governments have done their best to marginalise the Arab world's most ferocious war. The consequences of there being an Islamic republic on the Mediterranean have been so full of historical portents, especially for the French, that its very prospect has become unthinkable. As for the causes of the war, we should remember that which Western prevarication tends to conceal; that the French originally approved the suspension of democratic elections which the Islamic Salvation Front was due to win three years ago, when the Americans pathetically called for "dialogue".

As the war has become ever more gruesome, the Algerian authorities have striven to hide its cost. Newspapers are now heavily censored; reporting "security" matters without prior government approval results in immediate suspension. And for months now, theAlgerian foreign ministry has routinely failed to issue visas to dozens of foreign correspondents requesting permission to report the war. "There is too much exaggeration," an Algerian diplomat explained to me. "It's always the same - if a car tyre blows out in a suburb of Algiers, the press claim it's a bomb." The diplomat, it should be added, was talking of a war which has claimed at least 30,000 lives, in which the current death rate is about 600 a week, in which Muslim opponents of the government behead girls who do not wear the Islamic veil, in which 23 journalists have been murdered and an Algerian president assassinated by his bodyguard.

More than 10,000 Islamist "suspects" are imprisoned without trial in desert internment camps. More than 10,000 others have been tried by "special courts" in the past 23 months, with more than 1,100 death sentences passed, 26 actual executions and hundreds of unexplained deaths in custody.

Yet a week ago, as the hijackers cold-bloodedly murdered the three Air France passengers, we were still being invited to view this war as one between Algerian "security forces" and "terrorists"- the good guys versus the bad. The use of the word "terrorists" allows us to forget that their leaders were imprisoned for demanding a holy war after being refused a democratic election victory, that the Air France jet was targeted because of France's political and covert military support for a government in whose police stations men are routinely tortured. No wonder the Algerian military authorities have encouraged journalists to ignore the profound issues that lie behind this war, the gravest of which is the identity - Islamic or otherwise - of the Algerian people themselves. We have no excuses for misunderstanding them.

Here, for example, is a quotation from Leon Galibert's L'Algerie Ancienne et Moderne, published in 1844, 14 years after France's colonising troops arrived. In his attempt to explain why Algerian resistance to France was so fierce, Galibert defined the concept of jihad or "holy war": "It is inspired . . . by an absolute fatalism. Does not Mohammed repeat in every page of his book (the Koran) that paradise will be the reward of those who fight for the faith; that the coward and the deserter are cast into hell; that he who falls on the field of battle does not die, but lives . . ."

These, of course, were the very notions which the four hijackers contemplated as they prayed in the jet just before their deaths last week. For them and for millions of other Algerians the struggle for independence throughout 132 years of French colonialrule did not end with France's retreat in 1962. In the post-independence years of socialist-style corruption, the old FLN warriors smothered the Islamic elements of their revolution as surely as the Soviets suppressed any form of Muslim revival in theirsouthern republics. But in the early 1980s, some of the middle-aged men who fought the French came to the conclusion that only by restoring the "Islamic" identity of their country could destitution, poverty and corruption be eliminated. Thus Mustafa Bouyali, an FLN veteran, led a guerrilla force against the army until his death in a government ambush in 1986. In his last years, Bouyali regularly met younger Algerian Islamists in secret to discuss Islam and Algeria's future.

One was Ali Belhadj, one of the two leaders whose freedom was demanded by the hijackers last week. France's old colonial war has moved full circle.

And so, true to the appalling sectarian path upon which the Muslim militants have embarked, four Catholic priests were murdered in Algeria in revenge for the deaths of the hijackers. It was part of a campaign, the "Islamists" said, "for the annihilation and liquidation of Christian crusaders".

All sides in the region are now - deliberately, it seems - using theology to stir further hatred. While Algeria's militants claim they are at war with Christians, the French government refers to its enemies as "Islamic". Last week witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of Israel congratulating the French government on its victory over "Islamic terrorists". Could anything be more calculated to convince Algerians that Israel and France are acting as one, along with the Algerian regime, against "Islam"?

It is all part of a familiar scenario in which we in the West are being asked to invest: Western "values" versus "Islamic terror". The more cruel these "Islamic" enemies, the more we will be persuaded to overlook the historic issues - of colonialism, occupation, suppression - which lie behind these wars.