COUNTING ALGERIA'S GRAVES

by Celestine Bohlen

The New York Times/International Herald Tribune

Friday, December 19, 1997

Without a free press inside Algeria, or any other independent accounting, no one can say for sure how many tens of thousands of Algerians have been killed in the last five years of civil war, or who is behind the relentless wave of massacres, ambushes and disappearances. But according to Salima Ghezali, an editor of the last independent journal published in Algeria until it was shut down just one year ago, one way to gauge the scale of killing is to go to the cemeteries each day and count the number of fresh, unmarked graves. That is how she and her colleagues, sidestepping Algeria's tough censorship laws, gathered material in March 1996 for a special edition on human rights violations. Eight months later, their weekly newspaper, La Nation, was closed by government authorities, on the pretext of unpaid bills. In Rome on Tuesday, on her way to Strasbourg to collect a Sakharov Prize for democracy from the European Parliament, Mrs. Ghezali, a 40-year-old former professor of French literature and a founder of Al

geria's women's rights movement, accused Algeria's military-backed government of promoting "fictions" about the sources of the violence that has wracked the country. By her estimate, the number of dead in Algeria since 1992 has already surpassed 100,000 - Amnesty International put the figure at 80,000 or more - and is growing by as much as 1,000 a week. Just last weekend, another 34 people, including a pregnant woman and 3-year-old child, were reported killed in several attacks. "It is the uncomfortable truth that extremist tendencies and fascist beliefs can be found just as much among Algeria's secularists as among the fundamentalists she said, criticizing the Algerian government for its repressive methods and its failure to enter into any dialogue with its Islamic opponents. SINCE 1992, when the Algerian Army scrapped multiparty elections that Islamic fundamentalists were poised to win, the government has maintained that the killings are the work of Islamic extremists. Given censorship laws which require t

hat all reporting on the violence be based on official figures distributed by the Interior Ministry, and which strictly prohibit any contact with Islamic groups, there can be no other version of events inside Algeria. "One should~stop hiding behind the fan of the Islamists," Mrs. Ghezali said at a press conference at the Community of San Egidio, the Roman Catholic group that in 1995 tried to broker peace between the Algerian government and its Islamic opponents "There are Islamists and there are Islamic terrorists, there is a terror practiced by criminals, and there is a terror sustained by the government in defense of its power. We should try to identify the source of the violence, and see who profits from it." "The worst thing in a modern crisis is to think one can have good guys on one side, and bad guys on the other, added Mrs. Ghezali, who lives in Algeria but away from her own home in order to protect her family. We are not dealing with two camps. It is not an ideological battle, as it often portrayed

in the West. It is a violent breakdown whose victims we can't see, and don't hear." Mrs Ghezali described the difficulties of trying to penetrate the mysteries surrounding the ongoing massacres, including the reasons that local government troops and police fail to intervene even when the killings are taking place in the vicinity of their own installations. " They always claim it is because there are mines all around the area," said Mrs. Ghezali, "but then when it is all over, the mines never explode." Given the difficulties and dangers of reporting on the violence in Algeria, La Nation, founded in 1992, stuck to more analytical articles and conducted independent investigations on, for example, the growth of Algeria's quasi-independent militias, which have been given wide-ranging authority by the government. "There is no more independent press in Algeria and the proof of that is that the only newspaper that didn't reprint the official line was La Nation, and it was forced to close," said Malti Djallal of Repo

rters Without Frontiers, a Paris-based group that campaigns on behalf of press freedom around the world. According to Mrs. Ghezali, the violence in Algeria is caused in part by the frustrations of an ailing economy and an underemployed population,of which 70 percent is under 30 years of age.She said the murders had become self-perpetuating since families often sought to avenge their own dead. "But if you want to see a solution to the war in Algeria, go to the cemeteries particularly on Fridays," she said. "People are always talking about women in Algeria - about the division between feminists and Islamists - but if you go to the cemeteries you see women mourning their dead, wives and mothers of the victims of terrorists, and wives and mothers of victims of the state-supported terror. There is much less hate than people think. It is not that Algerian society cannot reach a compromise, it is that it is impeded."