Expert intervention: knowledge, violence and identity during the Algerian crisis, 1997–1998

Abstract

Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.

Notes

¹ I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, challenges and critiques. It is my hope that they might take some pride in having made a significant contribution to the enhancement of this paper. Any mistakes, of course, are mine alone.

² Following the Raïs massacre of 28–29 August 1997, an official with the Algerian Medical Union told reporters, ‘[e]ven the fetuses have been taken from their disemboweled mothers to be mutilated and massacred’ (Houston Chronicle 1997). A survivor of the Béni Messous massacre saw armed men take ‘my aunt and slit her throat, after slashing open her stomach’ (Khiari 1997). Another witness recalled for Agence France Press (1997b), ‘[a] baby was decapitated and as its mother fled, her breast was slashed with a sword’. François d'Alançon (1997) spoke to a survivor of the Bentalha massacre who had watched attackers hack his wife and daughter to death with axes, and then seen his son killed with knives. The Irish Times (Marlowe 1997c) published an account from the Algerian press in which some of Bentalha's attackers allegedly made bets on the gender of unborn foetuses before cutting them out. Following one of the massacres in Relizane, the Algerian daily Liberté (quoted in Agence France Press 1998) reported that infants' heads had been smashed against walls to kill them.

³ For example, Le Point (1997): ‘The violence in this increasingly opaque war is now, in the words of the historian Benjamin Stora, “privatized”.’

⁴ By the end of 2008, the Algerian government admitted that it had yet to demobilize most of the 100,000–200,000-strong militias or even find a way to properly reimburse them for their service to the national cause (Liberté 2008).

⁵ In early 1998, Entelis seemed to echo Grandguillaume's assessment when he told the Philadelphia Inquirer (Sipress 1998), ‘much of the violence may now be the result of rival villages settling old scores, such as decades-old feuds over land or avenging earlier wrongs. Some of it may be simply mafia-style gangsterism.’

⁶ ‘Other experts say the GIA is not the only culprit. [‘Jamal Khashoggi, a specialist on Islamic movements with the London-based, Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat’] said many of the villages that have been attacked occupy rich farm land distributed to Algerians in a wide-ranging land-reform program. Powerful interests, perhaps affiliated with the army, may hope to push the villagers off their land and grab it for themselves’ (Gee 1998; see also La Tribune 1997).

⁷ The accounts of Yous (a survivor of the Bentalha massacres) and Souaïdia (a former military officer) originally appeared in the catalogue of the Paris-based publishing house La Découverte, whose director, François Gèze, is a prominent critic of the Algerian regime. Despite significant problems in their accounts (Roberts 2001), Yous and Souaïdia's complementary indictments of the Algerian regime became the most well known contributions to the Qui tue?—who is doing the killing?—debate of the Algerian Civil War. Their importance also lies in the fact that, for some, these texts seemed to confirm, albeit after the fact, what was sometimes reported internationally at the time of the major massacres (April 1997 to January 1998). During that period, the international media carried fresh survivor and perpetrator accounts that seemed to indicate a direct or indirect government role in the massacres. On 23 October 1997, for example, the French paper Libération ran an interview with a young Algerian conscript, ‘Omar’, who claimed that he had indirectly participated in a June massacre with other members of the Algerian military (Sergent 1997). The London Observer (Sweeney and Doyle 1997) soon ran an interview with ‘Joseph’, an alleged former member of the Algeria's military intelligence body, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), who claimed the DRS was operating special ‘death squads’ and that he had seen DRS documents outlining its infiltration and manipulation of insurgent groups. Le Monde (Tuquoi 1997b) then interviewed someone claiming to be a serving member of the DRS; this ‘Hakim’ supported the allegations of Joseph and also claimed that some massacres, like that of Béni Messous, had been carried out by the DRS. Several months later, The Observer (Sweeney 1998) found two former Algerian police officers who also claimed to have helped undercover units of the DRS perpetrate massacres while disguised as Islamist insurgents.

⁸ Some commentators noted at that time that the concurrent death and funeral of Princess Diana completely drowned out the coverage of Algeria. The French magazine Marianne, which had carried the image of the two severed heads in a bucket, had run this caption underneath: ‘Here are photos of Algeria. Do you want to see them? Or do you prefer Diana?’ (quoted in Marlowe 1997b). One US newspaper (Post and Courier 1997) speculated that the international community's problem with Algeria (referencing Princess Diana and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem) was that ‘sometimes the scope of evil seems too great for the human mind to deal with’. This was why, in Algeria, ‘slaughter on such a huge scale and evil of such wide scope is not—unlike a midnight car crash in Paris—a major media event’.

⁹ Cohn-Bendit, who would later participate in the February 1998 EU parliament delegation visit to Algeria, was heavily critical of the French tendency to protect Algeria, as Paris was unable to appeler un chat un chat (call a spade a spade) in the face of the escalating massacres (Defouloy 1997).

¹⁰ One of the more ambiguous cases, and one of the few where a Western scholar was accused of collaborating with the GIA, was Yahya Michot. A Belgian professor of Islamic studies at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Michot was revealed by the magazine Le Vif to be the author of a religious treatise written under the pseudonym ‘Nasreddin Lebatelier’ and published by an apparently non-existent Beirut publishing house, Safina, in January 1997. The text allegedly used the work of the 13th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya to justify the recent GIA execution of seven French Trappist monks in Algeria. Michot, who lost his post over the affair, denied the text had made such an argument.

¹¹ Following the Raïs massacre, Etienne told Le Figaro (Mandeville 1997), ‘For me, three out of four attacks are done by the regime in power. To be more precise, the latest attacks appear to be from a faction of the military junta that refuses, contrary to another faction, to negotiate with the FIS.’ Martinez (2001, 50–51) also explored the hypothesis that the massacres were somehow related to disputes within and between civilian, military and intelligence elites, but he refused to endorse it above the other theses he discusses in that article. See also Addi (1998).