Algerians see hope for their future in glory of the past

San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2007
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/06/MNGUIPM1FB1.DTL

By Hugh Macleod
Algiers

Djalal Baba Khelil spreads his arms wide, pointing out the intricate brickwork of the Ottoman-era hammam that he and fellow young residents of Algeria’s western port city of Oran have spent four painstaking years restoring.

“The French were true colonialists. They built their structures on top of ours. But now we are recovering our history,” says the 23-year-old engineer, proudly showing off the grand bath – a relic of a time when Algeria was part of the Turkish Ottoman empire - over which the French authorities that subsequently divided and ruled this country for 132 years had built a causeway for their carriages.

In a country where over a million people died in the fight that finally freed them of French rule in 1962, and over 150,000 were slaughtered in a brutal decade-long terrorism campaign by Islamist extremists, shifting rubble and restoring old buildings is not simply an exercise in archaeology.

It’s an effort to educate and reconcile future generations of Algerians with their tortured past, in the hope they may steer this oil-rich North African nation out of its still troubled present.

“Our young people do not receive an Algerian education. In school they learn about Arab history. On television they watch Western films. Politics is about ethnic Berbers. And religion has become political Islam,” says Kamel Bereksi, head of the ‘Sante Sidi el Houri’ NGO that is working to restore heritage sites in Oran.

“We work in the poorest suburbs where the Islamists think they can have their way. We aim to give young people a sense of national pride, to ground them in this country so they can see a future in Algeria.”

That need could hardly be more pressing.

The triple suicide bombings by Al-Qaeda linked Islamists that killed 33 in Algiers last month – the first time the capital has witnessed such a terror tactic – followed a string of suicide bombings in neighboring Morocco’s capital Casablanca, and, to the east, deadly gunfights with militants in normally tranquil Tunisia.

For the older generation of Algerians, the resurgence of Islamist violence in their country is a grim case of history repeating itself.

In 1992, after elections that would have handed power to Islamists were annulled by the secular government, it was Algerian veterans of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation who formed the Armed Islamic Group, known by its French acronym, the GIA, unleashing a campaign of terror against civilian targets.

A national reconciliation campaign launched by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika when he came to power in 1999 succeeded in brining the civil war to an uneasy peace after the GIA and most other extremists were persuaded to lay down their arms in return for a pardon without prosecution.

Now, however, it appears the resurgence of Islamist violence in Algeria is once again being driven by veterans of a foreign conflict; this time the US-led war in Iraq. Authorities investigating the Algiers bombing have in the past fortnight arrested 80 Algerian Islamists suspected of fighting in Iraq.

And though the Algiers bombings were claimed by a GIA splinter group known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC - which rejected the government amnesty and last year rebranded itself as ‘Al Qaeda in Islamic North Africa’ - the founder of the GSPC, Hassan Hattab, has publicly disavowed the bombers.

““[They] are a small group that wants to transform Algeria into a second Iraq . . . I call on the militants to give up the fight,” wrote Hattab in a letter to President Bouteflika, published to coincide with government-backed rallies late last month across Algeria to denounce terrorism. “We urge the president to reopen the national reconciliation file and extend its deadline.”

But if President Bouteflika’s military-dominated government – which has been a key US-ally in its post 9-11 ‘War on Terror’ - appears keen to dampen fears by framing its terrorism threat as the product of foreign veterans inspired by Al-Qaeda, European governments the other side of the Mediterranean are growing increasingly concerned.

Intelligence agencies in Spain – which also has historical ties to Algeria – warned this week that North African Al-Qaeda-linked militants may be planning attacks in Europe, possibly to coincide with the French presidential run-off and Spain’s local elections next month, according to police anti-terror sources quoted by Spanish daily El Pais on April 22.

For those eager to change foreign perceptions about Algeria and develop the country’s nascent tourism industry – an industry which is a mainstay of the economies in both neighboring Morocco and Tunisia - the Algiers bombings were a sad reminder of the struggle they still face.

“I don’t know what these men with beards from the mountains are fighting for,” says Samia Aitissad, whose grand old Djenina restaurant has been serving Algiers’ elite cuscus and crevettes with a touch of French-pizzazz for over forty years.

“Algerians are a tolerant people. A French Jew used to live in my house and he returned recently to see where he was born. We had over a million martyrs and yet still we welcome the pieds noirs back here,” she says, using the name given to Algerians – almost exclusively those of European descent and Algerian Jews – who became French citizens under colonial rule.

It is just such ‘black shoes’ – the most famous of which was Albert Camus – who are beginning to drive Algeria’s tourism industry forward.

"Algeria has oil and gas so the government has traditionally not been very interested in developing tourism, but we are working to change that," says Abdeslem Abdelhak, a former journalist who is now one of Algeria's first dedicated tourist guides.

"We began training tour guides so the people of Oran could know more about their city. Then over the last few years the French who had lived in Algeria during colonial times began returning and we showed them around. Now we want to develop cultural tourism to oppose the narrow view of history being pushed by the Islamists."

The narrow view is one which Youssef Boualassel, tour guide at Bastion 23, a military fort on the edge of Algiers’ Old City founded in medieval times by Spanish invaders, believes many tourists, including Algerians themselves, are taking toward their country.

“We have more heritage sites than Tunisia. Security was a problem in the early 90s but now it is more under control,” says Boualassel, as he tours us through the cool marble courtyards and lavish reception rooms of the now museum.

“More tourists visit the museum than Algerians. There is a huge potential here but mentalities about Algeria have to change. Foreigners believe they should never set foot in the Kasbah, but now the only reason you need a guide for the Kasbah is so you don’t get lost, not for security.”

Meandering through the cobbled and collapsed Kasbah – the site of some of the worst atrocities committed by French colonial forces in their long battle against the Algerian resistance, the National Liberation Front (FLN), locals were certainly surprised but not in the least hostile to the rare site of foreigners in their midst.

“In Tunisia tourists are kept separate from the local population. They travel around on buses like they are in a little bubble of Europe. There is no contact. Nothing is spontaneous,” says tour guide Abdelhak, as we take coffee in the colonial-era baroque surroundings of Oran’s fast fading Grand Hotel.

“It is my hope Algeria will not follow that example. We do not want mass tourism. We think that if tourists come it is not only a matter of money, but an exchange of culture. We believe tourism can help combat those few in Algeria who think that other people are the enemy.”

That kind of reconciliation with the foreign would once have seemed a long way off for young Orani Old City resident Mohammed Mukhtari.

Aged 19, and with his father dead, Mohammed dropped out of school in search of work, a perfect target for Islamist extremists seeking to groom the young and struggling into militancy.

But then Mohammed heard about a project to restore an old Turkish bath. Four years later, the young man is a qualified stonemason and working for more than just his salary.

“Now I have a job and have also learned a profession,” Mohammed explains. “I used to not know the difference between the old and the new. Working here I can give history back to the people. And perhaps by restoring this city we can begin to restore our country.”