After 50,000 deaths, a vote for hope

Have Algerians seen off terror? Robert Fisk discovers that it still depends on a deal with the Islamists

FIRST, A TALE of terror. Abdul-Hafid - his real name, although he asked us not to identify his location in the slums of Algiers - was on his way to his pharmacy last August when he came across the bodies of two women lying on the pavement nearby. Both were known as local fortune- tellers. A blanket had been thrown over their bodies so Abdul-Hafid couldn't tell how they died. But no one doubted they had been executed by armed Islamists.

Abdul-Hafid had just returned from holiday two weeks later when he found a severed head lying on a manhole cover outside his pharmacy. He didn't know the identity of the dead man - nor what had happened to the torso - but he opened his shop and went on serving his customers while the head was removed. Then, on a Thursday just six weeks ago, he received a visitor, a young, clean-shaven man speaking in a soft voice, "in almost a whisper," Abdul-Hafid recalled last week.

"He asked me: 'Are you in the habit of giving?' and he gave me the name of his emir. Then he asked me: 'Do you pray?' When I told him I didn't, he said: 'Give me 20,000 dinars for tomorrow.' I knew the GIA (Islamic Armed Group) gives stamped receipts for money so I asked him for a receipt - so I wouldn't get asked for money by someone else - 20,000 dinars is only about $40 (pounds 25), but that's two days' takings in my shop. He said he didn't have a receipt, but he'd come back in three days."

Abdul-Hafid returned with the money on the Sunday but the young man didn't turn up. On Monday, he did come back, with another man - presumably the emir or local leader of the GIA. "I thought they were going to kill me, so I walked out of the pharmacy - I thought I'd have a better chance on the street," Abdul-Hafid said.

"The other man walked up to me and pulled up his pullover slightly to show me he had a gun in his belt. He asked me if it was my car near the shop. I was going crazy. I thought I was going to be executed. All the other local businesses have been paying protection money to the GIA. As soon as the men left, I closed the shop and went home, and I won't go back."

Abdul-Hafid suspects that his young shop assistant betrayed him to the GIA - the man mysteriously took two days off when the soft-spoken stranger paid his first visit - but his pharmacy remains closed, and Abdul-Hafid is out of work.

His wife still works in a bank, although three weeks ago she too came home with a story of horror. The girls where she worked were on their usual morning rush-hour bus to the bank from the Place des Martyrs, she recounted, when they saw a severed head impaled on the top of a green- painted grocery store in Bab el-Oued. No one knew whose head it was, but it was a fresh decapitation: blood was gushing down the front of the epicerie. Everyone knew the "Islamists" had executed the man. The police found the torso later in another part of town. The moral of this story came just three days ago, when Abdul-Hafid defied the threats of the GIA to turn the polling stations into coffins, and went out to vote for Liamine Zeroual as president of Algeria. Zeroual was elected, and on Friday - across the 10th largest country in the world - millions of Algerians like Abdul-Hafid celebrated what they hoped would be the end of their Calvary. Democracy had returned to Algeria and the people who once voted for the Islamic Salvation Front had turned their backs on violence. It meant the end of terror.

Or so the tens of thousands of demonstrators - waving Algerian flags and driving in convoys through the streets and firing automatic weapons in the air - clearly thought. All over the country, in Oran and Constantine and Annaba and Chlef, the unprecedented and chaotic scenes of joy that swept Algiers were repeated throughout Friday night. Not since independence from France had Algeria celebrated on such a scale. But had it indeed been liberated from the horror of the past three years?

Zeroual himself, the dimininutive ex-general and former deputy chief of staff, seemed to promise as much when he emerged from his ramshackle electoral office on Friday morning and told Algerians that they had voted for "the victory of sovereignty and democracy". He would, he said, represent "all Algerians" - an interesting phrase which went largely unnoticed - except by the now-banned FIS, which almost immediately offered to re-open suspended talks with Zeroual.

Even in Algeria, it seems, nothing succeeds like success, and Zeroual's election victory - although the official turnout figure of 75 per cent was derided by the FIS as a gross exaggeration - has clearly been accepted by his enemies.

At which point, of course, it is necessary to recall how Algeria got itself into a war which has so far cost 50,000 lives. For it was the suspension of parliamentary elections by the military-backed regime three years ago - elections which the FIS was certain to win - that provoked the slaughter; and it was the almost immediate banning of the FIS, winners of the annulled election, which propelled the more extreme Islamists to form their own armed groups. All through the three years of ambushes and decapitations and torture and throat-cutting, the FIS and its more militant supporters have harked back to the 1991-92 election. The will of the majority had been crushed by le pouvoir, they said. The army had staged a coup and the people would never vote in a presidential election that was a mere masquerade.

But the people did vote, and, if official figures are to be believed, gave Zeroual - originally appointed by a government committee - a greater percentage of the vote than the FIS received three years ago. The people's views had changed, the government was trumpeting this weekend, now that they understood what life under the FIS would be like, now that they realised the nature of the beast that was poised to win the 1992 elections. This idea - that democracy had been suspended when the people did not realise who they were voting for, but had been generously restored now they had come to their senses - underlay last week's presidential election. Having switched off the engine of democracy when faced with an Islamic republic, the ignition key had been turned again once that danger had disappeared.

Elsewhere in the Middle East and the Maghreb, there was hollow applause for the Algerian election result. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for example, tolerates no contenders in presidential elections - which is why he achieves victories of Saddam-like proportions, well into the 90 per cent surrealism of your average dictator. The Arab Gulf states - and Saudi Arabia remains a principal suspect as fund-raiser for Islamist groups in Algeria - don't bother to consider holding elections. Against this background, Liamine Zeroual's 61 per cent of the vote is positively modest, not least because his nearest rival, Mahfoud Nahnah of the Algerian Hamas party - a bourgeois Islamic group - received a respectable 25 per cent of the vote.

But as long as the FIS remains banned - its punishment for winning the 1992 election - such equations remain untested. And Liamine Zeroual has promised to represent "all" Algerians - which includes the men and women who support, or supported, the FIS. So how soon will he re-open negotiations with the banned party's imprisoned leaders, Ali Belhadj and Abassi Madani - especially now that the FIS has formally asked for talks to start?

The army and Said Sadi, the Berber leader who has effectively threatened his own civil war if there is an Islamic republic in Algeria, may try to persuade Zeroual to go for a military victory. But France and other European countries will urge him to use his first electoral mandate to embrace the Islamists as well, provided they work within a democratic framework.

That means, ultimately, the liberation of political prisoners, the closing of prison camps, an amnesty for armed groups. In six months, Zeroual now says, he is going to call parliamentary elections - an even bigger gamble than last week's poll if the FIS is allowed to field candidates: because then it will have the chance to lose under its own name.