Bernard-Henri Lévy

When Algeria slipped into fundamentalist violence in the early 1990s few western observers understood what was happening in this country of the Maghreb. For a long time some commentators were content to provide a cursory analysis in which the “civil war” was the result of a break with democratic process.

Even François Mitterrand, probably for the wrong reasons and certainly on the wrong advice, set aside his intelligence and legendary political intuition to denounce the cancellation of elections won by fanatics enjoying a wave of social support and determined to turn Algeria into a theocratic state. Some ideological camps did not seem overly disturbed by that prospect.

Naturally a very French Manichaeism held that those who did not share that opinion and who refused to defend the Islamists—who supposedly had been “stripped of their electoral victory”—were necessarily the tools, the lackeys, of a detested and detestable military regime. Obviously, in this binary mash-up, some among the Parisian pundits refused to see, despite ample evidence, that Algeria’s secularists, progressives, feminists, and all its democrats were also calling for a halt to the electoral masquerade and sought support from the international community, and particularly from French intellectuals. Their cry for support grew more urgent when the Salafist killers set about to liquidate them methodically to punish them for their attachment to universal values and for their opposition to the fundamentalist diktat, which opposition they sustained with great courage.

I remember that there was no stampede to join the cause of the Algerian democrats being hunted by the Salafist beast. Bernard-Henri Lévy was one of the very few in France who broke out of the intolerable cycle of reductionist discourse that sometimes placed the cutthroats of the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) on an equal footing with their victims. Early on, Lévy took up his pen to explain the situation in the country of his birth, which he knew rather well, having followed the moribund regime, characterized by one-party rule and one-way thinking, as it came to be overrun by a horde (an understatement: there were tens of thousands of them) of fang-bearing fundamentalists, djellaba flying and knife in hand looking for throats to cut.

But that was not enough. Those who had made their long-distance accommodation with radical Islam were unwilling to condemn it as a fascist ideology, finding it easier to condemn a regime that, while detestable, was not guilty of the mass murder of civilians. Let us remind ourselves that the anti-terrorist campaign of the Algerian army was hardly respectful of all of the democratic principles that we are defending here. But that is not the crux of the matter. Consider this analogy: Even if we disapprove of certain aspects of the post-September 11 policy of the American government, we would not give Osama bin Laden a free pass or equate him with George W. Bush.

In the case of Algeria, that is what was done. The general and the emir were two scoundrels and, in some eyes, the former was worse than the latter. On the pretext that the regime had been handling the terrorist problem in a manner that was dubious at best, the talking heads seemed able to ignore the true face of the fundamentalist killers and, worse, sometimes appeared to justify their crimes when they weren’t excusing their criminal impulses.

In this context, Bernard-Henri Lévy decided to support the initiative taken by journalist Daniel Leconte, who, like Lévy, had refused to heed the sirens’ call. Leconte was trying, not without obstacles, to organize “Algeria Night,” a special program to be broadcast by ARTE, the purpose of which was to explain the reality of the country and to show the ugly face of radical Islam.

Meanwhile, Lévy traveled to Algiers, where he met with democrats, feminists, victims of terrorism, and militant secularists—in short, all those targeted by the murderous madness of the bearded fanatics whom European writers sometimes tried to depict as “valiant revolutionaries” who had had the courage to stand up to the dictatorship.

Upon his return he wrote several articles. One appeared in Le Point in January 1998. “Stopping the murder and the murderers—that is the only question that matters. The rest is chatter, irresponsibility, and an insult to the victims,” he wrote—and rightly. Because, at the time, let us remember, while the GIA was massacring civilians and soldiers alike and claiming sole responsibility for the killing, while it was grinding out, in justification of its acts, ideological–theological “explanations” that were published in the Al-Ansar bulletin, the official organ of the terrorists that was distributed freely in the British capital and elsewhere; while it was enjoying ideological legitimization from theorists of theocracy such as Abu Qatada (who also operated from London) and promising to repeat its raids on neighborhoods and villages—in short, while the Islamists were parading their misdeeds before the world, the pundits in France were telling us that we had misunderstood, that all these attacks, massacres, throat slittings, mutilations, murders, threats, bombs, and other horrible scenes were the work of the Algerian “special services.”

That is called denial—or conspiracy theory. At best it was a dress rehearsal for Thierry Meyssan’s “big lie” that the U.S. government staged 9/11. It was against that sinister tide that Bernard-Henri Lévy had the courage to push back in two explosive reports published in Le Monde on January 8 and 9, 1998. The two articles, entitled “Law by Massacre” and “Jasmine and Blood,” produced an effect akin to electroshock in Algeria and France. Finally someone had stopped asking the obscene question of who killed whom and started speaking for the victims.

Obviously, Lévy’s stance earned him enemies as well as friends. His supercilious detractors, who sought to convince the public of the Islamists’ innocence, peddled an Algerian version of the killing fields of Timisoara. There was Nicolas Beau, then of the Canard Enchainé, who treated us to a festival of disinformation. There were the first Islamo-progressives, who broke in their ideological terror machine against Lévy. The same went for Pierre Vidal-Naquet who, with license from a careless publisher and under the influence of several specialists in conspiracy theories, accused Lévy of every evil. At best, they said, he had let himself be manipulated by the Algerians (who must be mistrusted if, like myself, they displayed a strong opposition to radical Islam). At worst, he was in the thrall of the regime, which supposedly was powerful enough to stage all of these manipulations but stupid enough to be caught by two or three charlatans who had never set foot in Algeria, or never stayed long at any rate.

So where do we stand, fifteen years after all these polemics? First, every member of the GIA who has been arrested since then has confirmed that the massacres were indeed Islamist acts. Second, after Algeria’s president decided, in the interest of “national reconciliation,” to swallow all shame and pardon the assassins, scorning the victims of those horror-filled years of horror, the “repentant” Islamists provided details that proved, once again, that the adherents of jihad had sought to punish Algerians for having rejected violence and armed groups.

But there’s more. The survivors of the massacres (I’m referring to real survivors) identified their attackers. In every case, those whom they identified were Islamists. Driving the nail home, we soon saw—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia—the same methods of operation, identical mass killings, similar explosions. The GIA did nothing more nor less than what the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the followers of al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and the successors of bin Laden in Somalia have done. We soon discover, after the horror in Algeria, similar horrors elsewhere. Always with the same determination and the same fanaticism that is the hallmark of Salafism, the Islamist sect that fights to universalize obscurantism.

Djamel Zitouni, once emir of the GIA, was ambushed and murdered by a rival faction in 1996. His successor, the sinister Antar Zouabri, was killed in a gun battle with the Algerian army in 2002.

Since then, other things have happened. The factions of the GIA have met with various fates. Some regional cells were decapitated; others dissolved when the majority of their members decided to lay down their arms. After the wave of killings, those of the terrorists who did not share the scorched earth strategy advocated by Antar Zouabri and his men (who led the massacres of 1997 and 1998) formed the GSPC, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

The disdainful critics of Bernard-Henri Lévy and other defenders of Algerian democrats told us that the GSPC was not composed of radical Islamists, any more than the GIA was. If the group appeared to be made up of Islamists, the “special services” of Algiers were behind what we thought we saw. Yet it is this same GSPC that decided in 2006 to declare its allegiance with bin Laden and, in 2007, to rename itself Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI). But there again, they’re not really radical Islamists, and if they appear to be …. You’ve heard the song before.

In the end, the worthy successors of the GIA have pursued their course, behaving in ways consistent with their precepts and proving that Bernard-Henri Lévy and a few like-minded critics were right all along.

The whole story leads me to think that Lévy was wrong on just one point: In France, it’s never good to be right before everyone else, and certainly not before the punditocracy …

Mohamed Sifaoui

Mohamed Sifaoui, b. 4 july 1967, journalist, writer and director Algerian living in France. He is principally engaged in the investigation of ideology and Islamist terrorism. He is engaged with SOS Racisme and a regular contributor to the magazine Marianne, Le Meilleur des Mondes. He is the author of Combattre le terrorisme islamiste, (éd. Grasset, 2007), Pourquoi l’islamisme séduit-il ?, (Armand Colin, coll. « Éléments de réponse », 2010)

(translation Steven Kennedy)