My father, Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune called these systematic 1990s killings of intellectuals by the country’s fundamentalist armed groups a genocide. A law student then, I explained to him that the UN Genocide Convention did not protect political or social groups. But in my research about the unrelenting assault on Algeria’s intelligentsia that began in early 1993, I have come to understand my father’s use of the term. This was indeed an attempt by the radical Islamists battling the Algerian state to stamp out the North African nation’s culture and to wipe out those who shaped it. It was, as Algerian writer and artist Mustapha Benfodil describes it, an “intellectocide.” Benfodil, whose most recent installation, “Headless,” memorialized these assassinations, argues that “never, to my knowledge, have so many intellectuals been killed in so little time.”
Lawyer Leila Kheddar, known for her modernist views and opposition to terrorism, shot and killed on June 24, 1996
Lawyer Leila Kheddar, known for her modernist views and opposition to terrorism, shot and killed on June 24, 1996On May 26, 1993, one of Algeria’s greatest writers, Tahar Djaout, was gunned down leaving his apartment in Bainem, a Western suburb of the capital Algiers where I lived as a child. The country reeled. Djaout, a Berber who wrote in French and had studied mathematics, who had penned numerous novels and volumes of poetry, founded the publication Ruptures, and been an eloquent critic of both the country’s government and its vicious fundamentalists, died a week later after lingering in a coma. “Algiers thinks about the corpse in its arms,” wrote J.E.B. on May 31 in a poem published in Ruptures. During those seven days, we waited to see if Djaout, and we ourselves, would awaken from this new nightmare; he never did, and the country would not for ten long years. “Tahar was assassinated by the inquisition,” proclaimed a headline in Rupturesafter his death on June 2.
The anniversary of this tragedy was recently commemorated by a somber colloquium in Algiers organized by the newspaper El Watan (The Nation) on June 1, entitled “Presence(s)of Djaout.” (El Watan director Omar Belhouchet himself survived a 1993 assassination attempt by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA).) As the poet Amine Khene said at the paper’s memorial colloquium, Tahar Djaout’s murder “was an assassination of Algeria and its future. Djaout was among that minority of intellectuals who could have formed the kernel of a democratic alternative.”
Back in 1993, thirteen days after Djaout’s passing, one of Africa’s leading psychiatrists, the erudite Dr. Mahfoud Boucebsi, another figure in a potential “democratic alternative,” was in the sights of obscurantist assassins. On the morning of Tuesday June 15, 1993, the 57 year-old vice president of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry was knifed at the entrance to his Algiers hospital. Boucebci had written pioneering works about single mothers, and won the Maghreb Prize for Medicine. In a 1991 interview, he described the fundamentalist takeover of Mustapha Hospital in Algiers. “I felt infinite pain in seeing these young men who thought they were all powerful and had suddenly become super-chiefs, and could command and humiliate a doctor.” Anouar Haddam, the loathsome spokesman of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) who found refuge in the United States, said that Boucebsi’s killing was “not a crime but the execution of a sentence.”
Salah Chouaki, noted education expert and
dedicated leftwing activist, murdered on September 14, 1994
Salah Chouaki, noted education expert anddedicated leftwing activist, murdered on September 14, 1994
The next theocratic “sentence” was carried out one week later on the morning of Tuesday June 22, almost exactly twenty years ago. Mohamed Boukhobza, 52, a prominent sociologist and the director of the National Institute for Global Strategic Studies, was tied up and had his throat cut in front of his daughter in the Telemly neighbourhood in Algiers. I came home that day to my father’s apartment on the outskirts of the city to find him angrier than I could ever remember seeing him over the murder of his former university colleague.
On Tuesday June 29, 1993, exactly one week later, I woke up early to an unrelenting pounding on the sturdy metal front door my father had recently installed. By then, as El Watan later described it, “every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of… fundamentalist assassins.” Mahfoud Bennoune was a politically outspoken professor whose anthropology class - in which he dared teach Darwin - had already been visited by the head of the FIS who had denounced him as an advocate of “biologism,” until - as a former student in that class recently reminded me – Dad had ejected the man. On June 29, 1993, whoever was pounding on our door would neither identify himself nor go away. My father tried repeatedly to get the police on the telephone. Perhaps terrified themselves by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of many Algerian officers, the local police station did not even answer. However, we were lucky that day. The unwanted and unidentified visitors eventually departed. We never knew why, or exactly who they were. Someone would return a few months later, leaving a note on the kitchen table. “Consider yourself dead.” They wrote “death to” before our name on the mailbox.
Subsequently, Algerian fundamentalists would post Mahfoud Bennoune’s name on lists of those to be killed in extremist-controlled mosques in Algiers, along with the names of so many others – journalists, intellectuals, trade unionists, women’s rights activists. They would murder more of my father’s colleagues, his friends and relatives, and as many as 200,000 Algerians in what came to be known as “the dark decade.” No matter how awful things became, the international community largely ignored these events. The world would leave all those victims of fundamentalism to fend for themselves.
Finally, my father would be forced to flee his apartment and to give up teaching at the University. That was when I came to understand that the struggle against Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism waged by countless people of Muslim heritage in many countries is one of the most important – and overlooked - human rights struggles in the world. Sadly, this is even truer now twenty years later.
The intellectuals who were killed first by extremists in Algeria were mainly those who had most quickly and clearly understood the nature of the beast. My father’s friend Salah Chouaki, a leftwing school inspector and esteemed education reformer, had warned in one of the last articles he published before being gunned down on September 14,1994 by the GIA that “the most dangerous and deadly illusion… is to underestimate fundamentalism, the mortal enemy of our people.”
Published after his death, Tahar Djaout’s final book, The Last Summer of Reason - Algeria’s “1984” - describes the rise of extremism in chilling detail, and projects what the country would look like if the fundamentalists took over – by elections or by force. In Djaout’s theocratic hell, roadblocks catch inappropriately garbed women. Young men are brainwashed against their more liberal fathers. Minds are closed, families destroyed. But some refuse to submit.
The novel’s hero, Boualem Yekker - whose family name means “stood up or awoke” in Tamazight (Berber) - is a free-thinking book seller. .. read more:
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