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From the War of Independence to the present scenes of slaughter and mayhem, the women of Algeria have always been on the frontline in the battle against oppression.
The afternoon that I flew into Algiers, thick storm clouds lined the sky and the plane shook violently like a child's toy. It appeared to be an omen. The day before I left, the Berber protest singer Matoub Lounes had been assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists and there were angry demonstrations on the streets of Paris and Algiers. On the Plane, passengers discussed his death with dull resignation,as though the singer was a symbol for all of the horror in Algeria. When I landed at the airport,I heard the eerie sound of yo-yo, the women ululating. For the first time in my life, I felt I was in a very foreign and strange place.
My bodyguards met me at the airport. I had four; assigned by the government for my protection. Sometimes there were seven, sometimes there were three, but they were always present,in an annoying but reassuring way. Since january 1992, when the military interrupted the country,s first democratic parliamentary elections, Algeria has been locked in a conflict between the government and the "terrorist" groups - a catch word for Islamic rebels. It is estimated that 80,000 people have been massacred since then, most of them civilians. In the first two weeks of October alone, 251 people were killed, and according to American intelligence sources, that included 83 killed by government forces in major sweep of the Ain Defla provinces.
The ways these people die are not pleasant: entire villages have been burned at night , women and babies decapitated, young girls throats slit (a popular method of killing known as the "Algerian smile"); old men burned alive. When I read through back issues of newspapers, the killings are relentless: during the holy month of Ramadan this year 1,100 people were killed; the week before I arrived, rebels slashed the throats of 14 people; two weeks before that , a bomb in a marketplace killed seven; the day before that five policemen were killed and 16 people died in another market bombing; in April 40 people were killed in overnight attack.
This is a drum roll because I am trying to make a point. Every day, people die: 100 a week is estimated. Nine on a beautiful autumn day in a small hamlet; 13 on the day I sat writing this story when a bomb exploded in an Algiers shop. I Think of matoub Lounes, who once sang: "the grave awaits us all, whether its today or tomorrow." In Algeria the grave is always premature.
Now, approaching another new year, and one year away from the millennium, things are getting worse, not better. While Kosovo, Iraq and central America have driven the story off the pages of the newspapers, the situation in Algeria steadily deteriorates. In September, the Algerian president, General Liamine Zeroual, announced he was leaving office mid-term and calling for early presidential elections in February (they have now been moved to April). Zeroual was due to serve until 2000 and his hasty exit was seen by the Algerian media as an act of cowardice, of a captain abandoning a very leaky ship. For most ordinary Algerians, however, that announcements has deeper repercussions: it means that the country will slip further and further into chaos. As of mid-November, on political party had nominated a candidate or said it would nominate one, and no electable politicians have given any clear indications of their intentions. "I am afraid," a young Algerian journalist told me, "that all this uncertainty, all this transition will bring about even more killings."
When you ask who is responsible for the killings, people shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes to the heavens. The government blames the Muslim extremists, yet there is a theory that the government, whose job it is to ensure that safety of ordinary Algerians, is now conniving in their murder to inflate the threat to itself and justify its repressive and undemocratic policies. There are many unanswered questions. Why, for instance, do many of the massacres take place a stone's throw away from the military and security barracks? Why, when villages are being razed and women and children are screaming for help, does the army do nothing to help them?
Initially the victims of the killings were intellectuals, women, foreigners, young girls who dared to attend school - those deemed to have been tainted with Western decadence. When journalists became too outspoken, they killed - 70 have been murdered in what the World Press Review calls "one of the most brutal campaigns at silencing the press since the dirty war in Argentina in the 1970s". Most of the Algerian journalists live in a heavily protected government compound near the sea side. Four newspapers which ran a series of unprecedented attacks on presidential adviser General Mohamed Betchine and justice Minister Mohamed Adami were "squeezed" financially by the government, forcing them to suspend printing. El Watan, Algeria's most important independent newspaper, resumed printing this month after a month -long closure. La Nation, run by the award-winning journalist Salima Ghezali, remains closed.
But the majority of people killed or victimised are not journalists, they are not even literate, they have no voices. On a sweltering hot summer day, I drove - along with ten body guards plus army protection - into a part of the Algerian countryside known as the Triangle of Death. The village we stopped at, Hamman Maloune, was small and insignificant, with small dwellings carved into the side of a mountain. That day, there was a feast and local farmers had walked to the town with their goods: jars of honey, embroidered fabric, pieces of silver jewellery. Outside, there was a sound of music - the flute, the tabla drum - but there was no sense of celebration. On one stand, next to a table of aromatic spices, was a white poster with scores of black and white photographs of people. Ordinary people, some very young, some old, some with bulging frightened eyes, some with no expression. Who are these people? I asked. There was an uncomfortable silence. "Victims of terrorism", I was told. After some prodding, I got a figure for the number of people killed in Hammam Maloune: 87 since 1992.
The mayor of the town did not tell me what everyone else told me about Hammam Maloune - that it was renowned as a place rife with fundamentalists where many indiscriminate killings took place. I had come to meet an old woman, in her mid-eighties, who looked after her 18 grandchildren because all of her children had been murdered. But when I tried to find her small house down a narrow and dusty pathway, I was told that she had "gone to a wedding". So I will wait, I said, preparing to sit out the afternoon. "Oh no, no!" the major said, excitedly, and lapsed into Arabic with my bodyguards who began shaking their heads violently. After a few minutes, it was decided that I would meet someone else. Obviously, the powers that be did not want me to meet the old woman.
Instead, I went to another house, a small windowless compound with mud floors. A 16-month-old baby called Sara with hennaed feet and earrings crawled on the floor and one of the bodyguards - the toughest looking one, the one with the Kalashnikov - lay down his gun and picked her up, cooing with delight. Mint tea was brought out; we appeared to be waiting for someone. It was the house of Nora Aissat, who is 18 and whose father was killed last summer by fundamentalists. "Why him?" I asked. "Why anyone?" she answered quietly. "He was on a bus, on his way to town... there were 20 people on the bus, and they chose eight to kill. One was my father". Her face tightens. "I hated the fundamentalists before he was killed. Now I hate them more."
And then Fatiha Kabas walked in the room. I stood up, because she had a kind of grace that made you want to stand up, but she shyly took my hand and motioned for me to sit. Then she stared at the floor. She looked frightened, delicate, much younger than 35 years old. I thought she was beautiful, until she began to talk and her face changed. I do not think I have ever seen anyone so sad, so beaten by life as her. She looked damaged.
In the haunting Italian-Algerian film The Battle of Algiers, which depicts the tragic history of the Algerian resistance against France from the mid-1950's until its independence in 1962, the women play a central role. It is the women who rally the men, plant bombs, nurse the wounded and keep the revolution moving ahead. It is a depiction of women during war time rarely seen, and it shows the extraordinary courage of the Algerian women in particular. In a sense, this is what I expected when I arranged to meet Fatiha: instead, I met an ordinary women who had been broken by war. Resistance and conflict meant nothing to her; she was a simple person, a seamstress, she said, whose life had been destroyed simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fatiha had lived in her village all of her life except when she took jobs in other villages. One summer day three years ago she was on the local bus going to another village to look for material for an upholstery job. She took a seat in the back of the bus. She was dreaming, nodding off when the bus stopped. This is what she remembers: "There were ten men. They had long beards and kohl around their eyes, they were dressed like Afghan fighters. They stopped the bus and got on; they looked around and saw four girls on the bus. They made us get out. We stood in front of it and then they let the other girls go and they took me. I was dressed correctly that day - nothing provocative. I wore a scarf around my head , a long skirt, a little but not much make up. I had on a jacket to cover my arms.They took me with them. The bus went off. I was alone."
As she tells the story, Fatiha's posture changes. she drops her head to her chest, ashamed, as thought it is her fault: for being beautiful; for being taken by the fundamentalists. She speaks slowly, in French, sometimes in Arabic. Her eyes well up with tears and one of the bodyguards gives her a crumpled Kleenex. He nods for her to continue.
"First they beat me. They put a blindfold on me and put my hands behind my back with rope. Then they carried and dragged me along a road which I thought lead up to the mountains. They kept saying: "You are not a good girl. You are a whore." She begins to cry.
She was raped repeatedly over the next few days. She dose not know by how many men, but she believes ten. And as they were raping her, they told her they wanted "to spread Islam, to make the country pure". She thinks she passed out at some point, because when she woke up, the men were gone. They had left the camp to pray; she could here them calling out "Allah Akbah! God is great!"
With a strength she did not know she had, she untied her ropes and, still blindfolded, made her way to the top of the mountain. "I thought if i went up, I could get down." She was cold, in pain and in shock. She had not eaten in days. At the top of the mountain, she got the blindfolded off and realised she was at a local reservoir. She found a path to the village and ran down, crying, "but not too loudly, because I knew if they found me again, they would kill me".
What has happened to her since? Not much. A local doctor told Fatiha that she is suffering from "post-traumatic stress" and that she should see a therapist. But Hamman Maloune is a long way from Algiers, and there are no therapists near the village. "The thought of travelling to Algiers," she says, "is terrifying." Anyway, she has no money and is not sure she wants to talk about what happened to her. The villagers feel sorry for her, but now she is no longer a virgin, it is doubtful she will find a husband. "I am the only one in the village to have been raped," she says. The bodyguard, with the baby on his lap, looks at her sympathetically, but there is something else in his eye - it is true, she is viewed now as damaged goods.
She lives with her older brother. She forces herself to go out sometimes. She quit her job as a seamstress because she couldn't stitch as well as she used to. For that, you need a steady hand. Yes, she feels unbearably lonely... but at least she didn't get pregnant. She looks away. She now works with children, as a kind of teacher. She loves working with children, but she knows she will never have any of her own. "Why not?" someone asks. It is a ridiculous question. She looks up, tears streaming down her face, then leaves the room to walk home.
I first heard the story of the rape camps through Houriya Sayhi, a 46-year-old film-maker who won a prestigious courage in journalism prize in 1995 for documenting the plight of the young women who had been kidnapped and raped by Islamic extremists. When she accepted her award for another of her films, Mother Za'ara, which is about a brave old woman who lives on after most of her family is wiped out by fundamentalists, she gave a speech which left the audience in tears. "I just wanted to give these people a message from Algerian women,"she said,"that we live in a country where girls are killed for going to school."
Since 1989, Houriya, who works for Algerian television, has been making profiles of women, in particular the rape victims. When I first heard about these victims, I was sceptical. I had never heard of "rape camps" outside Bosnia, and when I questioned her about specific details, she grew edgy and defensive. She did not want to give details about where the camps were, for instance, or how many girls had been raped. "It is not my job to give statistics,"she said. "It is my job to give a voice to the victims."
She is often thwarted in her work. As a staunch Communist (she won a scholarship to university in Moscow when she was 18), she often finds herself excluded from the inner circles of the state television. But despite this isolation, she has refused numerous offers to go and work in Europe or America. Many other journalists - including Salima Ghezali, the recipient of last year's European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought - have chosen to work partially outside Algeria. But the mere suggestion of this sends Houriya into a rage. "I have made the decision to stay in Algeria to fight in Algeria, even if I am frightened, even if I feel that my life is sometimes at risk," she says, practically shouting. "My job is to go into the field and get the pictures. Even if I work for Algerian television - and that means I am working for the government - I fight from the inside. I am always the opposition, always fighting against the regime."
Houriya is tall for an Algerian woman, broad-shouldered, with large hands and feet. At 46, she is striking, with her tight jeans an small T-shirt. She gives the sense of great physical and emotional strength: later, she will tell me that as a teenager she had been a professional athlete, and the training and discipline has stayed with her throughout her life. She appears fearless and defiant: she says that when she goes to film the Islamists, she always wears jeans, even though they insult her (woman, according to the strictest fundamentalists, must dress head to toe chadors). She continues to make provocative statements: "Even the Algerian war," she says, "is told through a perspective. No one ever talks about the works of women. Or the work that women did here in the unions. Or the fact that women create the work here. I want my daughter, who is 24 now, to live in a country where a woman has equal rights as a man. And not where she will die trying to have them."
She has frequently been targeted and physically attacked by Islamists; the first time in 1975, when leading a student demonstration. But she is, she says, of strong stock: born during the Algerian war against the French occupation, her earliest memories are of demonstrations and riots: "I must have been about five or six, and I remember putting the Algerian flag inside my dress and walking right by the French soldiers on my way to school".
As a teenager, she remembers wearing her brother's clothes: "I wanted to be treated equally, like a boy," she says. "I could not understand why I wasn't spoken to with the same kind of respect that they are given." Later, when she became a professional athlete, she was given "the opportunity to be free. Sport let me become an equal. When I trained, for once, there was no difference between men and women. But when I went back to my neighbourhood, there were problems - in the Muslim world, a female professional athlete is no longer regarded as a virgin."
Despite that, she married had a daughter and divorced. Divorce in Algeria is a lengthy and traumatic process - not only must the woman get the permission of her husband to divorce, but if she wants to marry again, she must get the permission of her father, her brother or even her eldest son. Houriya did not marry again. Instead, she began writing for a newspaper called Hope and eventually began to make films. "All of my films are like my children," she says. "It is the same experience as giving birth. Because it is such a battle to make them. The outside world only sees Algeria in terms of blood. I wanted to show another side. Beautiful, courageous women who are touched in their skin. Because these are the people who make history in Algeria."
One of the women whom Houriya admires is Jasmine Belkachi, who is a near legend in Algiers. Her story is so dramatic that she appears like someone straight out of The Battle of Algiers. Jasmine was 14 years old when she carried a one kilo bomb for the Algerian resistance, and it exploded before she reached her intended target. She lost both her legs and was imprisoned by the French for ten years, serving two before she was released in a prisoner exchange. She was the youngest of the Algerian girl combatants, and when she was released, she became a national heroine. "I was stubborn, so stubborn when I was that age," she says. "The men did not want to give me the bomb. I insisted. I said if they did not give me the bomb, if they didn't let me continue to fight for Algeria, then I would take a knife, go to the city, and kill a French soldier." She was sent to New York by ahmed Ben Bella, then Algeria's prime minister, for medical treatment paid for by an American benefactor. She had five operations and still goes back for treatments.
Dressed in silky trousers and low-cut blouse, she is flirtatious, sexy and outrageously outspoken. The first thing she does is after bringing out the tray of coffee is ask me - in perfect English - for a copy of newsweek that was published last January with Princess Diana on the cover:"I am obsessed with Diana,"She say. What she sees happening now in her country rips her apart. "What I miss the most are the intellectuals who are being killed off," She says. "We fought so hard for an independent state and now we have a country were the educated are being killed." She pauses. "And the others who matter, who have something to say, are leaving."
All three women above are women who have helped to carve a new Algeria out of the old French occupied country. And what of the younger generation? One sweltering afternoon, I took a trip to the beach and wandered over the black sand where clusters of teenagers lay on their stomachs reading newspapers and listening to the radio. When I stopped to chat with them, most were to frightened to talk, and certainly not to talk about the disturbing times facing there country. But in a small cafe on the edge of the beach, I saw an especially pretty teenager in a bikini top and a pair of jeans, flirting with a group of soldiers. The girl, I thought, does not look typical.
I was right. She was 18 and happy to vent the frustration she felt at coming of age in a country in the midst of such chaos. Her name was Hannan Boucheba, she was studying to be an accountant, and she lived with her elderly grandmother, her mother and her aunt. She longed, however, for her own place, "my independence, my own life". She felt stifled by the strict code in Algiers, by the fact that she could not walk down the street wearing the kind of clothes she wanted to wear (tight, skimpy) "without everyone thinking I am a bad girl". It's tough being young in Algeria," she says. "People expect you to be a certain way, to stay home, to wear a chador, to cook."
Hannan does not have a boyfriend at the moment. I loved somebody but he went with another girl." She says, pouting. Then she quickly adds: "But it's OK, there are so many, many men. And there are two kinds of girls today in Algeria. Girls who don't follow the rules, who do what they want, who sleep with men if they chose, who take pleasure. Then there are girls who pray all the time and who live for paradise. The truth is, I don't really want to be married. I want a man in my heart and not in my home. I want to have my freedom. But that will never happen in this country."
It is an extraordinarily brave statement for a young girl to make. Later she takes me to her local disco. There she tells more of her story: she was abandoned as as child by her father, her grandmother bought her up. When at last she met her father aged 17, he tried to rape her. "He did not penetrate me, I am still a virgin," she says. " If a Muslim girl loses her virginity, she has nothing."
She now has an older man "a kind of patron" who takes her to dinner and buys her things: "But he is not a lover," she insists. She says she needs money, a visa to the US or Canada in order to escape the oppressive life that she is doomed to follow unless she leaves Algeria now. "I have a personality of my own," she says. "I will die if I can't be free."
The same day, I meet another young woman only a few years older than Hannan, but from an entirely different background. She is Assia Athmania, 27, a teacher and a fundamentalist in the Hamas party. At her third-floor flat in Central Algiers, she answers the door dressed head to toe in a chador with her face covered. Assia is intelligent - she is the daughter of a lawyer and speaks excellent French, English and Arabic and has sound knowledge of the Koran. Her job is to present the Islamic argument in a more favourable light. We sit on the floor and drink tea. In the kitchen, her mother arranges a tray of cakes and her other sisters - all dressed in chadors - sit and listen. Assia's goal is to raise awareness of Islam through the cultural level: "We have to open minds and open brains," she says. "The culture of peace and democracy is the culture to change minds. For us, religion is acting to develop humanity."
I ask why women must wear the veil. "We wear it to be identified as Algerian women," she says simply," smoothing back her headpiece. "It does not mean that by wearing it, I close myself to other people. It means that I open myself." She says that the Hamas party - which in Algeria is not as radical as it is in other parts of the Arab world - believes in "peace, change and objectivity". It is not a religious party, she insists. It is merely there to "offer a different solution.
How does she feel as a young woman coming of age in the troubled times in Algeria? She flinches slightly. "We are from the independence generation.' she says. "Algeria has always given revolutionary lessons. It is country which had nothing and which fought against France, a country which had a lot. We have learned from these lessons of resistance."
Does she believe that she is pursuing these "lessons of resistance" by encouraging Islam? She shrugs. "I have a belief in the future." Which is more than Hannan, the young accountant I left dancing in the disco, has. The day I left Algeria, the city was calm, but the next day a bomb would explode in a market place, killing 13 people who just happened to be walking by. Wrong place, wrong time. I thought of Hannan and Samila and Houriya, and the remark that someone made to me: "The people who are usually killed are not famous, are not important. They are people you would never know."
At the airport, my bodyguards left me at passport control. I felt oddly naked without them. When I went though and boarded my plane, the last thing I heard again was the sound of the yo-yo, the women ululating. It is a strange, spooky, and yet ancient sound. When you hear it, you understand briefly what this country is about, and the role that women play in it. It is a strong sound. And it seems to define the kind of women who live in this haunted and dangerous place.
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