ON JULY 3rd, 1962, Algerians celebrated the end of 132 years of French colonial rule with boundless joy. More than a million Arabs had died in the eight year war against France, which won support around the world. Rarely was a country born of such bloodshed, and with such high hopes.
Now, 34 years after independence, Algeria is again engulfed in the most savage of wars. For the past five years, Islamic fundamentalists have fought to wrest power from the military. At least 50,000 people have died some estimates range as high as 120,000.
In the fertile plains and hills around the capital, whole families are slaughtered nightly, their throats slashed like cattle.
Bombs explode in markets, cafes and trains. Foreigners, writers, journalists, civil servants and the families of policemen and soldiers are all targeted for murder by the fundamentalists. The military have used napalm on suspected guerrilla hideouts. They bombard villages believed to harbour "terrorists" with artillery, and dynamite the homes of suspected Islamists' families. Where did Algeria's once promising revolution go wrong?
Ask any Algerian why National Liberation Front (FLN) leaders fought one another during the 1954-1962 war, why more than a thousand Algerians died in battles between FLN factions in the month following independence, why successive governments have spied on, locked up or assassinated opponents. "Al Kursi" (the chair) they will say, shrugging. The armchair of power. The throne.
Just as Catholicism became the vehicle of change among liberation theologians, the appeal of fundamentalist Islam for young Algerians is its promise of social justice and revenge against those who confiscated the revolution. Even today, says Benjamin Stora, one of the foremost historians of modern Algeria, "there is not a well defined division of ideologies. There is infiltration, interpenetration, on both sides, with the strategy of taking power.
The Algerian government is too hastily classified as "secular" and "westernised". In the new constitution - the fourth since independence, which is to be subject to a referendum on Thursday - the government reconfirms Islam as the official religion of Algeria, and forbids "practices contrary to Islamic morals".
National Liberation Army officers began sidelining FLN political leaders as early as 1958. "The army was always at the heart of the system," Stora explains. "Sometimes they came forward, as when [Col Houari] Boumedienne seized power in 1965. Sometimes they hid behind civilians. It is a theatre of shadows; you think you are dealing with the real decision makers but you're not. They are elsewhere.
Such was the tradition of secrecy inherited from the war against the French that Algerians rarely knew the names of the generals and colonels who wielded real power. Chadli Benjedid, also an army colonel, replaced Boumedienne when he died in 1978. I was in Algeria when Chadli was overthrown by the army after 14 years of power, in January 1992. Yet I could not find a single Algerian who knew whether Chadli was his first name or his family name - or indeed whether Chadli Benjedid was his real name at all.
Boumedienne laid the foundations of Algeria's catastrophe. His network of secret police quelled all opposition. He adopted a Soviet style economy, at the same time giving the Association of Ulemas (religious leaders) control of the ministry of religious affairs, education and justice.
"He created an alliance between left wing nationalism and traditional conservatives," Sevenne Lab at, author of Algerian Islamists, says. "The leftists were in charge of the economy, of agrarian reform and industrialisation. The conservatives dealt with the cultural aspects of the revolution, with Arabisation."
These contradictory strands were doomed to collide one day. By the early 1980s, left wing and Islamist students were fighting one another on Algerian university campuses. Agrarian reform created inefficient state run cooperatives, which the peasants abandoned to seek jobs in the city. Once the bread basket for France, Algeria was forced to import wheat, fruit and vegetables.
Priority was given to industrialisation. Refineries, steel mills and cement plants were imported from the eastern bloc. But when oil prices collapsed in the mid 1980s, they ceased to function for lack of spare parts.
Arabisation too was a failure. Many of the teachers brought from Syria and Egypt to wean Algerians from French were Islamic fundamentalists deemed undesirable by their own governments. The left wing elite preached the merits of Arabisation but sent their children to French schools.
Two social classes emerged, one privileged and Francophone, the other speaking poor Arabic and knowing little apart from the Koran. Algeria provided free education, but the readily available university diplomas were worthless. The crisis in housing and employment - two root causes of the present civil war - were direct results of Boumedienne's demographic policy. Have more children so Algeria will be strong, Boumedienne told his people.
Algeria enjoyed a decade of prosperity in the 1970s, thanks to high gas and oil prices. "There was a tacit understanding that the government ensured development and the well being of its people in exchange for their non participation in power," Severine Labat says. "The people had certain `inalienable rights' - to transportation, housing, medical care. Until 1986, the oil revenue financed social peace."
But by the 1980s, the majority of Algerians was too young to have known the war of independence. And this new generation could look forward to neither prosperity nor political power, which was reserved for those who had fought "the glorious revolution" of 1954-1962. Economic conditions worsened and bread riots broke out in October 1988. Some of the rioters brandished Korans and shouted "Islamic state". The army killed several hundred protesters.
In the wake of the 1988 disturbances, Chadli Benjedid tried to introduce political and economic reforms. In 1989, a new constitution legalised political parties, but the transition was poorly managed. After 26 years of single party rule, Algeria suddenly had 60 political parties. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won municipal elections in June 1990, and was poised to take over the parliament in January 1992, when the army cancelled the country's first free parliamentary elections.
The FIS was outlawed and took up arms, then splintered into ever more radical factions. "The army wanted the radicalisation of the FIS," Severine Labat says. "They wanted confrontation, to be able to settle the problem once and for all. But they didn't think it would last five years with 50,000 dead."
