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Killing the Messengers
Balter is an American writer who lives in Paris.
Last December, a reporter for Algerian national radio -- let's call her Batoul Bachir -- was working at the network's offices in Algiers when she received a visit from members of the country's security forces. "They said I should not return to my house," she says, "because they had just killed a leading terrorist, and on his body they found a list of women active in a feminist organization." When they showed Bachir the list, she saw not only her name but also detailed information about "when I returned home and what route I took to get home. They even knew when one of my friends went to visit her mother."
A week later, Bachir left for Paris, where she is currently staying with a sister. For the moment, at least, she has avoided adding her name to another list: the thirty-seven Algerian journalists who have been assassinated in that country since May 1993. The Armed Islamic Group (AIG), the most radical of several organizations fighting to turn Algeria into an Islamic state, has taken credit for many of these killings and is suspected to be behind most of them. Some 40,000 people have lost their lives since the Algerian civil war broke out three years ago, including thousands of insurgents killed by government forces, but Algerian journalists have become a special target for the fundamentalists, who see their commitment to freedom of expression as hostile to the strictures of Islam.
The latest attack was on Mekhlouf Boukzer, who covered sports for the national TV network; he was found with his throat slit on April 4. Before that, Rachida Hammadi died on March 30 after ten days in a coma; the thirty-two-year-old television journalist had been shot as she walked to work.
In essence, all Algerian journalists are now working under the threat of death. In August 1994, a fundamentalist group kidnapped a journalist in front of the Maison de la Presse -- a former military barracks in central Algiers that now serves as offices for some thirty French- and Arab-language newspapers -- and released him thirty-
six hours later with a letter warning all journalists in the building
to stop work
or be killed.
The AIG has issued a similar threat to all television and radio reporters.
Although at first the fundamentalists targeted journalists who had specifically criticized them, more recently the murders have been directed at reporters who had no obvious political position. As an example, Lazhari Labter, a former correspondent for the journal Le Pays who has also taken refuge in Paris, cites the case of Mohamed Salah Benachour, a reporter for the Algerian Press Service who was shot and killed last October south of Algiers. "When we asked him, 'why do you stay at home?' he would reply that he did not side with the government and he didn't write against the Islamists," says Labter. "He had nothing to do with politics."
Despite the danger, many journalists have continued to work. At the French-language daily El Watan, for example, although twelve reporters have quit work or left the country, a permanent staff of thirty remains. "We continue to work because it is a question of principle," says El Watan journalist FayŤal Metaoui. "We have chosen this work willingly, knowing the risks."
Fewer have made that choice at the daily Le Matin, whose editor-in-chief Sa•d Mekbel -- one of Algeria's most respected journalists -- was shot to death in a restaurant near the Maison de la Presse last December 3. According to one Le Matin reporter, only about twelve journalists are left out of a staff that once totaled forty. And of those who stay on the job, none have continued to live at home, including the many who have families. "We change places often, we go to friends' houses, or stay in hotels," he says.
One of the few exceptions to this rule occurred a few days after Mekbel's death, when journalists joined several thousand people in a march past the Maison de la Presse to protest the military government's failure to protect the nation's press corps. Yet the government itself lacks credibility when it comes to freedom of expression. Until 1989, after a wave of demonstrations challenged the National Liberation Front's role as sole legal political party, there was no independent press. A multiparty system was legalized that year and, says Lotfi Cheriet, a journalist with Algerian national television, "the press began to play an important role in Algeria." Nevertheless, last year the government shut down or temporarily suspended several newspapers, usually citing security considerations in the civil war with Islamic fundamentalists.
Although Algerian journalists have protested these measures, most do not see the government as the main enemy. "We have a debate with the government, but it's not a massacre," says Bachir.
No exact figures exist for the number of journalists who have left Algeria, but Labter estimates that perhaps 300 to 400 of the nation's roughly 1,500 reporters have gone, at least temporarily. Most are in France, while others have gone to such countries as Tunisia, Canada, Belgium, and the United States.
