Algeria

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Last year's article in he "Guardian Weekly" claimed that Algerian
Government is behind massacres.
http://www.igc.apc.org/desip/Algerian.html

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      Algerian Regime Responsible for Massacres

      Algeria regime 'was behind Paris bombs'

      by John Sweeney and Leonard Doyle

      Front Page, Manchester Guardian Weekly, November 16, 1997

      BOMBS in Paris, help for Saddam Hussein's programme to produce
weapons of mass destruction, the regime of terror at home -- today
Algeria's secret police state is indicted by one of its own members or
crimes against humanity.

      "Yussuf-Joseph" was a career secret agent in Algeria's securite
militaire until he defected to Britain, bringing with him the deepest
secrets of the regime's links with President Saddam. His wife an children
were spirited out. Two and a half years later they are still waiting for
political asylum. "Joseph" spent 14 years as part of the Algerian police
state. In one gulag torture chamber he saw "a human eye lying on a table,
and in the eye a fork". He now risks assassination for speaking out publicly.

      He said: "The bombs that outraged Paris in 1995 -- blamed on Muslim
fanatics -- were the handiwork of the Algerian secret service. They were
part of a propaganda war aimed at galvanising French public opinio n
against the Islamists."

      The Algerian police state is hiding material for President Saddam's
nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programme. Intelligence agents
from the two countries are collaborating to defeat the United Nations
sanctions against Iraq. The relentless massacres in Algeria are the work of
secret police and army death squads.

      Algerian intelligence agents routinely bribe Eurpean police,
journalists and MPs. Joseph said he paid one French MP, who cannot be named
for legal reasons, more than 500,000 francs (about $90,000) in bribes.

      The killing of many foreigners was orga nised by the secret police,
not Islamic extremists. Joseph, a strained, pale, intense man, described
the most secret workings of the Algerian police state. He revealed that the
constant terror! in which civilians live is orchestrated by two shadowy
figures, more powerful than the nominal president, General Liamine Zeroual.
The police state is run as the private fiefdom of two men: Mohammed
Mediane, codename "Tewfik", and General Smain Lamari, the most feared names
in Algeria. They are, respectively, head of the Algeri n secret service,
the DRS, and its sub-department, the counter intelligence agency, the DCE.

      "[President] Zeroual is just the cherry on the cake," said Joseph.
"Tewfik is much more important and Smain is his enforcer." Since the
military coup in 1992 after the first round of elections in which the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was set to take power, the violence has
escalated to make Algeria the most dangerous country in the world. The
carnage in Algeria and the bombs in France have been blamed on a group of
Muslim fanatics, the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA. Joseph said: "The GIA is
a pure product of Smain's secret service." His testimony is supported by a
former diplomat, Mohammed Larbi Zitout, No 2 at the Algerian embassy in
Libya until he defected to Britain. "I used to read all the secret
telexes," Joseph said. "I know that the GIA has been infiltrated and
manipulated by the government. The GIA has been completely turned by the
government."

      Joseph said secret agents who flew in from Algeria, sent by Smain,
organised "at least" two of the bombs in Paris in the summer of 1995, in
which several people were killed. The operation was run by Colonel Souames
Mahmoud, alias Habib, head of the secret service at the Algerian embassy in
Paris. Two men were later seized by French police. One, Khaled Kelkal, was
shot in cold blood, his killing caught on camera. The second, Karim Moussa,
was captured, injured. He has since disappeared and th French authorities
have failed to explain what happened to this most-wanted suspect.

      Joseph said Tewfik and Smain spent some of Algeria's oil and gas
billions to bribe politicians and security officials in Europe. Joseph
said: "I personally delivered a suitcase containing 500,000 francs to one
French MP with strong links to the French intelligence services." The MP,
who lost his seat at the last election, is a noted apologist for the
Algerian and Iraqi regimes.

      The power of the securite militaire is such that it murdered a
president, Joseph said. President Mohammed Boudiaf was assassinated in June
1992 by people within le pouvoir. He knows because two of the killers were
associates in the securite militaire. "Boudiaf was killed because he had
very sensitive files on corrupt generals. The generals have made millions
from corruption, held in Swiss banks. Boudiaf started an inquiry." Fatiha
Boudiaf, the president's widow, said last week: "Boudiaf knew that he would
be killed by those who brought him to power" -- a coded reference to the
secret police.

      Joseph said the massacres, in which tens of thousands of Algerians
have been killed since the civil war started in 1992, have been carried out
by the regime's death squads. "Le pouvoir are behind th massacres and other
killings besides. It's to maintain the state of fear," he said. "In 1992
Smain created a special group, L'Escadron de la Mort [the Squadron of
Death]. One of its main missions to begin with was to kill officers,
colonels. The death squads organise the massacres. If anyone inside the
killing machine hesitates to torture or kill, they are automatically killed
. . . The FIS aren't doing the massacres. All the intelligence services in
Europe know the government is doing it, but they are keeping quiet because
they want to protect their supplies of oil."

      Joseph said he had witnessed torture. "I have seen the blowtorch used
in Chateauneuf. The smell is awful. . . . It has a very special smell of
burning hair and flesh." But the blowtorch was not the worst. "I have seen
in Antar, a torture centre near Algiers zoo, a human eye on a table with a
fork in it . . . I have terrible nightmares."

      He described electrode torture he had seen. "They manacle a person to
a bed, no mattress, just the springs. Then they get a live electric wire
and touch the person -- he made a swishing movement, his right hand coming
down in a lash. "Smain used to go to the torture zoo and my colleagues
would say: 'The Boss is here. He is working.' That meant he was supervising
the torture himself." --

The Guardian Weekly, Week ending November 16, 1997 

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