Men moet niet vergeten dat een groot deel van de slachtpartijen in Algerijen gepleegd zijn door het leger en de geheime dienst van Algerije. Verder is uit onderzoek gebleken dat meeste doden aanhangers of sympatisanten van de FIS of GIA zijn.
Crucially, the vast majority of the victims of these massacres have not been non-Muslims, secularists or supporters of the new Algerian regime, as one would expect if the perpetrators were actually former members of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The victims have almost entirely been poor villagers and shantytown dwellers - the very Muslim people who voted overwhelmingly for the FIS. High-ranking officials or members of the pro-Algerian regime elite have rarely been victims. For instance, no atrocities have been committed in the area of Club Des Pines, which was recently turned into a high-class city on the outskirts of the capital. Government officials, army chiefs and pro-government party leaders reside there. Why would the FIS massacre its own supporters, its own popular base, rather than its real enemy in the new Algerian elite? There have also been accounts reported on the authority of physicians working in hospitals where the dead and wounded are received, stating that “the dead from those who commit these horrible crimes were not circumcised.” Yet circumcision is standard for all Muslim males in Algeria. This implies that the perpetrators were not Muslim - and therefore not Islamist terrorists. The FIS itself, along with other opposition parties, accuses the Algerian government’s security forces of masterminding the massacres, especially in light of the government’s refusal to establish an independent investigation into the atrocities, which the FIS has been demanding. These points expose the inconsistency in the notion that the GIA is a radical Islamic offshoot of the FIS.[12]
The IHRC bulletin goes on to cite an Agence France Press (AFP) report which noted: “Bomb attacks that killed eight people in Paris in 1995 were carried out by the Algerian secret service, according to a press report on Sunday... The Observer quoted an Algerian asylum-seeker in Britain - who claimed he was a former agent in Algeria’s secret service - as saying the Paris bombs were part of a black propaganda war aimed at galvanising French public opinion against Islamic militants... The man, named only as Yussuf, told the paper that the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) - on whom both the Paris bombs and frequent massacres in Algeria have been blamed - was ‘a pure product of (the Algerian) secret service.’... Yussuf said Algerian intelligence agents routinely bribed European police, journalists and members of parliament... And he claimed to have personally delivered a suitcase containing $90,000 to a former French member of parliament ‘with strong links to the French intelligence services.’... Yussuf added that the killings of many foreigners in Algeria were organised by the secret police and not by Islamic extremists.”[24]
Similarly, reports by British journalists John Sweeney and Leonard Doyle reveal the complicity of both the Algerian state and the West in the Algerian crisis. Sweeney and Doyle report that according to defectors from the Algerian security forces, “The relentless massacres in Algeria are the work of secret police and army death squads. Algerian intelligence agents routinely bribe European police, journalists and MPs” via “Algeria’s oil and gas billions”. The testimony of these defectors supports the conclusion that “the constant terror in which civilians live is orchestrated by two shadowy figures”; these being “the heads of the Algerian secret service, the DRS and its sub-department, the counter intelligence agency, the DCE.”[25] According to a former Algerian diplomat Mohammad Larbi Zitout: “The GIA has been infiltrated and manipulated by the government. The GIA has been completely turned by the government.” Zitout also testified that the regime is behind the massacres.[26] A former career secret service officer in Algeria’s military security, Yussuf-Joseph, reveals: “All the intelligence services in Europe know the government [of Algeria is responsible] for the massacres, in which tens of thousands of Algerians have been killed [and which] have been carried out by the regime’s death squads.” Meanwhile, he confirms, European intelligence services “are keeping quiet because they want to protect their supplies of oil.”[27]
The evidence of this twin Algerian and European governmental complicity in Algeria’s humanitarian crisis only mounts. Robert Fisk, for instance, recorded the testimony of ‘Dalilah’, an Algerian policewoman who was witness to the torture and executions carried out by the Algerian intelligence services: “They tortured people - I saw this happening,” she stated. “I saw innocent people tortured like wild animals... They executed people... people who had done nothing. They had been denounced by people who didn’t get along with them. People just said ‘He’s a terrorist’ and the man would be executed.... They tied young people to a ladder with rope. They were always shirtless, sometimes naked. They put a rag over their face. Then they forced salty water into them. There was a tap with a pipe that they stuck in the prisoner’s throat and they ran the water until the prisoners’ bellies had swelled right up... Sometimes while this happened, the torturers would put broomsticks up their anuses. Some of the prisoners had beards, some didn’t. They were all poor... Any cop would hit the prisoners with the butt of his Kalash (rifle). Some of the prisoners went completely mad from being tortured. Everyone who was brought to the Cavignac was tortured - around 70 per cent of the cops there saw all this. They participated. Although the torture was the job of the judiciary police, the others joined in. The prisoners would be 20 to 30 to a cell and they would be brought one by one to the ladder, kicked in the ribs all the time. It was inhuman. In the cells, the prisoners got a piece of bread every two days. There was no medicine. Every prisoner, according to the law, has the right to a doctor. But they would be returned to their cells covered in blood.”
Fisk comments: “For more than four years released prisoners have told us of water torture and beatings, of suffocation with rags, of how their nails were ripped out by interrogators, of how women were gang-raped by policemen, of secret executions in police stations.” He gives several typical examples: “A police officer who was in charge of the Algiers’ city police armoury has described to The Independent how his colleagues killed prisoners in cold blood, how police torturers suffocated prisoners with acid-soaked rags after tearing out their nails and raping them with bottles. A 30-year old Algiers policewoman has told of how she watched prisoners - at the rate of 12 a day - tied half-naked to ladders in the Cavignac police station in Algiers while, screaming and pleading for mercy, salt water was pumped into their stomachs until they agreed, blindfolded, to sign confessions. The same policewoman admitted to signing false death certificates to prove that dead prisoners had been ‘found’ decomposing in the forests south of Algiers. A 23-year old army conscript spoke of watching officers torture suspected ‘Islamist’ prisoners by boring holes in their legs - and in one case, stomach - with electric drills in a dungeon called the ‘killing room’. And he claimed that he found a false beard amid the clothing of soldiers who had returned from a raid on a village where 28 civilians were later found beheaded; the soldier suspects that his comrades had dressed up as Muslim rebels to carry out the atrocity.”[28]
A former Algerian secret service officer known as Captain ‘Haroune’ - who was authenticated by the British Foreign Office - had also defected, left Algeria, and sought asylum in London. He informed a British House of Commons all-party committee that his ex-colleagues carried out “dirty jobs, including killing of journalists, officers and children”. He confessed, for instance, that the murder of seven Italians in Jenjen in July 1994 was perpetrated by state military security death squads, in order to blacken the name of “Islamic fundamentalists”. Arrested suspects for the murder are merely scapegoats who were forced to sign confessions under torture.[29] The former Algerian agent also testified in 1998 that “It’s the army which is responsible for the massacres; it’s the army which executes the massacres; not the regular soldiers, but a special unit under the orders of the generals. It should be remembered the lands are being privatized, and land is very important. One has first to chase people from their land so that land can be acquired cheaply. And then there must be a certain dose of terror in order to govern the Algerian people and remain in power. A Chinese saying tells that a picture is worth a thousand words. I could not stand the image of a young girl having her throat slit. I could not bear seeing what happened and not tell it. I have children, imagine what this girl had to suffer, the last 10 seconds of her life must have been horrible. I think it’s our duty to speak up about this. I speak today in the hope that others would do the same, so that things change, and so that these killings cease.”[30]