THE BATTLE FOR ALGERIA

Robert Fox witnesses the latest struggle between Islam and the West on the Mediterranean shore

Algiers EARLY this month my friend Mohamed joined the march of 100,000 through Algiers to protest against the first-round victory of the Islamic Salvation Front, and their declared aim to make Algeria an Islamic republic. Mohamed comes from the Kabylie, the mountain country of the Berbers, speaks English, French and Ara- bic, as well as his native dialect. As an activist in the small Democratic Party, he is no lover of the old Marxist regime of the FLN, ousted in this month's coup.

Thirty years of one-party dictatorship have not done him and his like well. With his British engineering degree, he heads a department in a state enterprise, teaches two university courses and has several con- sultancies, but this barely covers the bills. Still single at 38, he lives in a small one- room apartment in outer Algiers, and his earnings have to support several members of his extended family.

Last week Mohamed the engineer collid- ed with the world of another Mohamed, who had also worked abroad, speaks English as well as French, but has a very different outlook. This Mohamed, aged 27, had rushed home from Stoke Newington, where he had been working as a lathe oper- ator, to the teeming suburb of Bab el Oued to be with his family in the hour of Alge- ria's latest upheaval. The family of five, who inhabit two rooms on the first floor of a peeling apartment block, are ardent sup- porters of the fundamentalists of the FIS (as the Salvation Front is always known).

The paradox of Algeria today is summed up by the tale of the two Mohameds. After a chance meeting by Algiers Town Hall, the younger Mohamed invited us to the Bab el Oued apartment. At the door we were greeted by his elder sister Nasira, swathed in a heavy blue dress, only her face showing from her chador.

Unusually, she shook our hand, which would be forbidden in fundamentalist cir- cles farther east in the Arab world. As the tea and sweetcakes were handed round, the 28-year-old teacher of history and geogra- phy could not wait to get going.

`What do Algerians want? Algerians want Islam,' began her well-rehearsed ser- mon in fractured but accurate English, in a shrill, high soprano. `Algeria is a very good country, a very rich country, but the gov- ernment is not good. It has not been good for 30 years. We must be rid of the govern- ment.' Without deviation or hesitation, the repetition of the message went on. `We support FIS because we are Muslims and we cannot choose any other path. We say religion is not only in the mosque, it is our life. It is like the sun, like oxygen. We can- not live without it.

`Of course Islam will get us jobs. Mohammed talks about work, and Islam is work.' Of all her pupils at the local school, admitted Nasira, not one could expect to get a job on leaving. In the crowded apart- ment block of Bab el Oued, their rubbish grows like fungus; the stark economic facts of Algeria's crisis are only too plain. On the corners and in the streets young men stand and talk, or lean against walls. They are Algeria's new political class, the hitist, in local jargon — literally `those that lean against walls'; they are the foot-soldiers, the messengers and carriers of the FIS.

Now more than three-quarters of Alge- ria's population is under the age of 30. Recently, the numbers have been going up by 3 per cent annually, the highest birth rate in North Africa. The pressure for emi- gration to the northern shore of the Mediterranean, to Italy and Spain, as well as France, makes the Algerian crisis more than a domestic affair of the Maghreb. When the French rulers quit 30 years ago there were roughly 10 million in Algeria, now there are nearly 26 million. When the new head of state, Mohamed Boudiaf, left Algeria for exile 27 years ago, most Algeri- ans alive today had not been born.

By chance, we catch the return of the new president, with his pharaoh's face, etched in stone, on the television, as we sit in the crowded room of Mohamed Moustafiou and his family. `This is dema- goguery — why do we want him? We didn't vote for him,' says the mother, Fatima, 62, in precise colonial French. 'He's too old.'

Nasira, never silent for long, chimes in: `This government is like the Mafia. We can't change the opinion of the people. We want Islam, and we shall have Islam — inshallah. Islam will give us more than democracy, it will give us life.'

Her younger brother, Mohamed the lathe operator from Stoke Newington, clos- es the conversation: `Democracy is made by man, so it can make mistakes. Islam cannot make mistakes, as it is made by God.'

The following day, we hear more Islamic politics when we attend Friday prayers at the As-Sunna Mosque in Bab el Oued, with the FIS leader Abdelkader Hackani preaching the sermon. We bring the older Mohamed, the engineer, to help translate. He is visibly shocked by the experience.

The rambling half-built brick mosque is surrounded by police and troops, armed to the teeth with rocket grenades, machine- guns and live ammunition. The worship- pers arrive in disciplined columns, mar- shalled by FIS activitists, who in turn are controlled and watched by the police and army commanders. `I came to prayers and have found an earthquake, tanks, guns and soldiers,' intones the preacher. `If you go to jail, if you die, we will have the Islamic republic. Read the Koran and reflect.'

Time and again he returns to the cata- logue of grievance which has been the recruiting manifesto of the FIS. `They have robbed you for 30 years, made you poor, stolen your jobs and even killed you (a ref- erence to the shooting of rioters in 1988 and last year).' But the urge for action has passed, and after a final appeal for calm and no violence, the worshippers melt away.

`I have never heard one of those sermons all the way through before,' mutters Mohamed, the Kabyle. 'It's pure poison— this poison was being administered intra- venously — blaming everybody else for their troubles, telling those poor people they're always the victim. It's time to break the agreement allowing the FIS to operate as a party. The mosque must be made a place for prayer, and not for politics.'

Mohamed says that at work he has been alarmed at the growth of support for the FIS fundamentalists. 'Only three of us in the whole department did not vote FIS. Even the women in their smart Western clothes went out in the afternoon to vote for FIS. I told them they must be crazy, but most seemed to think it was the best way to get rid of the old regime.' Mohamed says he is quietly relieved that they threw out the equivocal and vacillating President Chadli, and ended the 30-year rule of the FLN. But he thinks the new government has little time, and desperate measures must be taken quickly to resurrect Algeria's moribund economy.

The irony of Algeria's latest political drama is not lost on him. A month ago the country faced the prospect of becoming the first Islamic republic achieved by demo- cratic vote. The process has now been stopped in the name of Western constitu- tional legality by a military-backed coup. Possibly the best army in the Arab world has stood up to the fundamentalists, where other soldiers, in Iran and Sudan, could not or would not in the past.

Furthermore, just as the Western powers are making up to Teheran, the Algerians have cut diplomatic ties because of the meddling of the mullahs and politicians in Iran in promoting the FIS fundamentalists. The new government has also recalled the ambassador to Paris because of 'unhelpful and patronising remarks by certain politi- cians' — pointing to President Mitterrand himself.

For Mohamed, my sage friend from Kabylie, this is not the least significant ele- ment of the new Algerian paradox. 'What we are seeing here is part of the huge shift in the world economic order since the Gulf war. That led to France losing its vital influence in Iraq. Because they see Algeria in terms of their own domestic politics, the French are now losing here. Soon they could lose the whole Maghreb, which is looking more to America, and even to Britain.'

Robert Fox writes for the Daily Telegraph