Yesterday's Le Monde article on revelations of testimony by a former French military attaché in Algiers has caused somewhat of a stir on both sides of the Mediterranean. The former attaché, General François Buchwalter, testified that the seven monks beheaded in 1996 during the worst years of Algeria's civil war, had in fact been killed by the Algerian Army.
Algerian media reaction (a selection here via Algeria Watch) has been quick, seeing a nefarious post-colonial, anti-Algerian motivation: "The Delirium Of A General," or "The Return of 'Who Killed Who'?" The latter, "Qui tue qui?", is shorthand for calling into question responsibility for thousands of deaths during the dirty war. According to several former Algerian military, not all "terrorist" killings were carried out by Islamic militants.
Today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to declassify documents relating to the investigation. As L'Express points out, Sarkozy was not in the Chirac government during the period in question.
In their 2007 book Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, Martin Evans and John Phillips wrote extensively about the monks and the events leading up to their deaths, saying "the monks' deaths could be seen as the consequence of a counter-insurgency game that went disastrously wrong." Evans and Phillips draw on previous revelations, notably by a former Algerian government infiltrator in the armed groups.
The British authors know of what they speak: Phillips was the Times (London) correspondent in Algeria during the worst years of the war, including during the monks' killing at Tibéhirine. "Reporting from Algeria," they write, "with a regime one of whose characteristics was disinformation on a grand scale, was notoriously hazardous." One of the main areas of focus in the current French investigation is whether the French authorities were complicit in covering up the disinformation.
Algeria's 2005 National Reconciliation Charter was supposed to have unleashed a kind of "live and let live" spirit, but as Liam Stack wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor, it has instead "focused on forgetting the past," at least for those in the government. French justice, not bound by the Algerian charter, is free to look where the truth may take it.
