In many ways, it’s the perfect size of venue: not too big, or too small. A convenient balcony. Good lines of sight. A sturdy dance floor fit for moshing. Solid, utilitarian fixtures and fittings. All the systems for dealing with over-excited rock’n’roll fans in place and down pat. It reminds me of the old Town and Country Club in London. It’s an exciting place to be.

Tinariwen with Robert Plant at the Bataclan, Paris – 7th April 2007

And so it proved back in 2007 when Tinariwen played their first gig there.  Their third album Aman Iman had just come out to a loud international fanfare. The momentum around the band seemed unstoppable. There were journalists, photographers, TV people to deal with. Life was frantic. And exciting. The band’s bus was parked just outside the front doors of the venue. From mid afternoon onwards, there were fans hanging about. When Ibrahim came out to go into the venue, they mobbed him. Most of them were North African. They just wanted to do what fans generally want to do – say hi, have a hug, ask a question, snap a selfie. But it was strange for Ibrahim, and for the rest of us. We hadn’t really had to deal with these kinds of demonstrations of fan-love before. But this was the Bataclan and Tinariwen had arrived.

Because I hadn’t been with the band when they’d played at a festival in southern Morocco just a few months before, I was yet to realise the impact they were having in North Africa. It hit me for the first time there and then, outside the Bataclan. Later, during the gig, there were Berber flags waving in the audience. That was also new.  This was an altogether different, more positive, assertion of North Africa cultural pride and defiance to the one we saw last Friday night.  Robert Plant had agreed to come on and do a guest appearance.  I seem to remember that he sang ‘Win My Train Fare Home’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to the broiling roll of Tamashek guitars, with Yadou kicking out that famous riff on his bass.  Justin Adams was also there.  It was a night I won’t forget.

Last Friday night, once again by all accounts, the excitement was palpable.  “Eagles Of Death Metal Tonight – yet another sold out concert!” the venue proclaimed on its Facebook page.  People had come from far and wide.  It was going to be a cracker. Then the first gun shots – a different kind of death metal, unmusical, joyless, rhythm-less – cut across the broiling riffs. Men in black with goatees, of a similar age to most in the audience, had come to put and end to that feeling that anyone who’s been to an eagerly anticipated sold-out gig will know and cherish. It’s a feeling of immense good fortune, of being one of the privileged few, in the right place at the right time. Those young men stood that feeling on its head, and murdered it.

The ISIS statement called what was happening that night, before their bloody intervention at the Bataclan Conference Center (sic), “a profligate prostitution party”. How familiar the ring of those words, echoing a thousand puritan, Calvinist, kill joy rants from our own history. Christianity fought these same battles many centuries ago.  They were still being fought in the 1950s. We thought they’d been won. But no, that battle is still being fought. And anyone who walks out onto any stage – in Paris, or London, or Madrid, Melbourne, Mumbai and Osaka – is now in the front line of that battle.  Music itself is on the front line.  The whole global community of musicians, promoters, managers, roadies, sound engineers, bouncers, merchandising sellers, bar workers, music PRs, music journalists – we’re all on the front line. Take courage. We’ve got to win.  The alternative is too bleak to contemplate: a life without joy, relief, togetherness.  In short, a life without music.

Andy Morgan

Bristol, 17th November 2015.

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Souad Massi. Photo by Jean Baptiste Millot

A few weeks ago, an article called ‘What can Ibn Arabi do against Daesh?’ appeared in the pages of the Algerian daily El Watan (one of Souad Massi’s favourite newspapers). The question in the title neatly summarizes the ideological struggle that rages in almost every corner of the Muslim world; it also lies at the heart of Souad Massi’s new album El Mutakalllimûn, although she might balk at avowing as much in public.

Daesh hardly need any introduction; many readers might know the organisation by the acronyms more commonly used by non-Arabic speakers: ISIS or IS. This latter-day ‘caliphate’ is busy preparing the ground for the annihilation of all infidels and apostates, and putting anyone who doesn’t agree with their brutally literalist interpretation of Islam to the sword. It already occupies large swathes of eastern Syria and northern Iraq – the prophesied battleground for that final apocalyptic showdown with the non-believers. And though it professes a desire to rewind the human clock back to the 7^th century AD, the organisation has turned a local conflict into a global battle of hearts and minds with its gruesomely brilliant manipulation of modern digital media. In fact, ISIS is a paradigm of modernity, as much a part of the age we live in – like it or not – as Grand Theft Auto or Taylor Swift.

The name Ibn Arabi requires little more clarification perhaps. It belongs to a Muslim mystic and philosopher, many would say ‘saint’, who was born in Murcia, southern Spain, in 1165AD and died in Damascus 75 years later. Posterity bestowed him with the honorifics ‘al-Shaykh al-Akbar’ (‘the great Cheikh’) and ‘Doctor Maximus’. Amongst his many works is the seminal al-Futuhat al-Makkiya (The Meccan Illuminations) which comprises over 7000 pages of densely packed manuscript that elucidate, in language both complex and beautiful, his metaphysical philosophy of Oneness and the divine role of love and mercy in human existence.

Ibn Arabi was both venerated and reviled in the centuries following his death; venerated by those who admired the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his mystical insight; reviled by those, such as the 13^th century scholar and jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, who were wary of unfettered philosophising of any kind and preferred to adhere to a strict, literal and unquestioning (though selective) interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. Ibn Taymiyyah’s teachings are still revered by Sunni literalists and followers of ISIS to this day.

The article in El Watan was a report of a conference held last June at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Algiers to mark the 850^th anniversary of Ibn Arabi’s birth. The event gathered together eminent professors of philosophy, history, poetry and linguistics from all over the Arab world to venerate the great man, and contemplate the hotly topical question of how his fiqh or ‘philosophy’ of love can be deployed against the bigotry and hatred of ISIS and their ilk. The path to enlightenment propounded by Ibn Arabi is poorly suited to modern lifestyles and expectations; it demands silence, solitude, contemplation and self-abnegation – a retreat from this world rather than a more exhilarating involvement in it. What, in comparison to Daesh’s thrilling brew of guns, adventure, brotherhood and, above all, certainty, can his philosophy possibly offer today’s ardent young Muslim minds, apart from boredom perhaps?

Well, let’s start with peace, tolerance and love. Ibn Arabi and the ‘golden age’ of Islam in al-Andalus (southern Spain) that gave him birth are like beacons that shine a light across the centuries into Islam’s current heart of darkness. They offer examples of how not only Muslims, but all human beings, can live in state of peaceful coexistence and tolerance. Medieval Spain had its share of despots, bigots and jihadists, but it was also, in its heyday, the greatest centre of learning, science and religious tolerance in the western world. Muslim caliphs employed Jewish viziers, philosophers and architects. Christian kings were buried with Arabic inscriptions around their tombs. Poetry, especially Arabic poetry, was prized by all men of education – Muslim, Christian or Jew. Muslim and Jewish philosophers had no fear of assimilating the ‘pagan’ thought of Aristotle and the ancients into their discourse. Reason nourished faith. Tolerance towards the other was matched by a tolerance of inner contradictions and doubts.

Ibn Arabi is often held up as the guide and poet of what is often referred to as jihād al-akhbar, ‘the greater jihad’ – in other words, the endeavour to master the self. In comparison to that immense struggle, in which we’re all engaged, beheading innocents in northern Iraq is, at best, a lesser jihad. It’s this message that those professors and intellectuals who gathered in Algiers to venerate the memory of Ibn Arabi wished to convey. ‘One left the hall astoundingly relieved and calmed,’ wrote the El Watan journalist who covered the conference, ‘with the gentle conviction that another discourse is possible.’

Ibn Arabi’s writings stress the importance of the night as the time best suited for the inner journey. Souad Massi admits that she’s attracted to the silence of nocturnal contemplation. This was especially true when she was a young teenager living in Algiers during the late 1980s and 1990s, a time when her homeland was being ripped apart by political turmoil and religious fanaticism. “I was always very solitary,” she told me. “For me the night was an important time. If you wanted to cry, no one could see you. Because I lived in a large family and you can’t do anything during the day, everybody can see you, but in the night I spent hours looking at the stars, sometimes until three in the morning. Especially in summer, I found it amazingly beautiful.”

Many years later, after she had moved to France and become a singer of global renown, Massi chanced across a documentary on TV about the Spanish city of Cordoba and its golden past during another nocturnal vigil, at around 4am in the morning. She was immediately “bewitched by the city”, to use her own words, and fascinated by its former intellectual grandeur, sophistication and spirit of tolerance. She started reading books about the place, wondering why she hadn’t ever paid much attention to its history and legacy, despite her early love of flamenco and Spanish culture. “I was ashamed,” she says. “I’ve been all around the world but I’ve never been there.”

She read about a sort of cultural assembly that existed in Andalusia during the early medieval period, frequented by wise men – ‘masters of the word’ – who were called El Mutakalllimûn. The word is the plural of mutakallim, which means a scholar of Ilm al-Kala – the Islamic science of discourse. The object of the mutakallim is to defend the word of God by means of reasoned argument and reconcile faith with non-Islamic traditions of deductive philosophical reasoning. As such it was and still remains highly controversial. Strict Sunni scholars, of Salafist or Wahabist tendency, consider the kalam to be a dangerous innovation and generally forbid their students to indulge in it. The word of God is uncreated by man and therefore human reason cannot and should not be applied to it, or so they say.

To Souad Massi however, her personal discovery of Cordoba and the tradition of kalam served as a gateway into Islam’s glorious intellectual past and the accumulated cultural wealth of the Arab world. She was infused with a missionary zeal to share what she discovered, and, by celebrating the beauty of Islamic philosophy, poetry and calligraphy, to find “another discourse”. “I think we’re lacking a lot of tolerance,” Souad says, “and I think that we must give the power and the opportunity to the learned people in Islam, the university professors. They’re the ones who will show us the way and who won’t lead us astray. Because when you’re ignorant, anyone can tell you anything they want, and you’ll follow him.”

She prepared to fight her own gentle ‘cultural’ battle with two types of ignorance. The first was the ignorance of non-Arabs who see the Arab world and Arabic culture as a monolithic threat to their well-being; a source either of angry youth who refuse to integrate into the culture of their adopted homes in Europe and prefer to spend their time rinsing violent rap lyrics and stealing cars, or angry bearded zealots whose only purpose in life is sow terror and murder innocents. The second is the ignorance of Arabs, especially the youth in her own adopted country of France, of their own history and cultural heritage.

“How come nobody ever talks about those wise men? Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, great men of learning, writers?” asks Massi, “Why do people always talk about little hoodlums who’ve stolen some nonsense?…We don’t have the right to marginalise and hide away this treasure, and emphasize all the stuff that’s happening right now. We can’t reduce Arabic culture to that.”

Massi tells me that she set to work creating El Mutakallimûn the album “like a police investigator.” She read widely, surfed the net, visited archives and libraries and posted requests for information on Facebook. She corresponded with professors of Arabic literature and translators. She came across the work of the calligraphers Mohamed Bourafai, and his son Ayman Bourafai. Despite her longstanding love of poetry by Leonard Cohen, Mahmoud Darwish and Victor Hugo, she had never considered herself a very ‘literary’ person. Grappling with early medieval Arabic wasn’t easy.

But, as she delved deeper, wonders kept emerging. She discovered the 9th century Iraqi poet Al Mutanabi – ‘The Would-be Prophet’. “There are miracles in his poems,” she says. “No one has scaled the same heights as him. It’s just not possible to come out with beauty like that.” She discovered the ‘hanging odes’ of the pre-Islamic poet Zouhaïr Ibn Abi Salma and the astonishing depth that the Arabic language is capable of in some of the words he used, words like sa’imtou: “It means more than ‘I’m tired’. When you say it, you include all the years you have lived. I remember that when I was a child, it was the only word that really left its mark on me. When I couldn’t go on, I always thought discreetly about sa’imtou.”

She discovered Majnūn Layla – ‘[The Man] Possessed by Layla’ – the Arab world’s answer to Romeo and Juliet, about a young man called Qays who falls in love with a girl called Layla but goes mad and dies of hunger because her father disapproves of him and he cannot have her: “I said to myself that it just wasn’t possible to die of love, just like that. It doesn’t exist. But, well, yes…it does.” She discovered The Song of the Whistling Nightingale (‘Sawtou Safiri el Boulbouli’) by the 9th century poet Asmaï, with its intricate verbal refinements and frankly untranslatable word play. “You think you’ve written, you’ve composed,” says Massi, “but you’ve done nothing at all. They were geniuses who left traces, marvels. We’re nothing in comparison to them.”

Perhaps most encouraging of all, she discovered that the poetic prowess of the ancients had survived into the modern era, reincarnated in poets like the Tunisian Abou el Kacem Chebbi who wrote the irresistibly stirring hymn ‘To the Tyrants of the World’ (‘Elā Toghat al-Alāam’) with its prophetic lines “You dare to defile the magic of existence / And scatter needles of misfortune at will / Beware! That the springtime doesn’t trick you / Nor the clarity of the sky, nor the light of day.” Although el Chebbi died in 1934 at the age of 25, his verses stoked the passion of the crowds that marched down Avenue Bourguiba and occupied Tahrir Square in the spring of 2011, alongside the rap of El General du Bled, the protest songs of Cheikh Imam and the poems of Ahmed Fouad Negm.

‘Houria’ [‘Freedom’] by Mohammed and Aymen Bourafai

Souad Massi avows an admiration for poets and artists who take risks. “I have a lot of respect for people who can put themselves in danger of death to tell the truth,” she says. She cites the modern Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar as a luminous example. He was forced to flee his adopted city of Kuwait and settle in London in the 1980s. In 2011, he wrote about the power of poetry and words, a power even greater than the forces shaking the Arab world at the time: “Poetry is not an Arab regime that falls with the death of the ruler. And it’s not an alternative to action. It’s an art form whose job is agitating, exposing, and witnessing reality, aspiring beyond the present. Poetry lights the road, and guides our deeds.”

Massi set Ahmed Matar’s poem ‘El Houriya’ (‘Freedom’) to music and included it on El Mutakallimûn. It’s the tale of a teacher who writes the word ‘freedom’ up on the black board only to be met with the blank stares of his pupils. “It’s heartbreaking to see the youth / Who understand nothing about Freedom” says the teacher. The calligraphy by Mohamed Bourafai’s that accompanies the poem looks like the manuscript of a poem that has been saved from the flames, with the word ‘Freedom’ glowing bright at its heart.

There are young Muslim men and women all over the world who are caught in a vortex of identity-politics, weakened, disorientated and prone to apocalyptic rhetoric. In France, where Souad Massi now lives, the problem is acute. “The youth here have nothing. They’re made to feel like foreigners. All they have is football pitches, because the state has cut the funding for all kinds of activities in the housing estates. So either you become a football champion, or you’re nothing. If there was a place to meet and someone who could say ‘Look at your ancestors…like Ibn Firnas, the first guy to try and fly. He was from Muslim Andalusia. Or all those hospitals named after Avicenna. That is ‘Ibn Sinna’, a Muslim.’ That would already give them a little confidence, allow them to gravitate towards something.”

Talking To Souad Massi, it’s clear that she prefers to play the role of educator, sharing the beauty of Arabic culture, rather than risk career, family, life by taking the fight to the bigots and the haters. Her adopted home of France is one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the war of words and ideas that rages through Islam and the Arab world. As a public figure, she already stands exposed. She doesn’t want to become another Charb. Even though the passion with which she talks about the injustices perpetrated against Arabic culture and Islam, both from without and within, is palpable, her strategy is seduction rather than confrontation.

“All I’m trying to do is to make people aware [of all this beauty], by means of pop, of a beautiful poem,” she says. “Then perhaps that person will be attracted by that culture and will make his own way. That’s my aim. I have nothing to prove. I did for love, really, and I was very well supported by musicians. Then again…I’m sure there’ll be those who say that poems are sacred; but poems aren’t sacred. For Muslims, what’s sacred is the Qur’an, and I won’t tamper with that, that’s for sure.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2015

This article is an amalgamation of the sleeve notes for the album El Mutakallimûn and an article that was published in Songlines in July 2015

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So stark and brash was the nature of this visit that many see in it a major attempt to realign power relations in North Africa and the Sahel. Morocco’s ostensible aim is to finesse the role of privileged’ partner to Mali in the region from its old rival, Algeria. With Algeria in considerable disarray at the moment, due to the ill-health of President Bouteflika and the immense uncertainty about who should succeed him, this is an opportune moment for Morocco to step up to the plate. Its ancient ties with northern Mali, especially with the various Arab communities of Timbuktu, Djenné and Arawan, no doubt confers historic legitimacy to this move in the eyes of many at home in Morocco.

The first concrete result of the visit is an agreement from Morocco to help train 500 new Malian imams. “We share the Maliki madhab (school of religious law) with Mali, so there’s a perfect cohesion between us in the matter of training imams and in that of religious practice too, which is of a moderate Sunni Islam,” Morocco’s ambassador to Mali, Hassan Naciri, told Mali’s state TV station ORTM. “For us, it’s also important to train these imams according to the principles of moderation and tolerance in Islam.”

The Maliki madhab is still the most popular rite in North and West Africa. Generally, it is considered a lot more tolerant and respectful of people’s differences than the Hanbali school that has taken hold of many parts of the Middle East and which the Salafiyya, who are making inroads into countries such as Mali and Morocco, hold dear.

Mohammed VI fears radical Salafism and Wahabism as much as any hereditary ‘traditional’ ruler in the Maghreb, maybe more. In fact, extremist groups in Morocco recently issued death threats against the king.  The creeping influence of radical Sunni beliefs throughout the Sahel, aided and abetted by the petro-dollars of the Middle East, has also been a great cause for concern to Mali’s secular political elite.  So this move could be seen as a concerted counter-attack against religious radicalism and influence of firebrand Salafi preachers in North and West Africa.

The wider scope of Morocco’s intentions in Mali remains to be seen however. They see, if not common cause, at least a strong empathetic parallel between their struggle against the Polisario in the Western Sahara and Mali’s struggle against Touareg separatists in the north of the country. There were also many reports during the Malian civil war of 2012 of links between jihadi armed groups in northern Mali and disaffected youth in southern Morocco and the Western Sahara. The two countries no doubt see advantages in sharing know-how, intelligence and resources to fight separatism.

The issue of drug smuggling also binds the two countries together, whether they like it or not. Much of the big-time hashish trade that transits through northern Mali is connected to the Moroccan underworld, and there is some evidence of Moroccan involvement in the more lucrative cocaine trade as well.

Morocco might also see the election of a new President in Mali as an opportunity to reassert their influence in the north of the country. Many in the old nationalist Istiqlal party still harbour dreams of a ‘Greater Morocco’, whose influence, if not borders, would encompass all those lands conquered by the great 15th century Sultan Ahmed al-Mansour, which include large tracts of what is now northern Mali.  Those dreams may be fanciful, but closer and more vigorous ties with Mali will be at the very least expected to bring new business and resource-extraction opportunities.

Mohammed VI’s Bamako trip is an attempt to reassert Moroccan hegemony in the region at Algeria’s expense, to establish common cause with the new Malian President in terms of fighting separatism, drug smuggling and religious extremism, to ease pressure on the Western Sahara and generally flex the economic muscle of an increasingly confident Morocco.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

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Mokhtar Belmokhtar aka Laouaar aka Monsieur Marlboro aka One Eyed Jack

The following is an extract from my forthcoming book Kel Tinariwen – A Saharan Odyssey. The context is a visit I made to Tamanrasset in southern Algeria in January 2010, where I stayed with Eyadou Ag Leche, the bassist of Tinariwen. Obviously, the story of AQIM has evolved substantially since then but for present purposes I’ve decided to keep the context intact and limit this extract to the period 1990-2007.  I made no reference to subsequent events such as the Touareg uprising of January 2012, the alliance of Touareg Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali with AQIM, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 or Belmokhtar’s dramatic hostage grab at the In Amenas oil refinery in January 2013.  I will be bringing the story up to date before publication, but in the meantime, I hope this offers some useful background today’s dramatic headlines…

Out in the yard of Eyadou’s house, we talked about the Great Game that had gripped the southern Sahara. We asked all the usual questions in the eager hope that Eyadou might be able to throw some light on them. Who exactly are Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?  Why are they allowed to operate in northern eastern Mali? Why has the Adagh, the home of Tinariwen and their ancestors, become a bolt-hole for terrorists and their hostages?  Are AQIM involved in the drug trafficking trade?  Do they have links with the Touareg in the area?  Or with local Arabs?  Are they an invention of the Algerian secret services?  Are they in cahoots with the Malian government?  Is the President of Mali involved in drug trafficking? How come a Boeing 727 can land in the desert, unload up to ten tonnes of coke into a waiting convoy of 4x4s and then get torched without the local authorities intervening or even raising the alarm? Many questions spiralled in and out of each other like eddies of sand.  It was as if our vision of the whole problem ended at the tip of our noses.

Eyadou didn’t know the answers either. Not many people know the answers, and those who do aren’t the type to blithely spill the beans over a good lunch. Terrorist emirs, Malian secret service operatives, corrupt local politicians, Saharan drug barons, Algerian generals, politicians in Bamako, Touareg rebel leaders in Kidal, arms dealers from Tamanrasset and Timbuktu, Mauritanian customs chiefs, none of them are the most garrulous conversationalists and raconteurs, especially if they happen to be talking to a western journalist who’s asking too many questions.

There are facts about Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that are reassuringly hard and verifiable. The organisation exists. It’s run by Algerian Arabs. It’s made a home from home in the north east of Mali, on Tinariwen’s native earth. It earns millions and millions of euros from kidnapping westerners. No one knows exactly how much. Every now and then it chops the head off one of its victims. All in the name of Allah.

But beyond that solid core of certainties floats a penumbra of intrigue and supposition, a mist of conspiracy theorising that turns AQIM into a mystery with the power to obsess, like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster or the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas. And beneath all that speculative hot air, the people of the deserts, the Kel Tinariwen, languish in misery. Many of them live the truth, a daily gritty unglamorous truth that armchair theorists and analysts cannot know. But most live without knowing the geopolitical mechanisms behind that truth. They know their desert is dying. They know that rain is rarer than it was, that the government 1,500km away in Bamako has abandoned them, that the basics of civilization – schools, clinics, sustainable energy, a functioning economy, welfare – are absent from their lives, and that tourism has been killed by foreigners, i.e Algerian Arabs, in the name of Islam.  But why?

In the early 1990s, the small cabal of army generals who had wielded real power in Algeria since independence found themselves unpopular at home and isolated abroad. The anger and resentment of ordinary Algerians against these shady strong men and their party, the FLN, the only party in this one party state, had reached breaking point by the middle of the 1980s. Inspired by the Berber Spring of 1982, feelings exploded into a inflammable display of people power in October 1988. This popular uprising, an ‘Arab spring’ un-fêted and largely ignored by the rest of the world, lead directly to Algeria’s first free multi-party democratic elections in 1991. The first round of the ballot, held in late December 1991, gave an unassailable lead to an Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamic du Salud or FIS in French). But the generals decided that they couldn’t risk handing power to a party that considered democracy itself to be an unIslamic western apostasy. Islamist dogma held that power can only come from God, not the people, and that democracy itself is therefore ungodly.   The general’s dogma held that power was theirs, by right and privilege. The two dogmas were incompatible and so the generals cancelled the second round of voting, which was due to be held in late January 1992.

This spectacular abortion of the democratic process soiled the image of the Algerian leadership in the eyes of western democracies such as France and the USA. Back home, its effect was catastrophic. Fury cooked the nation’s heart. Some Algerians came to the conclusion that the generals, the ruling FLN and their entire rotten system of power had to be annihilated by any means necessary. Anyone with a stake in that system would have to be punished for robbing the nation of its dignity and its freedom. The generals tried to appease the popular ire by importing a new leader in the shape of Mohammed Boudiaf, a hero of the struggle for independence who had been exiled to Morocco for opposing President Ben Bella in the early 1960s. They installed him as temporary President in January 1991 but the move turned out to offer little more than a flicker of light in a storm of emotion that refused to abate. Boudiaf was assassinated six months later by a sub-lieutenant who belonged to an elite security unit affiliated to the Algerian secret services.

Gradually, throughout 1991, the hope that the Algerian people had placed in democracy mutated into gross civil disobedience, bloodshed and guerrilla war. The more radical elements in the FIS took to the hills and formed a number of different Islamist militias who vowed to continue their struggle for an Islamic state by violent means. Most of these home grown jihadists were clear that their enemies were the state, the army and the police. They considered the targeting of civilians to be haram, a sin. Hearts soon hardened however, and vengeance grew colder, a process that accelerated with the return of Algerian men who had fought with the mujahedeen against the Russian army in Afghanistan during the 1980s and others who went there to do a stint in the new Islamist training camps in the 1990s. Collectively, these ‘pros’ were known as Les Afghans and they were responsible for introducing ever more lethal guerrilla tactics as the decade went on.

The Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée or GIA) was formed by one of these Afghans, a man called Mansour Meliani, in the summer of 1992 and it soon became the most feared and powerful terror organisation in the country. It vowed death to all heretics and unbelievers, who, by their definition, meant not only the government, the army and the police but also journalists, writers, artists, musicians, academics, commentators, intellectuals, opposition politicians and countless entirely innocent civilians. In their polarised vision of the world, almost the entire Algerian population was guilty of complacency and ‘co-operation’ with the government, and thus were legitimate targets for their bullets and bombs. Eminent cultural figures like the rai singer Cheb Hasni and the writer Tahar Djaout were killed by GIA mujahedeen.

The FIS soon tried to alienate themselves from the GIA by forming their own Islamic Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut – AIS) in order to conduct jihad in what they considered to be the ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ way. The GIA then became more bent on fighting the FIS, the AIS, and the old Islamist militia, the Armed Islamic Movement (Movement Islamique Armée – MIA), than the Algerian army or police. The political intrigue and blood-letting within the jihadi movement became murderous and complex. By the end of 1994, the GIA was under the command of the bloodthirsty Djamel Zitouni, whose ambition was to refocus some of the GIA’s brutal power directly on France, Algeria’s hated ex-colonial overlord. He masterminded the highjacking of Air France Flight 8689 in Algiers on Christmas Day 1994, intending to fly it into the Eiffel Tower. He also sent mujahedeen to plant bombs on the Paris Metro, killing many innocent civilians. But the suffering of foreigners was nothing compared to that of Algerians themselves.

After Zitouni was killed by a splinter group in 1996, the GIA was taken over by Antar Zouabri, a man with an even greater thirst for innocent blood. He espoused the notion that the entire Algeria population were guilty of heretical behaviour, by their docility, their moral depravity and their aspiration to democracy. Religious guidance was sought from the Jordanian preacher and jurist Abou Qatada, then based in London, who issued a legal judgement or fatwa in 1995 which claimed that the killing of innocent women and children was justified if they had converted from Islam or were ‘apostates’.  Abou Qatada and the GIA espoused the extreme Kharijite doctrine of takfir, whereby entire groups or populations of Muslims are declared to be unbelievers, sinners and apostates and therefore condemnable to death under Shari’a law. This was the judgement which lead to the killing of over 100,000 innocent Algerians. Even though, by 1997, the GIA had begun to fall apart under the weight of its own internal cat-fighting and frequent purges, the carnage it perpetrated during Algeria’s dirty war of the 1990s has been well documented and lamented. By the middle of the decade, not only the level of violence, but its sheer inventiveness and depravity had plumbed unimaginable depths.

GIA recruitment policies were famously lax, and the organisation was soon burdened not only with large number of petty criminals turned opportunistic jihadists, but also by undercover government agents. The theory soon began to emerge that early in their campaign of terror, armed Islamic groups, especially the GIA, had been infiltrated the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), aka La Sécurité Militaire (SM), aka the Algerian secret services. The general whisper was that shadowy forces in the government were in fact responsible for instigating some of the inhuman acts outwardly committed in the name of jihad. The stench of conspiracy was reinforced by the testimony of former DRS agents who ‘turned’ and sought asylum abroad, where they revealed some of dark machinery of power that operated within Algeria. The finger was often pointed at the head of the Algerian secret services, General Mohammed Mediène, aka ‘Tewfik’, one of the most secretive figures in the Algerian military high-command, and, together with General Smain Lamari, the real power in Algeria.

Whether or not their struggle was partly puppeteered from above, by 1997 many GIA foot soldiers, and some cadres too, were tired and dismayed with the brutality that their leaders, especially Antar Zouabri, seemed happy to continue inflicting on a bruised and battered Algeria. One of these GIA leaders, a former army paratrooper and commander of the GIA’s eastern sector, Hassan Hattab aka Abou Hamza, broke away with other dissidents and announced the formation of a new organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafist pour le Predication et le Combat – GSPC), in March 1999. Hattab defined the group’s enemy strictly and narrowly as the army and the state. Killing innocent civilians was forbidden. This new direction attracted thousands of defectors from both the GIA and the AIS, and GSPC numbers soon swelled to over 3,000 fighters. Osama Bid Laden was alleged to have given the project his blessing. GIA tactics had proved too extreme even for the don of global jihad.

The horror in Algeria had become overwhelming. The generals and the FLN government confessed to have realised that military victory against the insurgents was an impossibility and a more conciliatory approach was required. Between 1995 and 1998, President Lamine Zeroual issued numerous decrees of clemency and pardon which persuaded over 4000 Islamist fighters to lay down their arms. In April 1999, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a 62 year-old FLN cadre who had the backing of the army, was elected President on a platform of national reconciliation. A law known as the Concorde Civile was passed in September 1999, offering a general amnesty that persuaded many more GIA grunts to come in from the cold. Further pardons were granted in 2005 by The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation which was approved by the people in a referendum. The nation was sick of violence and a large proportion of the Islamist movement began to turn away from Semtex and the Kalash’ towards the ballot box and other forms of non-violent opposition.

Only the GIA and GSPC spurned all peaceful overtures and vowed to keep on fighting until their dream of an Islamic caliphate in Algeria became a reality. But by the turn of the millennium, a combination of battle fatigue, conciliatory government policies and successful army and police operations against Islamist militias was slowly re-establishing law and order in the north of Algeria. The GSPC decided to seek new battlefields in areas where the government’s grip was still limp. They also wanted to implement a new ‘internationalist’ agenda, and bring their movement in line with the objectives of the global jihad. Representatives of the GSPC had travelled to Pakistan in 1998 to attend a meeting organised by Osama Bin Laden in an attempt to unite disparate groups of mujahedeen around the world into one global Islamist front. The predominant doctrines that united these groups were Salafism and Wahabbism.

The Salafists preach a return to the pure and unsullied moral principles of the as-Saaleh as-Salaf, the ‘righteous originators’, those first Muslims whose life and moral rectitude is admired and venerated by modern adepts. It’s a kind of religious nostalgia that looks back to what it imagines was a complete, unified and morally clean doctrine for living that held sway in the years immediately following the death of the Prophet but had since been corrupted and tarnished. Some claim that Salafism is actually a rather modern concept cobbled together by scholars in the Asian subcontinent at the end of the 19th century to free young Muslim minds from the chains of colonialism and bind them to a strict interpretation and application of the Qu’ran and hadith, or body of Muslim law. Since then, ‘Salafis’ has become something of a catch-all adjective used to describe any Muslim who vows to impose Sharia law and an unadulaterated Islamic way of life on an unwilling society by peaceful, or, if necessary, violent means.

An early proselytiser for a return the pure life of the as-Salaf was Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Arabian preacher who wrote the highly influential Kitab at-Tawhid or ‘Book of Oneness’. His ideas became entrenched in the Arabian peninsula and were adopted by the House of Saud in the early 20th century. Despite their love of material excess and their warm relationship with the USA, the Saudi royal family and princes from Qatar and other Arabian principalities have been among the chief funders of Salafism and Wahabbism throughout the world. Their money has helped to build mosques and madrassas in North and West Africa and fund the activities of Salafists. The GSPC were Salafists through and through, and they began to believe that they would be better off signing up to a worldwide movement of similarly minded mujahedeen, rather than continuing to fight their corner in Algeria alone.

New leaders emerged to challenge Hattab’s tenure as the overall emir or leader of the GSPC, especially after Hattab had tried to distance the movement from Al Qaida and its brazen violence against civilians following the 11th September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Furthermore, many men in the movement considered Hattab to be a weak leader, lacking in total commitment and unable to produce sufficiently horrifying and headline spawning results. Most prominent among these new dissenters were three men; Abdelmalek Droukdel aka Abu Mousad Abdel Wadoud, a graduate in mathematics and one of the GSPC’s most talented bomb makers, Nabil Sahraoui aka Mustapha Abou Ibrahim, one of the most admired and revered militia leaders in the GSPC, and Amari Saïfi aka Abou Haidara aka Abderrazak El Para.

The debate raged around the question whether the GSPC should be fighting a battle for the soul of Algeria or the soul of the entire world. In other words, were the Algerian generals the ultimate target, or was it America, Israel and ikufar or unbelievers and apostates throughout the globe. Droukdel, Sahraoui and Saïfi wanted the organisation to be part of a global jihad, modelled on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Hattab however still thought of the FLN and the Algerian state as the main enemy. In the end, the internationalists won the argument. Hassan Hattab was forced to resign and Nabil Sahraoui, “a towering minaret and courageous hero” according to the GSPC website, became the new emir in August 2003. In May 2004 he released a communiqué entitled “The War on Foreigners”, in which he vowed vengeance against Zionists, crusaders and the apostate regimes of the Arabo-islamic world. He also announced a plan to start attacking foreigners on Algerian soil. Less than a month later, he died in a hail of bullets near Akfadou in the Kabyle mountains. The copiously bearded Abdelmalek Droukdel took his place as the new emir.

A key matchmaker in the looming nuptials between the GSPC and Al Qaida was a Yemenite called Abdel Wahid Ahmed Alouane, aka Abou Mohammed al Yemeni, who visited the GSPC on many occasions in the early years of the new millennium as Bin Laden’s special envoy in North Africa. Following the US invasion in 2003, Bin Laden knew that Afghanistan’s days as the ideal training ground for the global mujahedeen were numbered. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman az-Zawahiri, were looking for another part of world in which to base their operations. The Sahara seemed to offer a number of advantages as a theatre for jihad; weak government control, remote hiding places, porous borders, corrupt officials already tainted by their involvement in smuggling, a poor and therefore pliable population and a thousand unwatched desert tracks on which to flee beyond the reach of the security forces. It was also the ideal pad from which to further the Al Qaida project in Africa, a continent which Bin Laden deemed most propitious for his hardline vision of the future.

After a few particularly bloody seasons, the GSPC leadership began to accept that they weren’t exactly winning hearts and minds in Algeria’s north. Their tactics were simply too brutal, and too damaging to the human and material capital of the country. The support of the populace, so essential to any guerrilla insurgency, was increasingly sporadic and begrudging. Moving south and targeting foreigners seemed to be a wise diversionary tactic, which would hopefully ease the bruised sensibilities of ordinary Algerians in the north and tap in their deep-seated resentment against France in particular and whites in general, who had been bogeymen in the general conscious ever since the debasement of the colonial era and the brutality of the war of independence.

The two GSPC emirs in charge of Algeria’s southern and eastern sectors at the turn of the millennium, Abderrazak El Para and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had already been active in the Sahara and Sahel for a few years. By ‘active’ it should be understood that the pair indulged in a range of activities, not all of which were inspired by the divine call to jihad. A large part of their time was spent smuggling. Belmokhtar was an archetypal Saharan smuggler and had been since his early teens.

Terrorism and insurgency, which involves feeding and arming many hundreds of full-time fighters, is an expensive business that needs a constant supply of black cash. During the 1990s it was relatively easy to raise the necessary funds by appealing to Islamist pockets worldwide. In the places like Saudi Arab and Qatar, those pockets were extremely deep. Apart from large donations from Middle Eastern princes, emirs and business, contributions were sought from the faithful in mosques, madrassas, universities, clubs and societies from Paris to Peshawar and Detroit to Djakarta. A complex network of Islamic charities, associations and banks was set up to channel these funds from the donors to the mujahedeen in far-flung parts of the world. However, after 9/11, the ease with which this money could fly backwards and forwards across the globe was severely diminished by new laws prohibiting the funding of terror.  Other means of generating cash needed to be found.

The GSPC involved themselves in the more lucrative end of the trans-Saharan smuggling game, namely cigarettes, second hand cars, illicit petrol, weapons, illegal migrants and drugs. Arms purchased in Northern Mali, Libya, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and countries further afield, were used to fight jihad or secessionist rebellions in Algeria and Mali. There was no dearth of stock. Small weaponry, from hand guns to automatic rifles and RPGs, often of Russian and East European manufacture, had flooded into West Africa during many forgotten wars of the previous decade. Tobacco, a favourite cash cow of armed insurgencies around the world, was a good earner. Marlboro cigarettes or other pirated brands could be snapped up cheap in the ports of West Africa, especially Lomé and Cotonou, and then smuggled north through the desert to Algeria’s mediterranean coast and on into Europe. The stringent duties payable in many north African and European countries on legally imported cigarettes made the black-market trade very profitable.

Unemployment, corruption and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa were also the root causes for an ever more lucrative trade in people. Poor African migrants on an epic search for a better life were loaded up onto trucks on the southern perimeter of the Sahara and transported north by people traffickers before being dumped and left to their own devices in the coastal towns of Algeria, Morocco and Libya. Finally there were drugs. Hashish was purchased from growers in the Rif mountains of Morocco and carried south through Mauritania and Mali, and then west up through Niger, Egypt, the Middle East and up into Europe via Turkey and Balkans. Cocaine was also beginning to trickle into the desert, but not yet in the quantities that were later to shock the world.

Smuggling has been around in the southern Sahara for as long as trans-Saharan caravan trading has existed, in other words, since time immemorial. The transport of goods from north to south across the Sahara and vice versa is the prerogative of desert people, most notably the Arabs, or Moors, and the Touareg. Members of certain families and clans are caravan traders almost by birthright, and the desert road is in their blood. Nice distinctions between the legality and illegality of different types of cargo matter less to these traders than to the distant governments under whose authority they are supposed to operate. After all, one man’s legitimate desert caravan is another man’s train of contraband. Dates, palm oil, ostrich feathers, ivory, salt, slaves, gold, cars, Marlboro cigarettes, ghetto blasters, transistor radios, fake Rolex watches, cooking oil, pasta, powdered milk, sugar, jeans, diesel, petrol, hashish, second hand cars, illegal migrants, weapons, cocaine; whatever the cargo, it’s always just been a question of supplying demand and earning a living. Without caravanning and smuggling, the Saharan economy, such as it is, would have collapsed long ago.

In bygone colonial and pre-colonial times, trans-Saharan trading was often dominated by large Arab families and clans, especially the Chaambi from the Tidikelt, the Ahl Azzi of the Touat, the M’zabi of the Ghardaia region, the Berabiche clans who lived in the deserts north of Timbuktu and the Kounta who lived on the eastern shores of the Niger bend, north of Gao. These families would trade across the desert with each other, turning the Sahara into one unified economic, social and cultural space. Their activity created links and ties that have survived and gradually mutated into the trading or smuggling networks of today. As British anthropologist Judith Scheele’s superb work on the subject, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (African Studies) so ably explains, the Sahara works on quite different economic and spatial principles than many other parts of the world. A trader in Adrar in the Touat might have closer family and clan ties with people in Timbuktu or Gao that with his immediate neighbours. Not only trade goods, but politics, religion, tribal loyalty, power and influence are determined by those ties, making the Sahara one of the most complex regions in the world to understand. This economic and social unity of the Saharan space also explains why the borders imposed on the region at the end of the colonial era were so problematic to livelihoods and connections and so often despised by desert people.

As the 19th century drew to a close, there was a large influx of Arabs from Mauritania into the deserts north of Gao, many of whom came to fight for the Kounta in its wars against the most powerful Touareg confederation at that time; the Iwellemeden. Many of these Mauritanian Arabs settled in the area and formed a distinct sub-tribe known as the Tilemsi Arabs, who became vassals of the Kounta and paid tribute to them. The descendants of these Tilemsi Arabs have become successful businessmen, smugglers and livestock herders, whose networks stretch far north and west into Algeria and Mauritania. In recent decades, smuggling hasn’t just been the get-rich-quick solution for the ‘lower class’ Arabs of the Tilemsi and Timbuktu regions, it has also been a means of securing political, social and tribal independence from their former masters. This process has been accompanied by deep and often severe social strain and political upheaval.

Nowadays Algeria, with its soft currency and its strictly controlled or ‘closed’ import and export policy, is a paradise for smugglers. Travel through Morocco and everyone wants to sell you something. Travel through Algeria and everyone wants to buy something from you. The Algerian state imposes ludicrous restrictions on the movement of basic food stuffs and livestock across its southern borders. Only second-rate and barely edible dates seem to be allowed through without hindrance. And yet, almost everything that goes into peoples’ bellies in Kidal and Gao has been smuggled into Mali from Algeria, whether it’s pasta, sugar, powdered-milk, flour or couscous. And the flow south of other essentials, including petrol, is constant and unstoppable. In such an environment, black economies thrive and provide ample opportunities to make, and loose, fortunes.

But smuggling isn’t only about money. It provides an answer to the soulful yearnings of the desert man. It’s a way of regaining pride, of pitting your wits, your courage and your physical strength against nature and against the oppressive control of distant States. It’s a way of becoming a young man of means, fit to marry one or even more wives from ‘good’ families, an asset to family and tribe, a ‘true Arab’ who feels pride in his heart. The smuggling road leads to independence and freedom, both of the pocket and the spirit. It allows a young Arab or Touareg to feel good about himself and his world once again, after decades of drought, of degradation, of rebellion against the state, of social change and collapse. Speeding across the lunar flatness of the Tanezrouft, behind the wheel of a powerful boulboul or Toyota Landcruiser HG60, at 120 kmph, with money in the pocket, payload in the back and eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, is a dream so much more powerful than anything else the Sahara can offer a 16 year old youth. It beats sitting around in some distant desert villages, penniless, wifeless, hopeless. It’s a dream of freedom.

Neither the GSPC, nor the GIA before them, actually controlled the trans-Saharan smuggling rackets. The Saharan emirs or militia leaders often came from a smuggling background and were well versed in the ways and wiles of the trade.  But the notorious smuggling dons of the 80s and 90s, men like the drug lord Ahmed Zendjabil aka El Chelfaoui aka The Pablo Escobar of Algeria or Tamanrasset’s smuggling lynchpin Hadj Bettou, weren’t necessarily Islamists. They were simply businessmen and mafia godfathers with enormous power. Hadj Bettou is suspected by many to have instigated the successful plan to assassinate the interim President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1992. Boudiaf vowed to ‘clean up’ Algeria in general, and Tamanrasset in particular.  Big mistake.

Terrorists and traffickers the world over co-exist in the same murky underworld. In the Sahara, family, clan and tribal links often bind together the smuggler, the Islamist mujahid and the agent of the State – whether a policeman, a customs official or an army officer – in one large and geographically far flung network of self-interest and self-preservation. It’s not that the presence of the state is necessarily weak in the distant border areas of southern Algeria and northern Mali, it’s just that what state officials do operate there are often more interested in making sure that in the daily struggle for security and advancement, the interests of their family and their clan aren’t overlooked.

If drug lord or people smuggler wants to transport his cargo through an area controlled by Islamists, then a brown envelope stuffed with protection money is handed over. If some impoverished army officer at the barracks in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu needs to earn a little extra on the side by selling a few surplus semi-automatic weapons and rounds of ammunition then he can just call the man from the GSPC. If a mafia boss wants to secure a more long term advantage then he can fund an Islamist group on a regular basis, just to keep things clean and stable.  That’s how the cogs of underworld turn. Other examples of insurgency and crime sharing different sides of the same coin are plentiful: The Taliban in Afghanistan and the heroine trade, Colombia’s FARC and cocaine, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and precious gems or rare wood, the IRA or ETA and narcotics or weapons, the Kurdish PKK and narcotics…the list goes on. What’s happening in the Sahara fits a well established global pattern.

Terrorism and smuggling meet in the figure of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka Khaled Abou El Abassa, aka Laaouar, ‘the one-eyed’, who is something of a Bin Laden, Scarlet Pimpernel and Al Capone all rolled into one; a desert boy, born and bred in Ghardaia, Algeria, who was “seduced”, in his own words, by jihad and especially by the writings and recordings of the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam. In his teenage years he travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in Al Qaida camps near the city of Jalalabad and it was in Afghanistan, so he claims, that a piece of Russian shrapnel robbed him of an eye. Belmokhtar returned home in the early 1990s and became the Mr Big Stuff of southern Algeria’s smuggling rackets, forging strong links with arms, drugs and people smugglers and befriending various Touareg and Berabiche tribal leaders in the process. He even married one, or possibly several Berabiche Arab girls from Timbuktu and once declared that he would like to ‘retire’ to northern Mali when his hustling days are over. He also joined the GIA soon after its inception and then left with Hattab to become part of the GSPC in 1999.

By the turn of the millennium, Belmokhtar had risen up the ranks to become the GSPC’s emir of zone 9, the southern beat that comprised most of Algeria grand sud, the open southern deserts so enticing to the inveterate criminal smuggler. In the early naughties he collaborated with Abderrazak El Para, then the emir of zone 5, the eastern zone, on refocussing GSPC operations further south, but the pair soon fell out, jealous of each others’ power. Whereas El Para ventured into ill-advised waters by seeking to buy arms in Chad and eventually got himself caught and extradited back to Algeria, Belmokhtar, with unfailing shrewdness of judgement, has evaded capture for more than two decades. The French security services call him l’inssaisisable, the ‘uncatchable’. Whilst his current rival at the top of AQIM’s Saharan hierarchy, Abou Zeid, is reviled for his brute cruelty and appetite for chopping the heads off his kidnap victims, Sahara watchers often regard the one-eyed Belmokhtar aka Monsieur Marlboro with a grudging respect, recognising his relative restraint in the treatment of hostages and his nose for a good deal. Many are convinced he’s only in it for the money and always has been. “Belmokhtar will kidnap, rob or smuggle anything for anyone,” a silver-haired Saharanist once said to me, “so long as the price is right.”

In 2003, the GSPC katiba or ‘militia’ lead by Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para kidnapped thirty two German, Swiss, Austrian and Dutch tourists in southern Algeria. This spectacular coup launched Islamic terrorism in the southern Sahara, an area that had hitherto been spared the worst excesses of Algeria’s horror. El Para, as his nickname implies, was a one time para-commando and captain of special forces in the Algerian army who had trained with US Green Berets in Fort Bragg and elite troops in Russia. He then served as bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, minister of Defence and one of the seven senior generals, or salopards (‘arseholes’) as GSPC fighters liked call them, who rule Algeria. He deserted the Algerian army not once, but twice, joining an armed Islamic terror group each time. His last desertion dated back to 1997, when he joined the GIA and then the GSPC under the leadership of Hassan Hattab. He soon emerged as an able man in the field, and a contender for Hattab’s crown. But the incident that clinched his fame was, according to the ‘official’ account at least, the result of an accident.

In February 2003, El Para and the men in the katiba el Maout, were still basking the ‘success’ of their spectacular ambush of an Algerian army column near Batna in the Aurès mountains, which had claimed the lives of over forty paratroopers. In order to make himself and his men scarce, El Para decided to travel south and buy some weapons in Niger. The katiba was crossing the remote desert near Illizi, a small town north of Djanet in the depths of the Algerian Sahara, when it happened to chance on a group of Swiss and German tourists who were indulging in some deep desert rough riding on all-terrain motorbikes, without a guide. Or so the story goes. El Para kidnapped the tourists and proceeded to lay his hands on a further five separate groups of European adventurers who had the misfortune of being in the Algerian Sahara and within the reach of El Para’s men in those months of February and March 2003.
After the final tourist had been captured, and a large number of Land Cruisers and dirt bikes requisitioned by the terrorists, El Para found himself in charge of a total of 32 hostages; sixteen Germans, ten Austrians, four Swiss, one Dutchman and a Swede. They were held captive in two completely separate groups, several hundred kilometres apart. El Para enlisted the help of Belmokhtar to guard them. A group of 16 hostages who had been captured in March were freed only a few months later after a bizarre ‘non’ battle with the Algerian army near Djanet. The other fifteen were held in the remote Tanezrouft desert and then taken south into Northern Mali, to a secret camp somewhere near Tessalit, the birthplace of Ibrahim and Hassan from Tinariwen. By the end of August, all but one of the hostages had been freed. Michaela Spitzer, a middle-aged German women, died of heat exhaustion and other desert maladies on the long trek from Algeria to Mali, and was buried in the desert.

El Para’s haul generated about 5 million euros in ransom revenue and cemented a relationship of sorts between the GSPC, the military security establishment of Mali, certain leaders of the Touareg rebellion, Arab army officers and business men and other key hustlers in the southern Sahara. The fatal agreement of the German and Swiss governments to pay a ransom established an irresistible economic case for further kidnappings, with disastrous consequences for the region and its relationship with the outside world. From that moment, tourism, an important means of livelihood for hundreds and thousands of Touareg, began to die a slow death. The doors of the desert creaked shut, slowly, inexorably. In the meantime, the GSPC used their ill-begotten lucre to buy more sophisticated weaponry, faster cars and the hearts and minds of more young recruits.

After numerous chases across vast expanses of desert with US special forces in hot pursuit, Aberrazak El Para was captured by the Chadian rebels of the MTDJ and kept prisoner in north western Chad, hidden away in the remote Tibesti mountains, until he was eventually handed over to Libya and then extradited back to Algeria. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable judicial farce involving abortive and inconclusive trials in his native country. For many years after his return to Algeria in October 2004, he was kept in secret locations under the surveillance of the DRS, during which time he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by an Algerian court. How the law of a land can find a man guilty in absentia when that country’s own security services are holding him in their custody is beyond baffling. Only recently, in 2011, was he transferred to a more ‘regular’ prison in Serkadji. His definitive trial for numerous crimes of terrorism, which include not only the 2003 kidnappings, but also the murder of seven French monks at Tibhirine  in 1996 (subject of the famous film ‘Of Gods and Men’) and of the paratroopers in the ambush near Batna, has yet to take place.

In reaction to this increase in terrorism and illicit trans-border activity, the US government declared a new front in the Sahel under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom, their global war on terror. In 2004 the Americans set up the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) to funnel training and equipment to the armies of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to help establish specialist anti-terror and anti-crime units tasked with taking on and defeating both the Islamic terrorists and the traffickers. The PSI mutated into the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in 2005, with a wide-ranging five year programme and a budget of half a billion dollars. Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia were brought into the field of play and anti-terror and anti-crime bases began to be established with American backing all over the southern Sahara and Sahel, including several in the Kidal region of north-eastern Mali. White men with army crew cuts were seen travelling through the desert in convoys of new 4×4 vehicles, or wandering nonchalantly around Kidal’s central market. US Army transport planes landed on Kidal’s dirt air-strip.

The Americans were convinced that the Sahel was becoming a crucible for anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam. Pondering the anti-american topography of the globe, they noticed that a huge contiguous swathe of central Asia, east and west Africa was becoming ‘radicalised’, from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, into Africa via Somalia, the Sudan and across finally to Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. With that strategic and remote point of view so favoured by intelligence analysts and their political clients, this banana shaped chunk of earth was seen as a homogenous battleground, with each territory within it linked to the others by dark and hostile forces.

Tinariwen’s home region of the Adagh in north eastern Mali, right in the middle of the banana, was deemed especially significant in this struggle against terror. The Touareg from this region had long been categorised as ‘trouble-makers’ by governments and security heads, ever since the rebellion of 1963. The uprising of 2006 only confirmed this. Furthermore, a proselytising missionary organisation called the Tablighi Jama’at, who preached an uncompromising return to piety and the core tenets Islam had been active in the Adagh for many years, building mosques, organising social welfare at a grass-roots level, and charming political and tribal leaders with their vision of purity and the pursuit of religious excellence. The GSPC, who had begun to use the Adagh as a convenient rear-base, over the border and beyond the reach of the Algerian security apparatus, were also digging their claws into Adagh society, making alliances with local communities and leaders, and ’sweetening’ this desperately impoverished corner of the desert with their ill-gotten gains. The Saharanist Baz Lecocq also points out that the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, physicist Abdul Kadeer Khan, had become a fan of Mali’s northern deserts, and had bought himself a house in Timbuktu. Just over the border in Niger were the uranium mines of Arlit, from where, according to false information given to the Pentagon, Saddam Hussein had obtained the uranium for his weapons of mass destruction. There were huge as yet unexploited deposits of the mineral all over northern Niger and Mali.  This coincidence of dark and threatening circumstances was, for the Americans, a ‘no-brainer’.  And yet there were brains, and very good ones at that, who disputed the logic of American policy.

Professor Jeremy Keenan is a controversial figure in the global community of Saharanists. The bluff old English anthropologist once had an enviable reputation, rare for an anglophone academic, as a specialist on the Kel Ahaggar Touareg of southern Algeria. Despite a number of books and treatises by German, Danish, Dutch, Italian and American historians and anthropologists, the academic study of the Sahara has mainly been a francophone preserve.  Keenan’s seminal works The Touareg, People of the Ahaggar (1973), Sahara Man: Travelling with the Touareg (19??) and The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Contested Terrain (2004) are respectable mainstays of the Saharan bibliography. Then, in 2003, according to some of his fellow academics, Keenan ‘lost the plot.’  Or did he find it?

Fascinated by the 2003 hostage crisis, he became convinced that El Para was in fact, an agent of the DRS and that entire kidnapping episode had been masterminded by the black ops stooges of the Algerian secret services, with the approval of the CIA. Their aim was to concoct a high profile terrorist outrage, of sufficient magnetism to hypnotise the international media, and thereby provide a dramatic headline-grabbing premise for the USA to increase its military presence in the Sahara and Sahel. Whether by pure coincidence, or by some darker chain of cause and effect, it was indeed in the wake of El Para’s hostage grab that the USA began the implementation of various large scale military-security initiatives in the Sahel. The result is that US influence in the Sahel, and especially in Mali and Mauritania, has increased exponentially, and military ties of a seemingly deep and enduring nature have been cemented with with the regional powers.  What’s in it for the Americans?  Well, according to Keenan and the conspiracy theorists, it’s all the usual unholy grails:  Security, influence, oil and blocking the Chinese take over of Africa.

For Professor Keenan, going public with this enticing conspiracy theory represented a leap out of hard-edged factual academia and into the murky world of supposition. The change was reflected perhaps in the fact that he chose to publish his first article on the subject, entitled ‘Building Castles in the Sand: US Military Basing in Algeria’ (Review of African Political Economy, Dec 2003) under the engaging pseudonym of Mustafa Barth. Keenan then resumed his habitual identity and published numerous lengthy articles exploring the obscure whys and wherefores of his theory, which he eventually summarised in his book ‘The Dark Sahara’, published in 2009.

But Keenan wasn’t the only one to smell a desert rat. Algerian journalists like Salima Mellah and Salima Tlemçani have also written extensively about DRS involvement in terror groups, and about the many unanswered questions that still hover around the 2003 hostage crisis. Frenchmen, like the terrorism consultant Alain Chevalérias and François Gèze, the CEO of Éditions La Découverte, also support the notion of DRS collusion with the GSPC and AQIM.  In fact, a sizeable body of French and Algerian writers, journalists, analysts and obsessives continue to uphold the idea that El Para was a DRS man through and through. They see nothing surprising or outrageous in the claim. After all, cases of collusion and manipulation of Islamist groups by the Algerian secret services during the ‘dirty war’ of 1990s are legion. El Para was a ‘special ops’ man in the Algerian army before he allegedly became an Islamist. Join the dots and this was just more of the same.

For these doubters, there’s too much about the 2003 hostage crisis that doesn’t chime. According to the hostages themselves, far from being the result of happenstance, the kidnappings seem to have been prepared in advance, although clearly not that well. Soon after their capture, they were taken to secret bases in the desert, already stocked with food and provisions, along specially prepared tracks. Their captors, who didn’t seem to know the desert or its climate very well, were never short of provisions. Where did these provisions come from and who supplied them?  The hostages saw Algerian army helicopters flying near the base, almost on a daily basis, and were perplexed as to why their location hadn’t been discovered and they hadn’t been freed. El Para issued no ransom demand for months and the GSPC itself never actually claimed any official responsibility at all for the kidnappings. The GSPC had never taken western hostages before. It just wasn’t their style. Why now?

After the initial kidnappings, a bizarre silence reigned around the whole affair, both nationally and internationally, at least until mid April.  The first group of 17 hostages were freed near Amguid only three days after the German foreign minister, Joska Fischer and the head of German intelligence paid a high level visit to Algiers. The ‘light skirmish’ that took place during the Algerian army’s assault on the camp seemed, according to several hostages, to have been staged.  All the debriefings of hostages in Algeria were conducted by the DRS and not the army or police. Back in Germany the hostages underwent further interrogations, this time by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German criminal investigation police.  Several hostages were astonished to be shown photos of their captors by the BKA, photos that were recently taken, at ground level.

By mid June, the second group of 15 hostages were being held in remote mountain range north west of Tamanrasset. Although they had been in captivity since mid February, El Para had yet to issue a formal ransom demand. He asked a french speaking hostage to help him write a letter to the Swiss and German embassies in Algiers, but it contained nothing except a rather verbose outline of the GSPC’s general aims and philosophy. El Para himself was often absent from the group, leaving his fellow jihadists perplexed and ignorant of his purpose or whereabouts, feelings which became the cause of increasing frustration among the katiba’s foot soldiers.

Towards the end of June, El Para came back to the camp and lead the entire group south into northern Mali, an arduous and often waterless journey that cost the life of Michaela Sptizer. By mid july, a full five months after the kidnapping of the first hostages near Djanet, El Para was finally in contact with the German Embassy in Bamako to begin formal ransom negotiations, albeit amid much confusion and uncertainty. During the negotiations, various Malian mediators including Touareg rebel leaders like Iyad Ag Ghaly, Alhaji Ag Gamou and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, or northern Arab strong men like Colonel Ould Meydou and Major-Colonel Lamana Ould Bou, were tasked by the Malian government with leading negotiations.

The question of what alliances were then formed and what promises were then made is the subject of enduring and irresolvable debate between Sahara heads and conspiracy theorists. What’s certain is that from this moment onwards AQIM acquired a ‘home from home’ in the north east of Mali, a safe haven in which the terrorists could while away the hours and days with their hostages whilst the business of ransom negotiation was pursued. With a couple of rare if significant exceptions, AQIM have never actually kidnapped their victims on Malian soil.  They’ve only brought them back to Mali for safe-keeping. And with the equally rare exception of a major clash north of Timbuktu in July 2009, in which 28 soldiers were killed, the Malian army have never actually lead a full frontal assault on Al Qaida.

These two facts alone have lead many conspiracy theorists and almost the entire Touareg intelligentsia at home and abroad, to conclude that Al Qaida were invited on to Malian soil by the Malian government in order to the discredit the Touareg nationalist movement and mask the illegal trafficking going on in the north, from which a number of middle-ranking and senior Malian officials were drawing hefty amounts of black cash. In the atmosphere of anti-Islamist paranoia that seized the world following the 9/11 attacks, it was expedient for any government to twist the international image of a recalcitrant separatist movement and pass it off as an Islamist terror one instead. The strategy masked the true nature of the separatist struggle, confused international opinion and secured almost immediate benefits in the form of better diplomatic and security ties with the USA and Europe, more military aid, both in money and in kind. That’s what happened in Mali in the years following 2003.

The problem with the theory of collusion between AQIM and the Malian government is that no firm evidence has ever been produced to back it up. No one has actually photographed or recorded a Malian army officer or secret service agent chatting with an Al Qaida emir, or taking possession of a fat brown envelope full of narco-cash in some distant corner of the northern deserts. Of course, that’s the nature of this shadowy world. Nothing is ever written down. Dirty deals are done behind closed doors, or on an impossibly remote sand dune right in the middle of nowhere. The north of Mali has been closed to outsiders, especially journalists, for years.  AQIM money is carefully laundered through various banks and legitimate businesses in Mali, Niger, Mauritania and further afield. Or it’s used to buy huge herds that chomp happily on the pastures of the north, away from the prying eyes of the world. There are no witnesses on record because there has never been any proper investigation. And even if there had been, who would risk their skin to expose skullduggery at such high levels. Fully uncovering the matrix of villainy that has been choking Tinariwen’s homeland since the beginning of the millennium presents a journalistic challenge that would make Watergate look like an episode of Miss Marple.

At the moment, all it can ever boil down to is one enormous hunch, a devil’s choice between a damning and a marginally less damning scenario. At best, finding AQIM on their territory, the Malian government just left them there to fester, knowing full well that their presence would putrefy the social fabric of the northern deserts. They did this because they didn’t want to risk Malian lives by taking fight to the terrorists, and / or because there were Northern Arabs in the Malian army and secret services who had strong family and cultural ties to AQIM and encouraged its presence on Malian soil because it provided an effective screen behind which they could continue with their high-stakes smuggling. Furthermore, AQIM’s presence in the north east would sully the Touareg independence cause with the taint of Islamic terrorism, an especially apt consideration following the Touareg rebellion of May 23rd 2006. At worst, all of the above is true, except that instead of waking up one morning and finding them there, the Malians actually invited AQIM to come and establish their iniquitous presence on this once open and welcoming land. That Malian policy towards AQIM should have been quite so cynical might come as quite a surprise to many. Diplomats at the US Embassy in Bamako were certainly quit taken aback when, in October 2006, a key official in the Malian Ministry of Territorial Administration told them that hostilities between the GSPC and the latest in a long line of Touareg rebel movements, the ADC, worked to the government of Mali’s advantage. Following clashes between the Touareg rebels and the GSPC, the terrorists had vowed to wipe out the ADC leadership. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” stated the Malian politician. Exactly how friendly, he refused to say.

On August 18th 2003, El Para’s remaining fourteen hostages were finally handed over to the Malian authorities and driven back to Bamako via Gao. Their ordeal was over. The Americans ‘honoured’ El Para by conferring the title of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on him, one normally reserved only for the “most wanted” of jihadis, including Osama Bin Laden. A court in Karlsruhe, Germany, issued an international arrest warrant for El Para, but neither Germany nor the US made any real attempt to bring him to justice. No due and proper police investigation or judicial process was ever conducted against El Para and his men, either in Algeria or Europe. After the hostages returned home to Europe, some of them seemed to display the partial effects of Stockholm Syndrome and spoke about the strangely warm and amicable relationships they had struck up with some of their captors, referring to them not as brutal terrorists, but almost as friends, much in the same way that a desert tourist might remember his or her guide after the Saharan trip of a lifetime. It seems that one of the GSPC men even gave the hostages his personal mobile number, and that a year after their release, some of the hostages were still in touch with him.
Whatever the mission or the alliances that motivated El Para in this affair, the German government committed a grave and unpardonable error in the opinion of many when they handed over their huge ransom to El Para and his men. Kidnapping now had form and precedence in the criminal sub-culture of the region, and it was adopted as a strategy of choice by an Islamic insurgency who had never indulged in it before. It became the fast-track to cash par excellence, far more effective than cigarettes, arms, drugs and protection rackets. And what’s more, it had the immense advantage of generating huge international publicity and sowing fear in the hearts and minds of western infidels. It was win, win and double win.

The great El Para kidnap of 2003 begs questions and attracts speculation like flies to a carcass. But maybe it should be taken at face value. The hostages confirmed that their kidnappers were fanatically devout, and obsessed with all the usual jihadi obsessions:  the moral failures of western civilisation, the evil of America, the ‘Great Satan’, and its zionist plot to support Israel and rob the Arab world of its freedom and dignity, the heinous crime of fighting a new crusade against the muslim brothers in Kuwait and Iraq, so near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the crimes committed against Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Palestine. All the usual stuff. And far from serving the DRS or the CIA, perhaps El Para was merely out to replenish the GSPC coffers. Kidnapping westerners – the killer cash machine.

And yet, despite all these core and fringe benefits, it was to be another five years before AQIM kidnapped another westerner. That fact alone gives pause to wonder. In January 2004, just six months after El Para released his final hostages, the third Festival in the Desert took place amidst the talcum white dunes of Essakane, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu, the Malian home of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and many of his Arab Berabiche allies. At least five hundred westerners made their way along the appalling track that links Timbuktu and Essakane, often getting bogged down in the soft sand for hours, even days. In terms of kidnapping potential, we were a turkey shoot. Not only that, but the very presence of a horde of westerners dancing, carousing and revelling in the pure white sands of a Muslim Sahara was surely in itself an unpardonable affront to the Salafist principles of the GSPC. But no band of GSPC desperadoes touting AK47s ever appeared. Not a single solitary bearded preacher or fanatic reared his head to disturb our revels. The atmosphere was open, generous, tolerant, as it always had been in Mali.

The same thing happened in January 2005 and 2006. During those years I travelled with scores of others – French, English, Italian, American, German, Dutch – to see Tinariwen, bombing up to Kidal, Tessalit, Aguel’hoc, Anefis and Gao without a care in the world apart from running out of petrol or missing the flight back home due to a broken axel. Only a few years later, this area was to become the red zone, the off-bounds fiefdom of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which was deemed suicidal for a westerner to visit. But until 2009, despite El Para’s introduction of the kidnapping business into the region, tourism thrived in Mali’s north east in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

That’s not to say that the GSPC went to ground entirely in those intervening years.  After the capture of El Para in Chad in March 2004, the GSPC slowed down their Saharan activities and went through a period of reorganisation. The 9th zone, which had been under the total control of Mokhtar Belmokhtar for some years, was split into two katibat, the katiba Al Moulathamoun, under Belmokhtar’s command, and the katiba Tarik Ibn Ziyad, aka Fatihin, under the command of Abou Zeid. The GSPC were also strengthening their international ties, especially Al Qaida in Iraq. The GSPC leadership had been impressed by the ‘successes’ of Abou Musab az-Zarqawi’s campaign of terror in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. In May 2005, Abdelmalek Droukdel issued a communiqué through an intermediary in which he requested support from his fellow mujahedeen in Iraq for his own struggle in North Africa. A few months later, a letter written to az-Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaida executive proposed an alliance between Al Qaida in Iraq and the GSPC, but not before their ideological strength and trustworthiness had been thoroughly checked. Intriguingly, the Al Qaida leadership still had a suspicion that the GSPC was heavily infiltrated by the Algerian secret services, a hunch that dated from the bad old days of the GIA. Nonetheless, the GSPC continued to followed az-Zarqawi’s exploits in Iraq with admiration and a certain amount of envy, especially when az-Zarqawi kidnapped and then executed two senior Algerian diplomats in the summer of 2005.

The GSPC’s thirst for moral cleansing and infidel blood was sharpened by the arrival of US troops in Mauritania, Mali and other countries in the Sahel from 2004 onwards. The mujahedeen saw this opening of a new battlefront in the US-lead war on terror, right on their doorstep, as a delicious provocation. Delicious, because they now felt part of a global rather than merely local struggle. In the autumn of 2005, the GSPC issued a proclamation that glorified this widening of the battle. “O young men of Islamic Maghreb…” it began, “from Egypt to Mauritania, Algeria to Nigeria, and the remainder of Muslim minorities in Africa. Many of you were unable to go to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Chechnya… However, Allah has brought those evil people to your own homelands… This prolonged and exhaustive war that was begun by Cheikh Usama Bin Laden is starting to bear fruit… This is your chance to erase colonial borders…that were established surrounding our Islamic countries and turning them into prisons ruled by various oppressors who have trampled on our religion and defended our enemies…therefore, demolish those borders. O young Muslim men, travel to the battlefields and attack the fortresses of the criminals and their supporters…Our war against the crusader American enemy is closely linked to the wars of our Muslim brothers around the world. [We] will be another brigade to join the brigades of holy jihad manifested by the holy attacks on New York and Washington under the leadership of Usama Bin Laden.”

The call was being answered in the Sahara; both the Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Mouthalamoun brigades saw increases in their fighter numbers in this period, although neither ever exceeded a couple of hundred. The GSPC was mutating into transnational enterprise. Algerians, Malians, Nigeriens, Nigerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Mauritanians, Burkinabés, Senegalese, Guinéens, Ivory Coasters, Beninois joined up to the cause in a sombre rainbow of ardent young hearts. These youth, often barely past their mid teens, were often recruited in mosques and Qu’ranic schools, seduced by inflammable speeches on grubby cassettes or videos of mujahedeen in Iraq and Afghanistan blowing up US army convoys and giving the Satanic west a bloody nose. Sometimes they promised the chance to fight for Allah in these distant lands, but ended up somewhere under the Sahara sun, as unforgiving as their own born-again spirit. Stripped down, the basic attraction of jihad was simple. It offered opportunities to young men who otherwise had none at all; opportunities to travel, to earn a little money, to carry arms, to defend Islam, to feel a part of something large, important, purposeful. Youth needs opportunity and in lands where poverty, displacement, war, corruption and social degradation have destroyed all most opportunities, it’s a case of take whatever comes along.

The GSPC now needed a major coup to prove the combat readiness and effectiveness of these new southern brigades. For the next major outrage following the 2003 kidnappings, they turned their attention to Mauritania, a country that had hitherto been spared the whip of Islamist violence, and launched an attack near Lemgheity, an outpost of impossible remoteness in the far north east of Mauritania, 400 kilometres east from the mining town of Zouérate. You’ll find it hard to get hold of a map that even recognises Lemgheity’s existence. On the fourth of June 2005 about one hundred and fifty mujahedeen sporting battle fatigues and black cheches attacked a Mauritanian army convoy near the village, killing fifteen soldiers and wounding seventeen more. Belmokhtar and his Mouthalamoun brigade were later revealed to be responsible for this strike. His declared aim was to punish Mauritania for having diplomatic relations with Israel and for cultivating alliances with the Great Satan.  Three days later, the US led ‘Operation Flintlock 2005’ against terrorism in the Sahel was launched, with the arrival of up to 1000 US military personnel in Nouakchott. Another red rag to the conspiracy bull.

In April 2006, a GSPC convoy carrying arms through the desert south of Ghardaia attacked a unit of Algerian customs men and killed thirteen of them. The army responded swiftly and heavily, killing a number of GSPC fighters and recovering a trawl of weapons, bought in Niger and destined for northern Algeria, that included: 1 x heavy machine gun, 6 x RPGs, 1 x mortar canon, 4 x RPK machine guns, 59 x automatic machine guns, 15 hand pistols, 311 ammunition chargers, 53 mortar shells and 16 cases of ammunition. Mokhtar Belmokhtar was reportedly behind the attack but, as always, he evaded his pursuers and simply disappeared into the desert.

Meanwhile, the links that El Para, Belmokhtar, Droukdel, Nabil Sahraoui and others had been forging for years had borne fruit. In late 2006, on the ultra-symbolic date of September 11th, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s no. 2, announced that the GSPC was now officially aligned to the global jihadi franchise. The GSPC pre-empted Al Zawahiri’s announcement with a communiqué released a few days his announcement. “We swear allegiance to Cheikh Ousama Ben Laden,” it read. “We will pursue jihad in Algeria. Our fighters are under his orders so that he might strike who he wants where he wants through our intercession… We advise our brothers in all the other jihadi movements, everywhere in the world, not to miss this blessed union. Al Qaida is the only organisation able to bring together all the mujahedeen, to represent the Islamic nation, and speak on its behalf.”  In a separate posting, Abdelmalik Droukdel claimed that “God ordered us to be untied, to be allied, to cooperate and fight against the idolaters…the same way they fight us as military allies and in economic and political groupings. Why shouldn’t we join our brothers while almost all these nations have united against Muslims and separated them, dividing their land, and taking away their Al Aqsa mosque. These crimes are committed by the Jewish-Crusader alliance.”  Unity…oneness…tawhid. After so many years of division, of in-fighting, of isolation and internal strife, all the mujahedeen of north Africa would now be united in one struggle, one jihad, under the banner of Al Qaida, in the service of the ultimate goal, an Islamic caliphate, not only in Algeria, but in all the Muslim lands of North and West Africa. Jihad in North Africa was now ‘fit’ for the new globalised millennium.

A few months later, in January 2007, the GSPC changed its name to Tanzim al-Qa’ida fi-Bilad al-Maghreb al-Islam or The Al Qaida Fighting Group in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. The title quickly contracted to the more portable AQIM or AQMI in the Francophone world, a big nightmare with a little name. The GSPC and Al Qaida leaders hoped that the group would eventually incorporate the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (MICG), the Libyan Islamic Combatant Group (LICG) and the Tunisian Islamic Combatant Group (TICG) into one structure, headed by the GSPC emirs. It was a classic efficiency drive, a rationalisation of disparate entities in the service of greater synergy and success, the kind of process that any management consultant might be proud to foist on a client. It was accompanied by a snappy new website, which proved that the Algerians were learning lessons from their more media and marketing savvy Al Qaida partners.

The last attack perpetrated by the GSPC before they rebranded themselves AQIM occurred on 10th December 2006. Two buses carrying employees of Brown Root & Condor, a joint venture between the Algerian state oil giant Sonatrach and the US firm Halliburton, were blown up as they drove from the wealthy suburb of Bouchaoui back to the Sheraton Hotel in Algiers. An Algerian driver and an American employee were killed. At the time, Brown Root & Condor was implicated in a vast and juicy scandal involving massive overpayments for goods and services, often of American provenance. The company had been distributing the proverbial bulky brown envelopes, stuffed with thousands of dinars and dollars in kickbacks and inducements to senior personnel in Halliburton and Sonatrach as well as the wider military, security and energy communities for years. Brown Root & Condor, which was founded back in 1994, was the nodal point in a tight relationship between the military-industrial complexes of America and Algeria which grew steadily throughout the 1990s and then flourished like a shameless bougainvillea following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The US security establishment realised that no one in world had more experience of the dark arts of fighting terrorism than Algeria and its DRS, and the Algerian security establishment was only to happy to provide their powerful new friends with information, expertise and lucrative procurement contracts.

2006 had been a relatively light year in GSPC annals. 2007 however was bathed in blood. It started with the detonation of seven bombs at police stations in the Boumerdès and Tizi Ouzou districts of northeastern Algeria. In March AQIM attacked a bus carrying employees of Stroitransgaz, the Russian firm that was building a gas pipeline from the fields in south west of the country up to the Mediterranean coast.  One Russian and three Algerians were killed.  Matters degenerated from there on.  Scores and scores of people, both security personnel and civilians, died in AQIM attacks in Lakhdaria, Batna, Dellys and Algiers. Kidnapping also flourished in the north. Capturing men of wealth, or members of their family, and cashing them in for fat ransoms became a work-a-day pastime. In 2007, there was at least one kidnapping incident a day in Algeria, although, interestingly, none of the victims were European or American. This was thanks in part to the assiduous security measures that were taken to protect foreign business men, workers and tourists. Overall, it was one of bloodiest seasons in the history of the troubles. But none of the violence touched the southern Sahara until the end of the year.

On Christmas Eve 2007, François Tollet, a 73 year old retired chemist from the Charentes area of France was driving south on the road between Aleg and Maghta Lahjar, about 250 kilometres south east of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. With him in the car were his brother Gérard, his two grown up sons Jean-Philippe and Didier, and a childhood friend of Didier’s, Adda Hacène. They had stopped by the side of the road for a picnic lunch when three turbaned men drove up in a black mercedes, got out and demanded money. When the tourists refused to hand over their cash, the assailants took out AK-47 rifles and killed four of them; Tollet’s two sons, his brother and his friend. Only François Tollet survived the attack, although he was severely wounded in the leg.

Tollet had long been a fan of Africa and the desert, and had travelled there almost on a yearly basis. How cruelly the desert betrayed that love. Or had it always been misplaced? Do desert lovers like Tollet swim in the rose-water of its seemingly endless hospitality, its generosity of space and time, the sweet calmness of its sunset hour. Are they blind to the human struggle that goes on in the Sahara every day, the poverty, the corruption and the anger, the nurseries of violence and extremism. I’ve often pondered that question. Maybe Tollet has too. This was the first time he had taken his two sons along with him on one of his African road trips. To see them murdered with his own eyes, in cold blood, by the side of a lonely desert road, in an immensity of sand and rock stretching to a wide and level horizon, must have been like a punch in the gut from a fist that had once belonged to a friend.

The Mauritanian authorities were quick to lay the blame for the attack at the door of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But this knee-jerk attribution was treated with suspicion by some in Mauritania. “I don’t believe in the terrorist attack theory,” a local journalist told The Figaro newspaper, “The GSPC men could more easily have struck in the tourist region of the Adrar if they had wanted to carry out a big coup.” Three men were eventually arrested in Guinea Bissau thanks to an operation reportedly masterminded by French intelligence. One of them, Sidi Ould Sidna, then escaped from the Palace of Justice in Nouakchott before being recaptured by Mauritianian security forces in April 2008. He was only 21 years old. Another jihadist, Maarouf Ould Haiba, an ex soldier and petty criminal, was already behind bars, having admitted taking part in the killing. “I killed those French miscreants,” he told the Mauritanian court.

The attack on Tollet and his family took place over two thousand kilometres away from Tinariwen’s homeland in north eastern Mali. There was a palpable fever of insecurity at the time but that was as a result of the recent Touareg uprising and not Islamic terrorism. Then, on February 22nd 2008, a full five years after El Para’s hostage coup, the strange hiatus in the Islamist kidnapping game came to an end. Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, a tourist couple from Salzburg in Austria, were kidnapped as they were exploring in the Matmata region of south eastern Tunisia, close by the Algerian border, an area famous for its caves and the troglodyte hotel which starred as the original home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars IV.

Ebner and Koiber were reportedly captured by the Tarik ibn Ziad katiba of AQIM, lead by the dreaded Cheikh Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.  Abou Zeid was born Mohammed Ghadir, sometime in the mid to late 1950s, no one knows exactly when. His family belonged to the Chaamba, originally a nomadic tribe that roamed with their herds between Debdeb and El Oued in the far eastern corner of Algeria, near the Libyan border. Abou Zeid’s spent most of his youth looking after the family goats and camels and occasionally attending Qur’anic school. Life was hard, but the young diminutive shepherd, whose nickname was “P’tit” (“Little’un”) was tough and resourceful. He was also steely, stubborn, and prone to violence if contradicted. By his early twenties, he already owned an old Land Rover and had started to smuggle goods, especially tea and cooking oil, along remote desert tracks that crisscrossed the nearby frontiers. The open desert tracks were to him like the sky is to an eagle. He was a loner, ascetic and austere, who abjured the pleasures of alcohol and cigarettes, although not necessarily women, of whom he married four by the end of the decade.

Over time Abou Zeid became a notorious smuggler, a status that earned him a few stints in the El Oued prison. Abou Zeid himself didn’t consider his activities to be criminal, just necessary for a decent life, and most of the youth of the Debdeb area shared his outlook. He even went on pilgrimage to Mecca twice during the late 1980s. His religious faith began to play a central and unforgiving role in his life. Abou Zeid’s strengthening zeal fused with an increasing hatred of the police, customs officials and border guards whose job it was to inhibit his ‘honest’ trade, galvanising eventually into a steely view of the world, streaked with a profound disgust for the political corruption, cronyism and moral degeneracy of modern Algeria. Thanks to his sweat, his courage, his cunning, Abou Zeid had escaped the pecking misery of his youth to become wealthy and independent. No one was going to steal the fruits of his hard labour from him.

When the FIS emerged as the torch bearer of anti-government fervour in the early 1990s, they found a willing recruit in Abou Zeid. He began to propound the imposition of Sharia law as the cure-all remedy for Algeria’s sins and became an active benefactor, distributing alms and food to the poor of Debdeb, especially during Ramadan. His faith was ardent and sincere, although he found the verbal niceties of political and spiritual debate hard to master, a weakness which blocked his path into mainstream politics or religious leadership. This lack of erudition left a void that fuelled envy and resentment against intellectuals who could spin words and ideas beyond his grasp.

In 1994, Abou Zeid was arrested and imprisoned for giving material support to terrorist groups. The charge wasn’t too far off the mark. Using his intimate knowledge of the secret pathways of the desert, Abou Zeid had been smuggling arms into Algeria from Libya and further south, and selling them on to the small terrorist groups who were already beginning to operate in the Sahara.  He was sentenced to three years in jail.  Prison was a school. Abou Zeid not only absorbed the violent fervour of the other mujahedeen who were locked up with him but he also learnt the tricks of jihad. On his release in 1997 he went underground, below the radar, with a brother and two uncles, joining a GIA katiba operating in the El Oued area. Its leaders had already been his associates in the clandestine supply game, and Abou Zeid was given the role of keeping his katiba stocked with guns, bullets, petrol and food. In 1998, he was sent on a mission to find new sources of arms further south, and he spent the next few years travelling throughout southern Algeria, Libya and northern Mali and Niger, cementing solid business relationships with traffickers, corrupt officials and bent army officers. If Mokhtar Belmokhtar was already enthroned as the King of the Saharan Islamist smugglers, Abou Zeid earned a reputation as the crown prince during those years.

After Hassan Hattab’s defection from the GIA and the creation of the GPSC, Abou Zeid found a natural ally in Abderrazak ‘El Para’, the new emir of the southern 5th zone. El Para made this tough resourceful man his lieutenant and kept him in his inner circle, until he decided Abou Zeid was ready to lead his own cell, the katiba Tariq Ibn Ziad. Its first mission, in 2002, was to prepare  for the planned expansion of jihad south into the Sahel and black Africa. The scene was set for the great hostage crisis of 2003, in which Abou Zeid played a crucial supporting role. His activities in the years between 2003 and 2008 are vague and barely known. However, with the kidnapping of Ebner and Kloiber, he returned to forefront of terrorism in the Sahara and has remained there ever since.

After their capture, the two Austrians were driven through Libya and Algeria and into northern Mali, where they were held in a secret base north of Kidal. It was Ennahar, an Algerian newspaper that has close links with the DRS, that published a list of the five prisoners that AQIM wanted freed in return for the lives of tourists in early March 2008. It included Amari Saïfi aka El Para, who was still being held by the DRS at the time, despite the fact that he had already condemned to death by an Algerian court.

A number of mediators were involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. One of them was Ibrahim Mohammed Assalegh, a Touareg member of the Malian national assembly. He spent months shuttling back and forth between Bamako and the far northeastern corner of the country, where the hostages were being held, although he claims he never actually met anyone from AQIM itself. He left that job to a well known smuggler and border hustler called Mahmoud Ag Mohamed, who came from In Khalil, the border town set up surreptitiously by the Algerian authorities as an ‘market’ for contraband traffic of all kinds. In Khalil isn’t the kind of place you’d ever want to spend a two week holiday. Think of it as a desert version of Dead Man’s Gulch, a lawless little burgh out in the middle of nowhere, a sinkhole of clandestino dreams built out of mud and sweat, a place to import, export, hand over, receive and then get the hell out as quick as humanly possible.

Assalegh and another Touareg bigwig, a former government minister called Mohamed Ag Erlaf, worked with the Malian secret services on a plan to persuade local nomadic groups to put pressure on Al Qaida to free the hostages. The nomads in question included Reguibat tribesmen from the Western Sahara, who Assalegh encountered in the far north of Mali, around the salt mines of Taodenni. He refers to them simply as ‘Polisario’, since the Western Sahara’s independence movement is largely made up of Reguibat. He urged all the nomads he met to help Mali free the hostages. If they didn’t, he argued, they might get caught in the crossfire of a war between the Malian army and Al Qaida. To Malian soldiers from the south, a man in a cheche is a man in a cheche, and differentiating between nomad and terrorist is testing, if not impossible.  The nomads in the north were also promised new wells, which were probably never delivered.
Apart from Assalegh and Ag Erlaf, several northern Arabs, or Berabiche were also involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. This group had the backing of Libya, who provided cash, vehicles, satellite phones and other essentials. Why would Libya be interested in helping a couple of kidnapped Austrian tourists?  Why, thanks to the warm friendship between far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, of course. The desert cultivates strange relationships. Among the Arab team was Major Bou Ould Lamana, a native of Timbuktu who worked for the Malian secret services or DGSE and was a protégé of Colonel Mamy Coulibaly, the Malian secret service supremo. Ould Lamana was also suspected to have been involved in arms trafficking and selling weapons to the GSPC as far back as 2001. The US Embassy called him “The Saharan version of a bent cop.”

Ould Lamana was part of a coterie of northern Arab army officers, political officials and business men who wielded enormous influence and power. They were dons in northern Malian smuggling rackets, and their networks stretched far and wide through West Africa and the Maghreb. Chief among this group were Colonel Mohamed Abderrahmane Ould Meydou, a handsome brick-chinned officer who was one of the Malian army’s ‘desert foxes’, charged with keeping a semblance of government control in the lawless northern provinces and thumping recalcitrant Touareg rebels with his own hand-picked militia of fellow Arab fighters.  Then there was Mohammed Ould Aiwanatt, an immensely rich Arab trader and trafficker from the Tilemsi region north of Gao, whose fingers were stuck in all manner of merchandise, both sweet and sour.  And last, but not least, there was Baba Ould Cheikh, mayor of the tiny but criminally significant village of Tarkint, north of Bourem.

All these men had their legitimate trades, but a desert potentate cannot operate on a measly government salary or a polite business in kosher goods alone. You’ve got to cross a line or two if you want to be a big shot Saharan player. All four harvested rich pickings in an ever hardening sequence of contraband goods. Their role as government and Gaddafi-backed hostage-negotiators offered a number of synergies with their other activities, including influence, protection for smuggling rackets, fame, kudos and a handsome cut of the ransom pie.

Certain Touareg officials and traders also benefited from AQIM’s presence in northern Mali, even though negotiators like Ibrahim Mohammed Ag Assalegh deny ever receiving a penny for their services. Iyad Ag Ghali, the ultimate Touareg ‘fixer’ and hostage-negotiator has hardly said a word to the media, either national or international, since he swapped rebellion for God in the mid 1990s. But it seems unlikely that men of his ilk would get involved in such a strenuous, draining and time-consuming endeavour as negotiating the release of western hostages without receiving a cut of the millions of euros paid by some western governments in return for the freedom of their subjects. Most Malian Touareg leaders were genuine in their frequently-voiced fear that the presence of AQIM in northern Mali was likely to damage the reputation of their people and lead to a disastrous confusion of Touareg nationalism and Islamist terrorism in the minds of international governments, the media and the public at large. On the other hand, they also held the view that hostage-negotiation was a job that deserved a handsome pay-out. If western governments were going to pour these astronomical sums into the coffers of international terrorists, then why shouldn’t they be recompensed for their honest humanitarian efforts. Furthermore, lower down the food chain, Touaregs, whether petty criminals or ordinary young men out of luck and out of hope, also provided services to AQIM as drivers, guides, cooks, suppliers of fuel, food and other essentials, informants and even, ultimately, ‘procurers’, who job it was to actually kidnap the hapless victims and hand them over to men like Abou Zeid or Mokhtar Belmokhtar for a fee.
But the northern Malian Arabs were closer to AQIM than the Touareg, ethnically, linguistically, ideologically and commercially. They were plugged into networks of kith and kin that extended from Gao to Timbuktu up to Taodenni and deep in Mauritania and Algeria. The one-eyed AQIM emir Mokhtar Belmokhtar was married to an Arab woman from Timbuktu. He was part of a family there, and families in the southern Sahara can be like quasi-political organisations, with far-reaching roots and branches stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the shores of Libya.

Austria dispatched a four man team to Bamako to coordinate efforts to free the hostages, headed by the sharp-suited stripey-shirted diplomat Anton Prohaska. They refused to negotiate directly with Al Qaida, outwardly at least, but instead tried to persuade other ‘friendly’ Muslim nations to put pressure on the Al Qaida leadership. Their dealings with Malian bureaucracy were frustrating, especially when it came the head of the Malian secret services Col. Mamy Coulibaly, whom one of the Austrian team described as “long on promises but short on information.”  Prohaska did the rounds of the foreign embassies, frequently dropping into the US Embassy for a chat and some advice. Another Austrian team that was sent to Algiers also made little progress. One of them described the Algerians as “extremely tough and security minded.”  There was also a confusing side-track opened by the arrival of a two-man team from the private security firm Blackwater, already notorious for its work for the US government during its occupation of Iraq. The duo booked into one of Bamako swishest hotels and tendered their services to the Malian government and the Austrian, proclaiming their expertise in hostage negotiating and promising to liberate Ebner and Kloiber in return for a handsome cut of the ransom of course.  They weren’t successful.

The negotiations dragged and so did the months. Wolfgang Ebner’s son Bernhard pleaded with the terrorists to show clemency, and eventually came to Mali himself to try and help free his father, without success.  The phone lines between Vienna and Bamako vibrated with high-level but ineffectual diplomacy.  Prohaska was well into his eighth month in the Malian capital, and began telling all and sundry that his useful time there was coming to an end.  Ebner tried to escape from the AQIM camp in northern Mali, but managed to walk a mere 25 miles before he was picked up by a trucker who returned him to the camp. In the end, Ebner and Kloiber were released on October 31st 2008, nine months and nine days after they were kidnapped.  Did they survive thanks to nomadic pressure, or to the fact that they converted to Islam whilst in captivity, through spiritual conviction or dire expediency it’s hard to tell, or to the Berabiche negotiators and their Libyan slush fund?  No, probably none of the above. The real reason was a 2 million euro ransom that was brought to Bamako aboard a special Austrian government airplane by Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, on board a special flight.  2 million euros in a country where a teacher earns barely 70 euros a month.  It was about the same as paying 200 million euros to a criminal gang in Europe.  That kind of money buys you a lot of weapons, and brand new cars.  And influence.  No wonder Al Qaida’s appetite for ransoms only grew keener.

 Andy Morgan.   (c) 2013, all rights reserved.
An extract from my forthcoming book on Tinariwen and the story of the Sahara desert since independence.

The post GUNS, CIGARETTES AND SALAFI DREAMS – The roots of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

These are serious accusations which bolster the long-standing theory that Algeria is using Islamist groups as proxies in Northern Mali to carry out its principle foreign policy aims in the region. These aims are, first and foremost, to prevent the creation of an independent state of Azawad by any means necessary.  Secondly, to make sure no foreign power, apart from itself of course, sends troops or humanitarian aid to northern Mali.  Thirdly, to ensure that Algeria remains the primary economic, diplomatic, political and developmental force in the region. And lastly, to make sure that Algeria eventually regains its historic role as power-broker and mediator par excellence in any conflict between Touareg separatists in the north east of Mali and the government in Bamako.  The job has temporarily been given to Burkina Faso, after the MNLA refused to allow Algeria to play their usual role back in February, stating that Algerian mediation had always ended proving disastrous for the Touareg cause. Algeria would like that role back.

Almost every leading politician or military leader of note with more than a passing interest in the situation in northern Mali has been beating a path to Algiers in recent weeks, from the newly appointed French foreign minister Laurent Fabius to the Malian Prime Minster Cheikh Modibo, as well as officers from the now as-good-as defunct Malian army.  For the moment, the Algerian government is listening and sitting pretty, refusing to take part in any military intervention in the north east whilst allowing the kudos and the solicitations to accrue.  The cynics and conspiracy-theorists would say that it doesn’t have to intervene militarily.  It has proxies like Iyad Ag Ghali and his Islamist Ansar ud-Dine militia or Al Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in situ, on the ground, fulfilling its military objectives in a satisfactory way already.  But when the time is right, it will be ready and able move in the troops.

Whether or not the Algerian secret services, the DRS, are the puppeteers of the current chaos in northern Mali, Algeria’s policy in the region should become part of the curriculum taught to every student of African politics or international relations for years to come.  To put it simply, it has been masterful.  The prospect of an independent Azawad was no more welcome to Algeria at the start of the conflict than the prospect of an independent Kurdistan is to Turkey or Iran.  The Touareg of southern Algeria have never been as rebellious and belligerent as their cousins in northern Mali, but the government in Algiers knows full well that it wouldn’t take much to turn the simmering social tensions in its southern Saharan wilayas, or provinces, into a conflagration that it might find hard to control. The very idea of Touareg independence only needs success, or the perception of success, to gain considerable traction amongst the Touareg populations of other countries in the region, especially Algeria, Niger and Libya.  Furthermore, Touareg success is seen as Berber success, especially by Berber minorities in Algeria and Libya who have hungered for some kind of breakthrough in their fight for great political and cultural freedom for a long time.  The Berber struggle, particularly in the northern Algerian province of Kabylia, has been the main internal headache of Algerian governments since independence.  The last thing President Bouteflika needs right now in these fragile post-Arab ‘Spring’ times is for the numerous and restless Kabyle in his country, fired-up by the onward march of their Berber cousins in northern Mali, to launch a major uprising or secessionist attempt.

Moreover, Algeria takes a dim view of the prospect of Touareg separatists entering into any kind of cosy relationship with France and thereby letting the old colonial power regain a central role in the affairs of the Sahara, a role it has coveted ever since the late 1950s when it made an attempt to keep hold of the Sahara after independence.  France has always said that it’s number one priority is to put Mali back together again. But when will fighting Islamic terrorism override the priority of territorial integrity in the Sahel. And if it does, wouldn’t the MNLA, who are desperately putting themselves forward for the job, partner up well with France in the fight to rid northern Mali of rabid Islamist mujahedeen. The US, who, as the many Wikileaked Bamako embassy cables prove, have long had a surprisingly good grasp of the arcane politics of northern Mali, are no doubt asking themselves the same questions.  But, to put it crudely, Algeria’s general message to France, Europe and the US since the start of the uprising has been “Hands off!  The north of Mali has always been our backyard and we intend to keep it that way.”  Although the mineral and oil wealth that supposedly lies tantalizingly close under the sands of northern Mali has yet to be fully exploited, Algeria will aim to make sure that it has a major hand in its exploitation when the time comes.  It doesn’t want Australian, Canadian, French or Qatari companies sticking their mining noses in an area they feel is rightfully theirs.

When Khadafy fell last autumn, the prospects for Algerian foreign policy in northern Mali weren’t good. Contrary to popular belief, the wily Libyan dictator, who was as averse to the idea of an independent Touareg state in the Sahara as his counterparts in Algiers, had always been able to control, dampen and snuff out troublesome outbreaks of Touareg rebelliousness whilst simultaneously strutting around pretending to be a great friend of the Touareg and supporter of their cause.  With Khadafy’s useful blocking presence now swept away, and with truckloads of weapons pouring out of the arsenals of Libya, Algeria knew even before the outbreak of the rebellion on January 17th, that this time round, Touareg nationalism in northern Mali was going to become a major headache and foreign policy challenge. The MNLA’s rebuff of their early mediation proposal only enhanced that uneasy feeling.  But wisely, instead of carrying out a full frontal military intervention, they sat and waited, bolstering the military readiness of their army units stationed in Tamanrasset, and boosting their air-strike capacity.  They also sent a small contingent of army personnel to the key Malian military base of Amachache in Tessalit, a move which cleverly delayed the MNLA’s full frontal assault on the base by several weeks.  Meanwhile they refused to allow wounded MNLA soldiers into Algeria to get treatment, in contravention of the Geneva convention, and contained the many thousands of refugees who poured over their southern borders, fleeing the conflict.

In late March, when it looked like the Malian army was being routed by the MNLA and their Touareg Islamist allies in Ansar ud-Dine, and that total defeat was only days away, seven Algerian diplomats were kidnapped by the Islamist militia, the MUJAO, from the Algerian consulate in Gao.  Whether the dark hand of DRS manipulation played a part in this event or not, it allowed Algeria to present itself as a victim of the troubles, with a grievance that might legitimize its intervention, if necessary.  Then, after the MNLA prematurely declared the independence of Azawad on April 1st, matters began to go miraculously well for Algeria.  The boss of Ansar ud-Dine, Iyad Ag Ghali, a Touareg strong man who has been intimate with the Algerian military and security establishment since his days as leader of the nationalist MPLA in the early 1990s, basically hi-jacked the MNLA’s victory, replacing nationalism with Islamism and stating that his purpose was only Sharia law in the whole of Mali and not any kind of Touareg independence.  Suddenly, Ansar ud-Dine seemed to emerge as by far the strongest military group in the north, stuffed with well equipped, well paid and experienced fighters from the Ifoghas, the traditional ruling Touareg clan in the north east.  Where did Ag Ghaly find all the money to transform what had been a minor group comprising a few hundred men at the start of the uprising in January into the leading military power in the north.  Was it from his friends in Algeria?  Was it from super-wealthy contacts he made in Saudi Arabia back in 2007, when he was posted to the Malian consulate in Jeddah?  Was it from the Prince of Qatar, always happy to see the advancement of Salafist ideologies anywhere in the Muslim world?  Was it from rich local Arab drug barons?  Was it from the war chests of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, bloated by the proceeds of their kidnapping exploits in recent years?  Was it from a combination, or even all, of these?

Soon after the MNLA’s indepdence declaration on April 1st, AQIM and MUJAO surged from nowhere and grabbed Timbuktu and Gao respectively, both using Ag Ghali and Ansar ud-Dine as a kind of front to appease local Touareg.  Both these terror organizations were in effect representing the interests of local Arab-speaking populations and especially those of powerful Berabiche Arab and Tilemsi Arab drug smuggling dons, who also reviled the prospect of a Touareg dominated independent Azawad. The aims of these powerful Arabs chimed perfectly with those of the Algerian government, and with what was left of the Malian government as well: we all must prevent an independent Azawad at all costs. No one can understand what’s happening in northern Mali without trying to get to grips with Arab vs Touareg tribalism, which is a tale of mind-befuddling complexity and longevity in itself.

Then, a few weeks ago, MUJAO, with the backing of the local Songhai population, who were also desperately keen for Gao and the north to remain part of Mali, managed to kick the MNLA out of the city.  This was a major defeat, and an acute embarrassment, as the MNLA had long declared that Gao would be the capital city of their independent state. The dispirited, penniless and ill-disciplined Touareg rebel force had been given its comeuppance.  For the moment, the dream of an independent Touareg state lies dead in the water.  Since their defeat in Gao, word has it that MNLA leaders have been contemplating abandoning their erstwhile uncompromising demand for total independence, and talking to representatives of the African Union, ECOWAS and yes, even Mali itself, about creating an autonomous Touareg-dominated homeland in the north east, modeled on the state of Quebec in Canada, which would enjoy considerably greater economic, political and cultural freedoms than ever before but would, crucially, remain a part of Mali.  The theory goes that the MNLA might be able to rescue the situation, and their dignity, if they ally themselves with the rump of the Malian army and take the fight to the Islamists.  That way, they’ll get the African Union, ECOWAS, France, the US firmly behind their cause, but the price they’ll have to pay is the abandonment of their long-cherished dream of an independent Azawad.  “The rout of the Touareg of the MNLA in Gao is a good thing,” an Algerian DRS agent recently told the French magazine, Jeune Afrique. “Now, the ex-rebels will turn to the Malian army.”   In other words, Azawad is dead. Algeria is happy. Mission accomplished.

So what about the big Algeria – Terrorist collusion theory?  Did Algeria plan the Islamist hi-jack of the Touareg cause?  Did it mastermind it?  Did it finance it?  Or did events just spin themselves out with glorious serendipity?  Anybody who knows the long dark history of Islamic insurgency in Algeria also knows that the Algerian government is no stranger to the manipulation of Islamist movements.  There are examples aplenty of government collusion with terrorists from the bloody civil war of the 1990s.  The man who created the GSPC, the fore-runner of AQIM, Hassan Hattab, was an ex-Paratrooper in the Algerian army.  Amari Saïfi, aka Abderrazak ‘El Para’, who carried out the kidnapping of 32 western tourists in southern Algeria in 2003, the event that launched the kidnapping game in the southern Sahara, was not only an ex-Paratrooper, but also a special forces operative, trained in the USA and Russia, who spent time as a bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, one of Algeria’s most powerful men.  Iyad Ag Ghali made excellent links with the Algerian army and the DRS in the 1990s, as leader of the Touareg rebellion and in the 2000s, as a hostage-negotiator of choice.  So there’s form to support the theory.  But, unfortunately, no really hard evidence.  Hard solid copper-bottomed evidence, that’s what we hacks in the media need.  I do wish that Toumast Press, rather than just reporting hearsay, would distribute a few discreet cameras with telephoto lenses to friendly, and courageous, operatives in Gao and Timbuktu, so that they can capture any collusion between Algeria and the Islamists on film and post it on You Tube for the world to see.  Easier said than done, I know.  But we need that evidence, guys, and we need it badly.

In the end, whether Algeria has been playing chief puppeteer in northern Mali or whether fate has simply smiled on its parade, the recent turn of events has delivered almost everything that Algeria could have wished for.  Somehow, and I admit I don’t exactly know how, they have played an absolutely masterful game.

The post Algeria plays a master’s game in northern Mali appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Hamada ben Amor aka 'El Général du Bled'

It was early morning on Friday 11th February and the streets of central Cairo were throbbing with adrenalin and fear. Long-haired American professor Mark Levine and Shung, founder of the Egyptian extreme metal band Beyond East, were caught in the pyroclastic flow of a million Egyptians who seethed towards Tahrir Square, past tanks, burned out buildings and soldiers with taut faces, through the rubble and detritus of two weeks of revolution.  Mubarak’s surprise announcement that he was holding on to his rotten throne had sent a collective groan of frustration through the nation.  The crowd feared that the time had come for desperate measures.  Marvelling at the mood of coiled rage all around, Mark and Shung looked at each other, wavelengths firmly locked, and said “This is really metal!”

Before the revolution, Egypt’s metal heads lived in fear of arrest. Bullet belts, Iron Maiden T-shirts, horn gestures and sweat ejaculating head banging were closet past-times for foolhardy freaks.  Bands like Bliss, Wyvern, Hate Suffocation, Scarab, Brutus and Massive Scar Era rocked their fans like the priests of a persecuted sect who lived in constant wariness of the ghastly Mukhabarat, Mubarak’s secret police.  Since 1997, when newspapers had ‘exposed’ the metal scene as a sordid sewer of Satanism and western decadence, metal was never a faith for the faint hearted.  “Here in Egypt, everything is Satanic if it’s unknown,” muses Slacker, drummer with Beyond East, and veteran of Egypt’s metal wars.

“The consequences of speaking out could be pretty dire,” explains Levine, author of the recently published ‘Heavy Metal Islam’, a startling look at metal heads, hip hop kids and other musical marginals throughout the Arab world.  “And for what?  What would it get you?”  Jail? Sodomy? The lash?  Any musician contemplating open revolt against one of the Arab world old-school authoritarian dictators, faced some stark choices. Zip up or die, in career terms at least. “We were like in a cocoon,” explains Skander Besbes, aka Skndr, a luminary of Tunisia’s electro and dance scene, “Closed in on ourselves, ignoring the regime and the authorities. You’re angry, but you move on, because you don’t know what to do.  I decided to compromise because I wanted to be involved in the music scene in Tunisia.”

Skndr organised parties and raves with his friends under the moniker Hextradecimal at a bar / restaurant called Boeuf sur le Toit in the town of Soukra.  It was a mecca for Tunisia’s rave scene, regularly hosting dub step, electro and rave nights. There Tunisian party people rubbed shoulders with musicians, artists and hacktivists like the newly anointed King of the Tunisian protest bloggers, Slim Amamou, aka Slim404, who has been made minister of Youth and Culture in the new post-revolutionary government. Mutual rants about the regime were fire walled from government eavesdroppers by the venue’s pumping sound system. “They were rare occasions when people could meet without feeling oppressed by the police or without the usual social barriers,” Skndr says.

However, electro music was a relatively safe option because it was instrumental. Metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the local fuzz didn’t understand.  But if you sung in Arabic, you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne ‘high art’ music, or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates like Rotana, the huge Gulf-owned media and entertainment conglomerate that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East.  Alternatively, you could choose to cup your hands around a flickering flame of integrity and fight a lonely battle out in the cold. Some popular Tunisian singers like Baadia had the guts to speak out. She denounced the brutal suppression of Tunisia’s first anti-corruption protests in the town of Redeyef back in 2008, before eventually fleeing Tunisia for the UK, where she was spotted singing alone in front of the Tunisian consulate during the recent revolution.  Others like Emel Mathlouthi and Bendir Man also deserve honourable mentions.

But it took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been distilled into liquid hydrogen by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général du Bled was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie, leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with parents and elder brother in a modest flat a drab workaday seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax where his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El Général didn’t even register on the radar of Tunisian rap’s premier league which was dominated by rappers like Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or Psyco-M.  It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.

El Général had been quietly honing his very own brand of politically combustible rhyming since 2008 with tracks like ‘Malesh’ (‘Why?’) or ‘Sidi Rais’ (‘Mr President’).  Maybe it was the influence of the books his mother brought home from the shop.  Maybe it was his beloved Tupac Shakur. Whatever the reason, El Général was game for confronting le pouvoir, aka the corrupt regime of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.  “Before the revolution it was forbidden to do gigs,” he tells me over the phone from Sfax. “We just played our music over the internet, on Facebook, because there was no other way.  The media never talked to me and I didn’t have a label.”

Ramy Essam

On November 7^th, El Général uploaded a piece of raw fury called ‘Rais Le Bled’ (President, Your Country) onto Facebook.  “My President, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery Everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.”  Within hours the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.  Before being banned, It was picked up by a local TV station, Tunivision, and Al Jazeera.  El Général’s Myspace was closed down, his mobile cut off.  But it was too late.  The shockwaves were felt across the country, and then throughout the Arab world.  That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a locally spiced dialect of Arabic.  El Général’s bold invective broke frontiers and went viral from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.

A few weeks later, El Général recorded another stick of political dynamite called ‘Tounes Bladna’ (‘Tunisia Our Country’), just as the revolution was gathering momentum.  The authorities had had enough.  On January 6^th, at 5am, thirty local cops and state security goons turned up at El General’s family flat in Sfax to arrest him, “on the orders of President Ben Ali himself.”  When his brother asked why, they answered “he knows.”  He was taken to the dreaded Ministry of Interior building in Tunis where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days. “They kept asking me which political party I worked for,” he remembers. “”Don’t you know it’s forbidden to sing songs like that,” they said. But I just answered “Why? I’m only telling the truth.”  I was in there for three days, but it felt like three years.”  Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. “People were proud of me,” he says cheerfully. “I took a risk, with life, with my family.  But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality.”

El Général’s rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap’s power is its simplicity. “People can just record songs in their living room,” says Narcycist, an Iraqi born rapper living in Toronto, Canada, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, like Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called ‘#Jan25’ which has become a huge viral hit. “It’s something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution.”

The Cairo massive: Arabian Knightz

Karim Adel, aka ‘Rush’ from Cairo rappers Arabian Knightz stayed up late into the night of Thursday January 27^th recording a new rhyme for the tune ‘Rebel’, which he was determined to release on Facebook and Mediafire.  “Egypt is rising up against the birds of darkness,” spat the rhyme. “It was a direct call for revolution,” Karim says. “Before we’d only used metaphors to talk about corrupt system. But once people were out on the streets, we were just like “Screw it, you know.”  If we’re going down, we’re going down.” He and his crew just about managed to upload the new version of the song before Karim was called away to help with the vigilante security detail who were down in the streets keeping his neighbourhood free from looters and government thugs.

After the uprising of January 25^th, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded to the traditional Egyptian frame drum or daff, which pounded out trancelike beats over which the crowd laid slogans full of poetic power and joyful hilarity. As the Egyptian people rediscovered what it felt like to be a Nation, united and indivisible, they reverted to the raw power of their most basic musical instincts to celebrate their mass release from fear – traditional drumming and chanting and patriotic songs from the glory days of yore when Egypt trounced the forces of Imperialism in ’56 or the Israelis in ’73.

During the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, or the mass student protests of 1968, poets used to monopolise the power that rappers now share.  The chain-smoking, cussing, national poet hero Ahmed Fouad Negm, ‘Uncle Ahmed’, was reinstated by the Tahrir protestors as Egypt’s bard of protest par excellence. A man of unbelievable courage, Negm has spent 18 of his 81 years in Egyptian prisons. The word ‘Fearless’ doesn’t begin to do him justice.  In 2006 he was being interviewed by the New York Times when a donkey brayed loudly outside Negm’s ramshackle flat in one of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods.  “Ah, Mubarak speaks,” he quipped to the astonished journalist.

‘The Donkey and the Foal’, Negm’s poisoned paean to Mubarak and his son Gamal, was set to music by Ramy Essam, a young engineering student who became the Billy Bragg of Tahrir Square. He sang the song to ecstatic crowds with the ancient Negm beside him, still standing tall.  Essam went to Tahrir early in the uprising with his guitar and cobbled together a song called ‘Leave’ from all the inventive slogans that were flying around the intoxicated air of the square.  It became the hit of the uprising, going viral on YouTube and Huffington Post before being picked up by CNN and then TV Networks around the globe.  Essam lived in Tahrir’s tent village for the entire revolution, composing songs, and playing almost every hour on one of the many stages that had sprouted across the square.

Ahmed Fouad Negm

In that microcosmic temporary utopia, Egypt rediscovered its love of freedom, honesty, joy and simplicity. The Revolution flensed away layers of glamorous sheeny blubber from the fatuous irrelevant body of Egyptian pop to expose a new punk-like directness and integrity in artists like Ramy Essam, Mohammed Mounir or Amir Eid Hawary from the rock band Cairokee, who gathered together other luminaries from the Cairo rock scene to record the rousing hymn-like anthem to the revolution ‘Sout El Houreya’ (‘The Voice of Freedom). The people were tired of bullshit, whether it was political, social, religious or cultural. When the slippery pop star Tamer Hosni was sent into the Square to try and persuade the protestors to go home, he was almost lynched, later issuing a blubbing apology on National TV.  Million selling pop idol Amr Diab fled the country with his family in a private jet bound for the UK at the start of the uprising.  He’ll find hard to look his country in the face again.

Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of the traditional street music ensemble El Tanbura, from Port Said, remembers the student protests of the late sixties and early seventies.  “I was very happy to see a second revolution in my life,” he tells me in his gentle wistful voice. Despite the head wounds received by his son Hassan when government good squads invaded Tahrir Square on horses and camels half way through the revolution, Zakaria went down to Tahrir with El Tanbura, and several other bands affiliated to the folk centre that Zakaria has founded in Cairo, to play regularly.  “People were completely excited to hear something new that they were never used to hearing before on state media,” he says proudly.  “Under Mubarak, Egyptians had become selfish and aggressive,” he continues. “But In Tahrir, you suddenly saw the other side of people, the kindness, the forgiveness and many things like that.”

All in all, as Noor Ayman, son of a famous dissident Egyptian politician, and founder of the legendary Egyptian metal band Bliss told me, “this was a very artistic revolution.”  Political freedom and cultural freedom danced hand in hand.  To be young, to be alive was bliss, but to rediscover the thrill of banging your head to the sound of a raw pummelling guitar, or spitting a rhyme to the mic, or strumming out the truth in simple chords, without fear or compromise…that was very heaven!

This article is dedicated to the memory of artist and musician Ahmed Bassiouni, who died in Cairo on January 28^th 2011, from injuries sustained fighting the police and government militias.

A collection of clips relevant to the article can be found here

POSTSCRIPT: On March 10th Ramy Essam took part in a demonstration in Tahrir Square.  He was arrested and severely beaten, even tortured, by the security forces.  The fight for freedom of expression in Egypt is far from over.

Ramy Essam tortured

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Despite Ahmed’s claims, it now seems certain that up to 800 young Touareg have been lured north from Mali and Niger to go and fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi since the start of the Libyan uprising. This is unsurprising perhaps if you consider the dire state of poverty and joblessness in the southern Sahara. Decades of drought, under-development and ethnic conflict have recently been exacerbated by the presence of Al-Qaeda In the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) whose kidnappings have put an end to tourism and foreign investment in the region. Gaddafi’s promise of arms and petrodollars represent a pill of hope, albeit a bitter tasting one. Some Touareg youth feel they have no option but to swallow it.

Gaddafi has been buying the affections and fighting skills of the nomadic tribes of the Sahara for a long time. His vision of a borderless desert, an Islamic republic of the Sahara, has often found favour with the Touareg, who have been fighting their own struggle for political self-determination and cultural recognition against the governments of Mali and Niger since independence back in 1960. Gaddafi invited young Touareg immigrants in Libya to join his Islamic Legion in the early 1980s before sending them off to fight wars in Chad, the Sudan and the Lebanon. The same Touareg soldiers then unleashed their own rebellions against Mali and Niger in the 1990s. Despite widespread suspicion that Gaddafi only ever helped the Touareg to further his own territorial schemes, many Touareg fear the consequences of his fall from power. After all, for the past half century, he is the only head of state in the world who has ever supported their cause with arms and cash.

“The Touareg who are fighting in Libya are the ones who live there anyway,” says Nina Walet Intallou, elected member for the Kidal region in Mali’s national advisory council and representative of the Touareg rebel movement. “The south of Libya is Touareg territory. They’re obliged to hold on to what is theirs because if Gaddafi goes, they fear what will happen to them. There’s a risk of total destabilisation in the region. Many people in Libya detest the Touareg. Before Gaddafi came to power they weren’t allowed to go to Benghazi, for example, without a special pass.  So if Gaddafi’s enemies are given power, we’re really asking what will become of us.  We may even face the complete disappearance of the Touareg as a people.”

Other Touareg leaders cite the severe political and social strain that could result from the fall of the Gaddafi regime and the consequent return of thousands of exiled Touareg from Libya to their homelands in Mali and Niger. Many of these returnees will probably be impoverished, disaffected and, what’s worse, heavily armed.  Such an influx would pose a severe challenge to the already tenuous peace that exists between the Touareg and the central government of Mali in Bamako. Ironically, Gaddafi has also been investing heavily in agriculture, water infrastructure, hotels and other sectors in southern Mali, where the Touareg are seen as the enemy. Amadou Toumani Touré, the current President of Mali, was the first of many African leaders to call Gaddafi and express his support after the rebellion broke out in Libya. 

Hama Ag Sid Ahmed, spokesperson for the Democratic Alliance for Change (ADC), the Touareg rebel movement set up in the wake of an uprising in Kidal in 2006, is well aware of the ambiguous attitudes to Gaddafi among the Touareg. The Libyan leader has often given financial support to Ag Sid Ahmed’s boss, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, the hard line Touareg rebel leader who has refused to make peace with the Malian government, blaming Mali’s intransigence and broken promises for his uncompromising stance.

“The Touareg are divided on the Libyan question,” says Sid Ag Ahmed. “Some say that Libya has sided with the Touareg during difficult moments in our history, and that Libya has been an invaluable rear base during the Touareg uprisings.  Others say that Libya has never brought us any concrete help or political progress.  And yet others say that Libya has actually prevented things evolving normally in the region.”

Gaddafi and his son Seif al-Islam Gaddafi have both played an active part in the endless peace negotiations between Touareg rebels and the governments of Mali and Niger.  In the case of Mali however, Libyan intervention has often lead to conflict with Algeria, who see the deserts just over their border with Mali as their own natural sphere of influence and resent Gaddafi’s meddling in the area.

On the international stage, Gaddafi has often proclaimed his great affinity to the Touareg as a people. He is said to have inherited some Touareg blood from his mother, and he sees the Touareg as natural allies in his overriding ambition to create a Sahara without borders, unified by Arab culture and Islam. However, Gaddafi’s international pronouncements are in stark contrast with the way in which he has treated the Touareg and their culture in his own country.  In a speech he gave in 1985, he famously claimed that mothers who taught their children Tamazight, the language of the Touareg, were injecting them with poison.

Akli Sheika, a Libyan Touareg living in exile in Britain, was imprisoned for teaching Tifinarh, the ancient Touareg alphabet, in Libyan schools.  “I consider Gaddafi to be the enemy number one of the Touareg people,” he told me. “Most of the Touareg in Libya want Gaddafi to leave. Gaddafi is recruiting the Touareg by force and threatening them with violence if they don’t fight with the protestors.  Many Touareg from Ghat and Ubari in the south have actually fled to Djanet in Algeria.”

When I speak to Abdallah, a Libyan Touareg who is virtually imprisoned in his family home in Tripoli by all the violence going on in the streets outside, his views are unequivocal.  “Countries like Mali and Niger who have been killing the Touareg for over forty years, now want to exploit the situation by saying that the Touareg are supporting the regime here,” he says in an anxious voice.  “But this is false. About 200 Touareg have been killed here because they refused to obey orders to shoot innocent protestors. And now the Touareg youth have joined the revolution against the regime…” Abdallah was only able to speak for a few more minutes before insisting he had to hang up because his mobile phone was being tapped.

The fall of Gaddafi is sure to bring fundamental changes to the political situation in the southern Sahara.  Whether, as many Touareg in Mali and Niger think, Gaddafi’s demise will spell disaster for the Touareg people, or, as many Libyan Touareg claim, it will spell freedom after four decades of oppression, remains to be seen.

(The names of some of the persons in this report have been changed to protect their identities).

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

An edited version of this article was first published as a ‘Monocolumn’ by Monocle Magazine (online edition only) – March 2011

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It was only recently that I learned the real significance of that night back in 1994.  It ended a thirty-year period of official ostracism and neglect.  It was the first time that Cheikha Rimitti had been programmed in a proper concert hall, and one that was part of one the most respected cultural centres of the Arabic Diaspora to boot.  Since Algerian independence in 1962 Cheikha Rimitti had been given the cold shoulder by the cultural leaders of the newly independent state and had been forced to earn her living by playing weddings, baptisms and henna feasts on both sides of the Mediterranean.  After enduring three decades of Arabisation, corruption, deception, disappointment, moralising, cultural chastity and linguistic repression, Algeria welcomed la diva du rai back onto an official concert stage (the same welcome still hasn’t been extended by state radio and TV).  She lost no time in reminding her fellow country men and women who they really were, what they had been missing  and how to smile again.

Rimitti sang, as she has always done, in the plain spicy slang of Oranie, the huge province that spreads south, east and west from the port city of Oran in Western Algeria.  She didn’t mince her language or play too many high-minded metaphorical games.  She sang just how the poor rural population of her homeland speak, and to the gathered ex-pat crowd that was a refreshing epiphany of epic proportions.  Rimitti had returned, and she was telling it like it was.   The effect was Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf, Barbara Windsor, Eva Peron and Oum Khalthoum all rolled into one.

With your permission, I’m just going to indulge in a little plain-speaking myself.  My recent interview with Cheikha Rimitti was a nightmare.  We met in late January amidst the luxuriant Arabian nights décor of a Moorish bar restaurant in Paris’ third arrondissement.  Cheikha Rimitti arrived with her manager and producer Nourredine Gafaiti, an old rai svengali who has managed an impressive stable of A-list Algerian stars in his time including the late lamented Cheb Hasni and the husband and wife duo Sahraoui and Fadela.  I’ve always had a lot of respect and a lot of time for Mr Gafaiti.  He’s one of the rare native Algerian showbiz operators who has had the courage to explore and master the ‘western’ way of doing business, and the benefits have been obvious.

Cheikha Rimitti has long harboured a deep mistrust of journalists.  You can’t blame her.  Her kingdom is the spoken word, and the written opinions of hacks belong to a sphere beyond her ken, her interest and her control.  Before I had even asked my first question, I was made aware of the ground-rules in no uncertain terms.  Rimitti doesn’t want to talk about her private life.  Rimitti will not discuss her age or her past.  Rimitti only wants to talk about the music.  Recently, I was told, a French journalist wrote an inaccurate and unkind account of the alleged debaucheries of Rimitti’s past life.   She invented stuff.  We trust you won’t do the same.   Have you got a card?  Thanks, now we know how to get hold of you if you write anything cheeky or false.   Ok, now we can start.

The frustration and nervousness inspired by this onslaught of rules and restrictions was diluted by excitement and a gut feeling that this was a one-in-a-million opportunity that should under no circumstances be screwed up.  After all I was sitting inches away from one of my all-time heroines, a living breathing and impatiently waiting piece of history.  “OK, so let’s talk about the new album then…Haja Rimitti, what were you trying to…”  “It’s just Cheikha Rimitti to you, no Haja if you please!” came the booming riposte.  Legend 1, trembling English hack 0.  Everyone had been addressing Cheikha as ‘Haja’ since the moment she arrived, but it seemed that the title conferred on Rimitti following her pilgrimage to Mecca in 1976 was off limits to all but close friends and family.

OK, so CHEIKHA Rimitti, what were you trying to do with the new album?  She has an amazing way of talking, which is close to her singing style.  Her phrases come out like canon balls, rolling, loud and bass heavy, with little delicate grandmotherly croak trails at the end of each sentence.  Nourredine Gafaiti translated, assuring me that his rendition was unspun and word-for-word.   “In some way I wanted to resuscitate my life’s journey and my repertoire with this album but nonetheless I’m annoyed by all the artists who use my songs without declaring them.  I’ve always been short of money and I’ve been deprived of my rightful income so I hope that all of this will be put right sometime soon…”

BANG, ten seconds into the interview, we’ve already collided head on with Rimitti’s obsession numero uno: the great pop-rai Rimitti rip off.   Basically, it goes like this.  Rimitti has written over two hundred songs in her time, without pen or paper, just straight from her buzzing brain and into the microphone. Some of these songs, like ‘El Hmam’, ‘La Camel’ and ‘Mani Mani’ were snapped up by the younger generation of pop-rai chebs, covered on various releases and then registered with the French Society Of Composers, Authors and Arrangers (SACEM) as if they had written them themselves.   In other words Rimitti was deprived of her rightful ownership of and income from the songs.  It’s a legitimate gripe, which has been exacerbated by the fact that none of the younger generation, like Khaled, Mami, Zahouania, Fadela, Sahraoui and Tahar have ever acknowledged the debt they owe to Rimitti.  It’s that ingratitude that Rimitti still finds deeply hurtful. In fact, she’s obsessed with it.  The subject crops up again and again during our interview, like an unswattable insect buzzing furiously and intermittently in the ear.   Basically, as far as Rimitti is concerned, the only thing any journalist she meets is really good for is to help her broadcast this grave injustice, this heinous crime of base ingratitude.

Which is a pity, because deep down under that time-etched visage is a unique and deeply fascinating life-story.  But it remains resolutely stashed away in the vaults of Rimitti’s memory.  I do get a few tantalizing glimpses; a wayward recollection of performing with M’hamed Benzerga, le James Dean du rai, at a restaurant in Oran in 1959 on the night he was killed in a motorbike accident; a strange story about how a lawyer and music entrepreneur called Belhadj once acted as go-between for the famous traditional Oranais singer Cheikh Hamada whilst he was courting a French woman.  These titbits are thrown at me like choice morsels of roast meat to a hungry dog.

Rimitti also likes lists and takes pleasures in intoning them like a Buddhist boom box.   The famous names of yesteryear who she worked with: Hachlef, El Anka, Skandrani, Abdelwhahb, Mohammed El Badi, Abdoulahi Belkhayat, Fadila Djziriya, Miriam Fekkai, Cheikha Tetma, Mahboubati, Benzerga.  The places where she has performed and triumphed: Italy, Casablanca, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Tunisia, Angoulême, London, Bordeaux, Marseille, Spain, Cartagena, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Portugal, Berlin, Cologne.  The labels she has recorded for: Pathé Marconi, Maison d’Armor, Dounia, Philipps, La Voix de Son Maitre.   The old traditional singers who influenced her: Hamada, Madani, El Khaldi, Hadda, Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby, Benzerga, Ahmed Saber.  The new singers who have ripped her off: Khaled, Mami, Fadela, Sahraoui.  For those with only a passing interest in North African and Arabic music, these lists will be more or less meaningless.  But for those few obsessional Maghrebi music train-spotters out there, these lists are stories in themselves, and mighty impressive ones too.

But when I try to delve deeper into the past, all I get is curtains.  “Why are you asking questions about Cheikh El Khaldi, Hamada, Madani?” Gafaiti translates.  “Because I’m fascinated by that period,” I answer.  “In that case you journalists should write the story of that period and give it some more consideration.”  “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”  “I don’t want to talk about others, I want to talk about myself.  What interests me are my rights, my songs and my works.  Ethnomusicology is not my predilection.”

Nor is it mine.  It seems that the real full-bodied Rimitti story might go with her to the grave.  In the meantime, hapless writers and idolizers like myself will have to be content with approaching her as if she were a historical figure, piecing together her story and her significance from the jumble of re-cycled references which can be found in the articles written about her by North African journalists with privileged access and knowledge of her language, especially Bouziane Daoudi of Liberation and Rabah Mezzouane, the musical director of the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Cheikha Rimitti was born in the mountainous region of Tessala, between the garrison town of Sidi-bel-Abbès and the prim wine-growing burg of Ain Temouchent, in western Algeria, on May 8^th 1923.  Algeria was still a part of France, trains still ran on coal and 78rpm shellac was still the only format in town.  She was given the name ‘Saâdia’, which means the happy or the fortunate one.  Her fate did not fulfil the promise of her name, and when she was still young, both her parents died.

The events of Rimitti’s early life remain locked away in her memory, but one can only surmise that it was a testing and tough existence, battered by extremes of hunger, poverty and loneliness.  The young Saâdia no doubt learned what she needed to know to survive, and events forged a character of street-wise steel.  We can speculate what music she must have heard at that age; a mix of the rural Berber folk of her forebears, which had remained largely unchanged for centuries, like the lifestyle it serenaded, and popular poetry known as melhoun, which had been adapted by ‘urbanised’ troubadours who adopted the instruments of rural poor, the rosewood desert flute or gasba and small goblet drum or guellal, and wore the turbans and burnous of the peasantry, to create what became known as folklore Oranais or gharbi, which means music ‘from the west’.  By the 1920s there were already many recordings available by these venerated cheikhs, a title which is equivalent to something like ‘sir’ or ‘the honourable…’

Men like Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh Madani, Cheikh El Khaldi, Cheikh Benyakhlef and Cheikh Elarbi Ben Sari, were a powerful early influence on Rimitti.  But she also had an ear for another tradition, a more risqué, more libertine and less time-honoured one than that of the chioukh (plural of ‘cheikh’).  This style shared the rural sounds of gharbi, but its lyrical content belonged to the same family tree as the zendani, or tavern songs which were paeans to the pleasures and pain of alcohol, carnal love, feasts and all-night revelry, very popular amongst those at the bottom rung of society’s ladder.  These tantalising themes were taken up by the new sirens of the age, women singers who had ventured beyond the pale of respectable society, wilfully or by force of some misfortune such as the birth of an illegitimate child, a violent husband, a forbidden love affair or just grinding poverty. Even though a career in music and entertainment was considered to be base, unworthy and depraved, at least it afforded these ‘fallen’ women some chance of earning a living and being mistress of their own destinies.  It could also bring considerable fame, and some of the favours that accompany it.

By the time Rimitti entered her teenage years, several of these popular divas, or cheikhas, as they were referred to, in ironic contrast to their ultra-respectable male equivalent, had become very popular.  Among them were Cheikha Kheira Guendil, Cheikha Zohra Bent Ouda, Cheikha Zohra Relizania and Cheikha El Ouachma El Tmouchentia. These proud independent women must have offered the young Saâdia a powerful role model.  But her own road to independence was long and hard.  At some point during her teens, Rimitti joined an itinerant troupe of Hamadcha musicians, who lived out their devotion to the Moroccan Sufi saint Sidi Ali Ben Hamdouch by touring the countryside and performing healing rituals animated by music during which ‘patients’ would go into a trance and communicate with spirits or djnoun.  The troupe no doubt afforded Rimitti a powerful musical education and a kind of ersatz family unit.  The young singer lived a hand-to-mouth existence, sleeping rough in public baths, religious shrines or out in the fields under the stars.  Rimitti learned to survive, to sing and to dance.

And it was as a dancer that Rimitti first began to be noticed.  Her grace and daring were incredibly seductive.  She was famed for dancing with a whole tray of glasses full to the brim balanced on her head, her belly a-blur, without spilling a drop.  News of her derring-do antics at fantazias, or traditional demonstrations of horse riding and gunmanship, also began to spread throughout the region.  She was known for mounting horses with rifles in each hand and giving the gnarled old veterans a run for their money, or for diving under galloping hooves.  Meanwhile she continued to perform with other women, in groups called meddahates, who would sing the medh or verses in praise of The Prophet for women only audiences at weddings, baptisms, feast and henna parties.  She would also entertain male-only audiences with other cheikhas, liberating souls from the straightjacket of respectability, sowing dreams of love, alcohol and oblivion until dawn doused everyone with its sobriety.  It was an exhausting existence, but it kept her alive and gave her dignity, however perverse in the eyes of society at large.

At the age of 20, Rimitti settled in the agricultural centre of Relizane, sweltering in the middle of the hellishly hot plains of Oranie.  It was a town that was famed for its vineyards, its watermelon groves, its olive trees and its cheikhas.  Back in the 19^th century it had been the centre of the uprising against the French lead by Emir Abdelkader. The town dominated a territory rich in cultural as well as agricultural produce, and its jealously guarded rural folk music tradition had given the world several renowned chioukh including Cheikh Belabbas Relizani and Cheikh Mohamed Relizani.   Relizane was also the home of several well-known female singers, including one of dominant voices of the 1930s, Cheikha Zohra Reliziana, whose biggest hit was ‘Moula Bagdad’.

At around this time Rimitti met the venerable gharbi flute player Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems and set up a ménage with him.  Ennems was famed throughout the region and the protection he gave the young Rimitti was invaluable.  Together they started a family, and Ennems opened the door for Rimitti to many established musical figures, eventually clinching a session for her at a radio station in Algiers.   With this unfamiliar stability in her life, Rimitti began to compose her own songs.  It was a time of terrible hardship in Algeria.  The Second World War was raging in Europe and North Africa, and the Allied invasions of 1943 brought violence, danger and famine in their wake.  Oran and its surrounding regions were also ravaged by a plague of typhus, immortalised by Albert Camus in his existentialist masterpiece ‘La Peste’.  Meanwhile the entrenched apartheid of colonial Algeria heaped misfortune on the native underclass.  Rimitti began to sing about these terrifying realities, not in a polemic or analytical way, but rather like a mirror coloured with cautionary tales, idioms, double entendres, popular epithets and the rich patois of the region, reflecting the woes, aspirations, trials and tribulations of the ordinary man and woman.  And the ordinary man and woman began to love her for it.

Rimitti would travel the region with her retinue of two flute players (Habib and El Manouar were her favourites), percussionist, dancer and berrah, a kind of MC whose job it was to keep the dedications coming and receive the tips in return.  Apart from private weddings and feasts, the public venues she played at were often bars, cafés and cantinas in the red light districts and entertainment quarters of towns like Sidi bel Abbès, Relizane, Mostaganem, Hammam Bouhadjar, Ain Temouchent and Oran.  The main square in the Medina Jdida, or Arab quarter of Oran, which was called the Tahtaha, was a favourite place for chioukh and cheikhates to appear.  Rimitti would often perform completely veiled, especially in front of mixed or male only audiences.  It all helped to heighten the sense of mystery and forbidden allure.  In fact, anonymity was a crucial aspect of the cheikhate phenomenon, and remains so until this day.  They ditched their real names in favour of nicknames which might describe their place of origin, or a salient characteristic.  Later, when their music was released on 45rpm singles or cassettes, a stock photo library shot of an Alpine scene, or the Tour Eiffel or some voluptuous blonde model would be use for the front cover, rather than a picture of the singer herself.  Although extremely popular, no one with the slightest concern for the colour of his own reputation would actually admit to listening to recordings of the cheikhas.  It was a private affair, but none the less potent or widespread for all that.

The story of how Rimitti earned her own stage name is a revealing one, that has been told many many times.   Near Relizane, just by a river called Oued Rhiou, there was a shrine dedicated to Sidi Abed, the patron saint of the region.  Every year, as happened all over Algeria, a festival or wa’ada, was held near the shrine.  Hundreds of white canvas tents were erected and all manner of musical attractions, both extremely famous and less well known were brought in to animate this temporary ‘musical’ city.  There would also be feasting, drinking and fantazias.  One year, Saâdia was walking through the festival with her retinue, accompanied by Cheikh Hamada and Cheikh Bouras, and was caught in a torrential downpour.  She took shelter in a canteen run by a local French company.  There she was recognised and complimented.  Someone suggested that she give thanks to her assembled fans by buying them a round of drinks.  The problem was that the bar was run by a French woman and Rimitti has never spoken more than a few words of French.  So she asked for a panaché (shandy), and then kept saying “Remettez panaché madame, remettez, remettez!”, (“give me another shandy, madame, and another, and another…”) eventually actually putting the words to music and singing it for the benefit of her delighted audience.  When passed through the filter of a thick North African accent, ‘e’s tend to mutate into ‘i’s, and so the assembled crowd started to cry out, “It’s Rimitti, it’s the signer Rimitti!”   “There,” she still says, “I became ‘Rimitti’ thanks to alcohol.  It’s a fine name!”

It was also at one of these wa’adat that Rimitti was spotted by a talent scout for the Pathé Marconi Company and in 1952 she released her first 78 for them, featuring the classic ‘Errai Errai’, followed by ‘Trig Tmouchent’ and ‘Gasmou Tiaret’.   Two years later she released ‘Charrag Gatta’, a barely veiled invitation to virgins to do the deed.  “Tear, lacerate / Rimitti will mend / Let’s caress under the covers / somersault over somersault / I’ll give my love everything he wants / I’m smitten by the wholesale fruit seller / by the one with his turban and his turtledove” went the lyric.  It’s not hard to imagine the effect of such a discourse on the polite Algerian society of the 1950s.  The song was a big hit and Rimitti’s reputation was assured.

But 1954 was also the year in which the first salvos of the War of Independence were fired, and life in Algeria began to mutate irrevocably. Despite all the immense hardships of the pre-war years, despite the racism and apartheid rule of the European pied noirs, it’s astonishing how much nostalgia still exists for those times when life, although not easier, was perhaps simpler than now and blessed with greater degrees of tolerance and diversity of culture, opinion and entertainment.  Rimitti supported the independence cause, as did other female signers like Cheikha Kheira Guendil, but she was also a popular act on colonial radio and TV stations, whose programmers valued the non-political nature of her songs and her immense popularity amongst ordinary native citizens, which was precisely the constituency that the French propaganda machine found hardest to reach.  Thanks to this popularity, Rimitti and the other Cheikhas were deeply distrusted by the cadres of the FLN, MTLD and other revolutionary groups.  As far as these po-faced strategists were concerned, this music was just a frivolous distraction, an opiate that drew the populace away from their true revolutionary Arab destiny.

Thus began Rimitti’s long fall from official grace and favour.  During the ‘60s and ‘70s she maintained her grassroots popularity by performing at hundreds, even thousands of weddings, naming ceremonies and henna feasts.   “I was fed up with doing weddings before you were even born,” she declares during our interview.  In the 1970s the North African community in France multiplied a hundred fold, and Rimitti became a favourite in the cafés of the Arab quarters like Barbès in Paris, Place du Pont in Lyons or Cours Belzunce in Marseille.  Her songs were a potent balm for the sorrows of lonely Algerian men, living in their worker’s hostels and pining for the warmth and sun of the heir homeland.  A horrendous car crash on the road back to Oran from a concert in Algiers, in which three of her musicians died, had a deep effect on Rimitti.  She sings about it in the song ‘Daouni’, one of the best on her latest album ‘N’ta Goudami’.  In 1976 she went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and soon afterwards gave up alcohol, cigarettes and other carnal indulgences.  Since then she has lead a modest and frugal life, split between a hotel room in the Barbès quarter of Paris and a  home in Oran, which she has been visiting regularly during the Ramadan period, when fasting and partying go hand in hand.

Rimitti’s restitution in 1994 came in good time.  She has had another decade of life, and will hopefully have yet another one, in which to prove to the world that she is one of the greatest female voices in the Arab world and a cultural gem that Algerians from every level of society should protect, value and cherish.  Despite the global popularity of the electrified rai sound, Rimitti’s roots formula of voice, flute and drum remains the most arresting, the most evocative and the most enticing clarion-call of the genre.  It takes you straight back to the dusty plains of Oranie, and to the lives of its struggling millions.   The fact that Rimitti and her team of producers and musicians have managed to modernise it so effectively, first on ‘Nouar’, a modern rai masterpiece produced by Algerian Mohammed Maghni and released in 2000, and now on ‘N’ta Goudami’, is something that all of us should be grateful for.  Remettez Rimitti.  Let’s have another one, and another, and another!!!

Ivan Chrysler, (c) 2004

First published in fRoots Magazine, May 2004

The post CHEIKHA REMITTI #2 – Ethnomusicology is not my predilection! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Someone had the idea of organising a rai festival in the suburbs of Paris.  All the A-List raimen and women were invited: Cheb Khaled, Cheb Sahraoui, Chaba Fadela, Chaba Zahouania….  But only one singer was deemed worthy to open the event.  She was la mamie du rai, a living legend to whom all the younger singers owed their freedom of expression, their linguistic and moral rebelliousness, their sense of unchained hedonism, and a significant proportion of their repertoire too.  She was Cheikha Remitti.

“I had the impression that I was being used,” Remitti explained two decades later to Le Monde. “I suffered, I even cried.  They used me to launch the new rock-rai sound.  I’m the mother of rai music, but I’m rooted in a tradition… Remitti is like the plam tree that provides dates for all and sundry.  But all the young ones have evaporated, and I’m still here.”

Remitti is most emphatically still here, well past her eightieth birthday, sharp, defiant, halogenically lucid, still giving her audiences the proverbial cru-cut with her freight-train baritone holler and still raising the temperature with her shimmying shoulders and pulsating midriff.  Moreover Remitti really does seem to have overtaken and outlived much of the younger generation that she originally spawned.  Her brand new album ‘N’ta Goudami’, is creatively more ambitious and successful than 95% of the rai being recorded by singers one third her age.  It seems like Remitti has trounced the rai youth at their own game.

Under direction from her long-time manager and producer, Nourredine Gafaiti, Remitti took the bold step of recording ‘N’ta Goudami’ at the Boussif studios in the western Algerian seaport of Oran, the city where rai music was born over a century ago.  She also used a 100% Algerian crew of musicians and arrangers.  Younger pop-rai stars have been in the habit of paying through the nose for top-flight studio time and trophy producers from France or the USA, in pursuit of off-the-peg musical credibility.  Remitti likes to keep things 100% homegrown.  Her penultimate album ‘Nouar’, which was produced by the talented and often overlooked Algerian Mohammed Maghni, is a modern rai masterpiece.   Her creative juices are flowing as freely as ever.

To place the Remitti legend in its proper context, you have to take a trip back to a time when Algeria was still under French colonial rule, when 78rpm shellac was still the only format in town, and trains still ran on coal and sweat.  Cheikha Remitti was born on 8^th May 1923, in Tessala, a lost burg near the French garrison town of Sidi-bel-Abbès, deep in the countryside of western Algeria.  She was christened Saadia, which simply means ‘happy’ or ‘joyful’.  The name didn’t deliver on its promise, however, and Remitti lost both her parents at a very early age.  In those remorseless days when the welfare state was still a socialist dream, a young female orphan had to learn the game of survival quickstyle, the hard way.  “Misfortune was my teacher,” Remitti is fond of saying.

The young Saadia would sleep rough in local hamams (‘Arabic baths’) or shrines dedicated to local saints.  She made her clothes from old mattresses, and her coffee from ground wheat germ mixed with syrup.  By day she would earn a few francs working as a maid for French families, or helping out with the harvests.  At the age of 15 she joined a troupe of traditional hamadja musicians, who devoted their lives loosely to some revered Sufi saint, and travelled the countryside entertaining the populace.  In their company, Remitti felt something approaching familial warmth and security.  She also learned how to sing, and dance.

“She used to dance like some kind of possessed spirit,” remembers an old-timer.  Amongst her repertoire of crowd-pleasing tricks was the ability to balance a tray laden with brimful glasses of water, and shake her hips without spilling a drop.  She would also dive under feet of galloping horses at fantazias, which were traditional displays of breakneck horsemanship mixed with gun practice.  Audiences were so aroused by her antics that would shoot their rifles in appreciation, and came close to terminating the young Saadia before she had even begun to make her mark.

At the age of 20 Remitti moved to the moribund provincial town of Reliziane which sat in the middle of the vast hot plains of Oranie, surrounded by vineyards, wheatfields and water melon plantations.   She was still singing and dancing herself to exhaustion at festivals, weddings and henna parties, and her reputation was beginning to grow amongst the rural poor of Algeria’s far west.   But she was also beginning to compose her own songs with the encouragement of the renowned flautist Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems, who became Remitti’s protector, partner and champion.  It was he who took her to Algiers to record her first radio broadcasts.

From an early age, Remitti had adopted the style known as folklore oranais or bedoui rurale which was championed by venerable old male singers like Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh Al Khaldi or Cheikh Madani.  These folk troubadours would intone ancient epic poetry which spoke of the heroic deeds of yesteryear over a bed of pounding goblet drums, known as guellal, and the hot breath of rosewood desert flutes, known as gasba. Remitti kept the gasba and guellal but dispensed with arcane verses of the cheikhs. Instead she adopted a rich linguistic stew of local slang and rural patois, liberally sprinkled with metaphors and popular sayings.  It was the language of the common man, and Remitti became its champion.

The late 1930s and early 1940s were a time of intense hardship in Algeria.  The mediterranean was at war, famine was widespread and the western provinces were scourged by typhoid epidemics, immortalised by Albert Camus in his novel, ‘The Plague’.  Remitti didn’t flinch from singing openly and directly about these contemporary miseries, and about the more personal traumas of alcoholic oblivion, lost love, emigration and carnal pleasure.  Her music was like a clear and exhilaratingly sharp mirror, which reflected the daily grind of the poor.  In that sense it was both revolutionary and delectable.  To date Remitti has written over 200 songs on subjects as diverse as sex, alcohol, oblivion, nocturnal pleasure, the telephone, the TGV, virginity, enforced emigration, the carnal desires of workers at a chemical refinery, the offensive nature of forced marriages between older men and teenage brides, friendship, war…and the list goes on.  “Songs canter through my head and I tie them to my memory,” she says.  “I don’t need paper or pen.”   Illiteracy has never posed her the slightest problem in pursuit of her art.

By the her late 20s, Remitti had become the queen of the cheikhate, (plural of ‘cheikha’) a new breed of popular female singer, who would tour the countryside with a retinue of dancers, musicians and berrah, or MC.  In order to protect the reputation of their families and loved ones, the cheikhate would operate behind a soft-focus gauze of anonymity, adopting nicknames, decorating their cassette covers with Alpine scenes or stock library shots of young models and performing infront of their male audiences wearing a veil.  They were martyrs to the hidden desires of the population.  Dealing with the all-pervading moral hypocrisy of the nation required considerable courage, guile and self-belief.

It was sometime during the second world war that Saadia became Cheikha Remitti.   One day, she was performing at one of the biggest Festivals in western Algeria, dedicated to the saint Sidi Abed.  The sky burst open and the rain came down in sheets so Saadia and her retinue were invited to take shelter in a tented watering hole normally reserved for Europeans.  She was recognised, fêted, and to show her gratitude she offered to buy a round for some of her admirers.   The problem was that the bar woman was French, and Remitti has never spoken more than a few words in that language.  So she just kept saying, “Remettez panaché, remettez, remettez!”   (Another shandy, and another, and another).  When spoken by a North African with a strong accent, ‘e’s tend to mutate into ‘i’s.   And so the gathered crowd took up the refrain and started shouting, “It’s Rimitti!   It’s the singer Rimitti!”    “My name became Remitti because of alcohol,” she says, “it’s a great name.”

In 1952, Remitti recorded her first 78 for Pathé Marconi under the name Cheikha Remettez Reliziana.  It was a roots rai standard called ‘Er-rai er-rai’.   Two years later she recorded ‘Charag Gatta’, a barely veiled invitation aimed at young women to trade in their virginity for the pleasures of carnal love.  “Tear, lacerate…Remitti will mend,” she sang.  The song was a monstrous success, and Remitti’s fame was assured.

The bitter war between the moujaheddin of the FLN and France started the same year.

Remitti was unequivocal in her support for the rebels, but she also found it hard to refuse the growing number of invitations to sing on radio and TV.  The colonial authorities knew only too well that Remitti was the most popular singer amongst the poorest of the poor.   If they could only keep the mind of the masses  focused on forbidden love, alcohol and oblivion, then they might dissuade them from thinking too much about rebellion and independence.   To Remitti , the radio was just another gig, another way of making a living.

Nonetheless the FLN, high on hardline Nasserist Pan-Arabic socialism, denounced Remitti as a purveyor of hedonistic frippery and “folklore perverted by colonialsim”.  When independence finally came in 1962, the new government did everything they could to silence the cheikhas, who continued to sing in the everyday language of the streets.    Their high-minded strategy was to try and impose classical Arabic on the nation, a language which noone spoke, and hardly anyone understood.  Remitti was banned from radio and TV.  She continued to perform at weddings and feasts, and to release a few 45rpm singles and later cassettes.   But in effect, her country abandoned her, officially at least.

From the 1970s onwards Remitti became increasingly popular amongst the growing number of Algerian immigrants in France, who led a nostalgic existence in their factories, worker’s hostels and high rise low rent housing, pining for home, stranded in a kind of mental ghetto with no hope of release.   It became a habit to spend the month of Ramadan back home in Algeria, and the rest of the year living modestly in a hotel room in the Parisian immigrant quarter of Barbès, where she would perform regularly in North African bars.  Remitti could command very good fees for wedding performances, but officially, in Algeria, she was still persona non grata.   In 1971, after a rare concert appearance in Algiers, she was involved in a terrible car crash near Mostaganem, not far from Oran.  She went into a coma that lasted several weeks.  Three of her musicians died.  The incident is the subject of the song ‘Daouni’ (JENNY PLEASE CHECK NAME) on ‘N’ta Goudami’.

Perhaps it was this close encounter with death, coupled with her increasing age that prompted Cheikha Remitti to go on the ‘hadj’ or pilgrimmage to Mecca in 1976.   Since then the doyenne of hedonism has actually lived quite an ascetic life, devoid of cigarettes or alcohol, and sustained mostly by rice and water.  This might go some way to explaining why Remitti is still singing, dancing and speaking her remarkable mind at the age of 82.  The disappointment of the Bobigny Rai Festival, and the blatant way in which the new pop rai starts like Cheb Khaled or Chaba Fadela have plundered her repertoire without moderation or recognition, or even thanks, all weigh heavy on Remitti’s mind, but they haven’t managed to destroy her spirit.

In 1994, partial recognition by the self-proclaimed guardians of Algerian culture followed Remitti’s two triumphant performances at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.  For Algerian audience members present, whose lives and hopes were being torn apart by the increasingly brutal civil war back home, Remitti’s appearance was a triumphant homecoming, a deeply moving exposé of Algeria’s true character, which is Mediterranean and not middle Eastern, a handsome mongrel mix of Berber, Christian, Jewish, Ottoman, Spanish, French, and Maltese  influences with a corresponding language of infinite richness which has no better champion than Remitti herself.

Since then Remitti has been hailed in every continent, and fêted at festivals from Tokyo to Toronto.  In 1994 she collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the album ‘Sidi Mansour’, which nudged the creative boundaries of the rai genre out further than ever before.  She has always avoided the spangly cabaret pop approach to rai so favoured by the younger generation.  Even though she has adopted the bare bones of the rock format in her last two releases, the pure essence of the North African blues, whose active ingredients are powerful unpolished vocals, driving trance beats and the searing swirl of the gasba flute, remains the most crucial element in Remitti’s music.

Remitti is nothing less than the living surviving incarnation of Algeria’s long lost lust for life.  Like some dauntless liberated aunt at a dysfunctional family feast, who sings, laughs, chides and surveys the psychological torture going on all around with her knowing eye, Remitti continues to remind her fellow Algerians that spiritual faith can coexist with a love of life and physical pleasure.  No regrets.  Live and let live.   Let’s have another one Remitti…remettez, remettez!

Andy Morgan, c 2004

(Artist biog for Because, 2004).

The post CHEIKHA REMITTI – Grand Dame of Algeria’s school of hard knocks! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“Silence is death and yet if you speak you die.  If you keep quiet you die.  So then speak and die.” Tahar Djaout

“I want to speak and I don’t want to die” Matoub Lounès

A grave between an olive and a cherry tree

Death finally caught up with him on the lonely bend of a mountain road.   The bullet-strafed car was still smoking and the pools of blood on the asphalt were still warm when the news broke.   Telephones lines crackled and the Internet came alive.   “They’ve killed him.”   “He was with his wife and two sisters in law.”  “They were hit too.”   “It happened just after 1pm.”   “On the Tizi Ouzou road.”  “It was a false road block.”   “It was an ambush.”  “It was the GIA.”  “It was Chenoui’s men.”   “It was the government.”   “He’s dead.”  “He’s gone.”  “Matoub has gone.”  Some even whispered, “It had to happen.”

Within hours angry mourners in their thousands had gathered around the Mohammed Nedir hospital in Tizi Ouzou, where Matoub Lounès’ bloodied remains were taken after the attack.   Their shouts boomed like mixed-shot salvos of anger, desperation and grief. “Government…Assassin!”   “Zéroual…Assassin!”   “Islamists…Assassins!”   “The generals…Assassins!”   Over the next few days youths took to the streets of Tizi Ouzou, Akbou, Sidi Aïch, Bejaia, Aïn el Hammam and Tizi Guénif and unleashed their rage on government buildings, party offices, banks and shops.   The police and security forces retaliated nervously with water cannons, tear gas and bullets.   Three protestors were killed.   The Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia appealed feebly for calm.    Kabylia was burning.

In Paris, thousands gathered in Place de La République, in front of an immense black and white portrait of Matoub.  Actors, politicians, community leaders, writers and musicians took to the stage to say a few words or sing a song.  The great Berber singer Idir denounced the new Arabisation law which was due to be passed on July 5^th making Arabic the compulsory language of almost every official or semi-official transaction in Algeria.  The crowd stood smouldering under the fluttering yellow, blue and green flags of Kabylia, arms raised to the skies, chanting his songs.  “Matoub was the Bard of Kabylia.  They wanted to shut him up so they killed him,” said one mourner.   “He sang for freedom, our freedom, Berber freedom,” said another.  “He was our Che Guevara,” said a third.

The Berber Cultural Movement (MCB) called for a general strike and the response was overwhelming.  Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Kabylia, was enveloped in a sepulchral silence on Sunday 28^th June 1998, three days after Matoub’s murder.  Boarded up shops and businesses looked like mausoleums lining the paths of a huge cemetery.   Many of the city’s inhabitants had left before dawn and made their way up the mountain to Taourirt Moussa, the village where Matoub was born.   They stuffed themselves in cars or braved the 25km on foot.  The roads were hopelessly jammed.   This, for once, was a real roadblock.   In every hollow, on every ridge, down every street or path and on every rooftop around the Matoub villa, as far as the eye could see, a sea of mourners stood simmering under a hot and ripening sun.  The presence of women, dressed defiantly in their colourful traditional dress or western threads, all of them unveiled, surprised many.   Traditionally, funerals in Algeria are all-male affairs.

The heat was intense, the atmosphere even more so, and many fainted.  Militants from the various Berber political groups and local village defence associations policed the gathering. Their work was light because no one was in the mood for trouble making.  Placards bearing Matoub’s intense and troubled features were held aloft.   Banners broke the silence and the sobs.  “Remember and Revenge!”   “No Peace Without Tamazight”   “Arabo-Islamism, the shortest way to HELL.”   Eventually Matoub’s body was brought out, wrapped only in an Algerian flag, and laid tenderly in a grave just in front of his family home, between an olive and a cherry tree, facing the majestic Djurdjura Mountains which he had loved with such a passion.  His mother Aldjia fired two shots in the air and his sister Malika made a short speech which ended, “The face of Lounès will be missed but his songs will dwell forever in our hearts.  Today is a day of great joy.  We are celebrating the birth of Matoub Lounès.”


*      *      *      *

One God?  One Nation?  One People?

Like a young adult who has just broken free from parental chains, any newborn nation state must grapple with the fundamental questions “Who am I?  What is my identity?”  Sometimes the answer comes easily.  Countries whose territory is already blessed with linguistic and cultural coherence have little trouble establishing a national identity.  But for many of the huge amorphous nations of Africa, which were often carelessly cobbled together from a chaotic patchwork of tribes and ethnicities by civil servants in the oak-panelled ministries of Paris or London, the question of identity has always posed huge problems.   In the end one political group, tribe or clan usually imposes its rule, its ideology and often its culture on the rest of the country, by force if necessary.  Proud, defiant but still politically immature, the new leaders of these fledgling states find they cannot entertain progressive notions of federalism and live-and-let-live cohabitation for fear that the weak mortar that binds their nation together will just crumble into dust and anarchy.  The grail of national unity becomes an end that justifies the most violent and oppressive means.

Algeria’s birth pains were brutal and severe.  The war of independence that ended in 1962 was one of extreme hatred and extreme violence.  It combined a Gestapo-like approach to civilian control – many former resistance fighters turned French army officers were all too familiar with the Gestapo’s methods – with the kind of all-terrain guerrilla shock tactics that would later find favour with the Viet Cong, the Mau Mau, and many other popular people’s armies.   The French used napalm, torture, mass civilian executions, and a scorched earth strategy, anything to defeat their invisible opponents.  The rebel mujaheddin answered in kind.  Europeans killed Muslims.   Muslims killed Europeans.   Muslims killed Muslims and eventually Europeans killed Europeans.  The scars went very deep.   It all ended with the birth of an independent Algeria and one of the greatest mass exoduses of the 20^th century.   Over one million people of European descent left the country in the few months before independence; businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and civil servants, taking with them the very foundations of a functioning civil society.   The country’s new leaders were left with hopes and ideas but few of the skills necessary to turn them into reality.

As long as the war was taking its murderous course, the rebel nationalist movement managed to maintain at least an outward appearance of unity.   But beneath this veneer there were deep divisions which began to surface even before the ink was dry on the Evian Accords of March 1962 which guaranteed Algeria her independence.   Various factions had very different answers to that “Who are we?” question.   The émigré revolutionary council lead by Ahmed Ben Bella, who eventually managed to seize power and become Algeria’s first effective head of state, were inspired by three overarching ideologies.   The first was command and control socialism, Soviet style.   The army and the state had a duty to commandeer the economic, social and natural resources of the country and manage them for the good of the country.  The second was more a reaction than an ideology.  Algeria would slowly and surely purge French civilisation, the French language and French cultural values from society.  In time, Arabic would take over as the language of education, the judiciary, science, technology, culture and commerce.  French notions of égalité, fraternité and liberté would be strictly controlled and curtailed.  Muslim Algerian intellectuals and thinkers, who had all hitherto used the French language as their vehicle of expression, would now have to think, dream and cry in Arabic.

The third ideology was Arab nationalism.   Ben Bella and his crew had delved deep into the same well of political inspiration as Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria or the Ba’athists in Iraq.  They all believed that if a nation state in North Africa or the Middle East was to stand proud, defiant and spiritually self-sufficient in a post colonial world, then it must draw on the glorious history and culture of Arabic civilisation, the unifying power of classical Middle Eastern Arabic and the bedrock of Islam in order to succeed.   ‘Petty’ regional and ethnic differences must be buried or obliterated.   Unity was paramount.

These ideologies only began to make a small difference to daily life in Algeria during the short reign of Ben Bella, who was ousted in a military coup by his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Colonel Houari Boumedienne in 1965.   Boumedienne was an Arabic Literature teacher turned steely military leader and staunch command and control socialist.  He was also a die hard Arab Nationalist and it during his reign that the process of Arabicising and nationalising the country really gained momentum.   Apart from his agrarian and industrial revolutions he also instigated a cultural revolution with the aim of ‘decolonising the mind’.   He knew that Algerian society was fundamentally fractious and partisan with a historic tendency to splinter and implode.  Only the discipline of the great revolutionary army and unifying forces of Islam, state socialism and the Arabic language could hold the nation together.  His programme of Arabicising all walks of Algerian life was continued after his death in 1978 by the new president Chadli Bendjedid and into the 1990s by Presidents Lamine Zéroual and even the present incumbent Adelaziz Bouteflika.   All these men were loosely affiliated to the nationalist clan who took power in 1962.  Their ideas have softened and shifted over the decades but many of their core beliefs about identity have remained unchanged.

There was, however, a very different answer to the question “Who are we?”  The problem with this pan-Arabic, nationalist, ‘Ba’athist’ inspired vision of Algeria was that at least 25% of the country didn’t even speak Arabic at all.   They spoke Berber.  Instead of looking to the Middle East for an answer to the country’s identity, these Berbers looked to their own past.   They saw that their ancestors, the original inhabitants of North Africa, had a heroic tradition of defying the might of successive invaders – Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks and French – even though they never prevailed long enough to establish their own Berber nation.   They revered their own heroes like Jugurtha, Massinissa, Kahena and Koceila and took an intense pride in the riches of their own poetic and musical traditions.   Their vision of Algeria was that of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Mediterranean country, which possessed more affinity with neighbours like Spain, Greece, or Yugoslavia than far-flung Middle Eastern nations like Egypt, Syria or Iraq.   They recognised the fact that the Algerian territory had long been home to a highly nuanced patchwork of different cultures – Berber, Arab, Spanish, Turkish, Jewish and French – and that the local Arabic dialect reflected this mongrel past.   This was something to be cherished and preserved, not brutally eradicated by the artificial imposition of the classical Arabic of the Koran, a language that hardly any Algerian speaks in daily discourse to this day.   Their proposed solution was to establish Algerian Arabic, Berber and even French as the three official languages of the nation, and to let each be used according to habit, convenience or necessity.

There are Berber communities with different social and cultural characteristics dotted all over Algeria, and North Africa as a whole, but the largest and most significant are the Kabyles who inhabit a mountainous region of unparalleled beauty called Kabylia which is situated south east of the capital Algiers.   Dour, rugged, tough, free, ungovernable, honour-obsessed, dignified, home-sick, democratic, music loving, these are some of the characteristics, some would say clichés, perennially associated with the Kabyle.   For a long time their idyllic country has been neither large nor fertile enough to support all its sons, and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience.   The first Algerian Muslims to emigrate to France at the beginning of the 20^th century were Kabyles and they became the largest North African immigrant group in France before the 1960s.   Consequently it was the Kabyles who adapted quickest to the French language, to French ideas of egalitarianism, socialism, democracy and nationhood.   The first recognisable Algerian nationalist movement, the Étoile Nord-Africaine founded by Messali el Hadj in the 1920s, comprised mostly men of Kabyle origin.  The movement went through several tortuous mutations to emerge eventually as the Front de Liberation National or FLN in the 1950s.  Kabyles played pivotal roles in this evolutionary process.  They fought hard in the war of independence.  Kabylia itself with its remote valleys, ravines and mountaintops is classic guerrilla country and as such it suffered some of the worst brutalities of the conflict.   A body with its throat slit is said to be wearing a ‘Kabyle smile’ to this day.

Nevertheless it soon became apparent that many Kabyles in the nationalist movement had fundamental disagreements with their Arabic co-revolutionaries.  They were not prepared to see their Berber identity and their own dialect of the Berber language, known as Tamazight, disappear under the authoritarian umbrella of an Arabic socialist über-state.  They also had very different ideas about democracy and the future shape of Algeria’s government.   The traditional system of Kabyle village and clan politics, with its djemaat or village councils and aarouch or tribal councils, instilled a raw but visceral feeling for democracy and the values of community involvement and egalitarianism in many Kabyles.   This went against the grain of the authoritarian, centralised and top-down ethos of Arab nationalism.   Many Kabyles also recognised the importance of Islam but they preferred to let faith be a personal matter, between the individual and God, rather than something decreed and formulated by the state.   They increasingly feared that state-sanctioned Islam and an insistence on Arabic, the language of the Koran, as the only vehicle for education, would roll out a red carpet for extreme political Muslim fundamentalism, which was already making its presence felt in Egypt, the Middle East and Algeria by the 1960s.   The fundamentalist Muslim ulema or ‘scholars’, a revolutionary movement founded by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis in the 1920s, had already denounced Kabyle and Berber aspirations as “a reactionary doctrine born of imperialism.”   All in all, the answer of many Kabyles and, it has to be said, a fair number of other non-Berber Algerians to the question “Who are we?” could not have been more divergent to that supplied either by Ben Bella and his allies, or the fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries for whom an Islamic state was the be all and end all.

Almost as soon as the independent flag of Algeria was fluttering freely over the skies of Algiers, the Kabyles were on the move.   There was a gradual purge of dissident Kabyle elements in the nationalist movement already underway by 1962 but a year later a senior Kabyle revolutionary called Hocine Aït Ahmed formed the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), as a vehicle to promote social democratic ideas and the rights of Berber minorities.   A full-scale revolt flared up in Kabylia against Ben Bella’s government, with skirmishes and reprisals as bloody and brutal as anything that had been seen during the war of independence.   Eventually Aït Ahmed was captured, sentenced to death, reprieved and exiled.   With his departure the entire Berber movement in Algeria collapsed or went underground.   The emphasis of the struggle moved to France where gradually throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Berber cultural awareness grew like a storm cloud in the ex-pat Algerian community.  Thanks to the activities of numerous Berber cultural groups, notably the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB), the language, history, literature and music of the Berbers started to become a major force in the Diaspora.

What’s striking about this struggle is its essentially cultural nature.  Most Berbers aren’t fighting for autonomy or an outright Berber Algeria.  Nor is their struggle predominantly about trade union rights, women’s rights, cheap food, better schools and hospitals and an end to corruption although, like most other Algerians, they long for these things too.  Their overriding cause is simple; first and foremost the recognition of Tamazight as an official national language, suitable for use in schools, commerce and government business.  And secondly, a general acceptance that Algeria should be governed along secular, egalitarian, multi-cultural and democratic lines.   That in a nutshell is the Berber struggle.


* * * *

Childhood and strange fruit

Musing on his early childhood in the pages of his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ (Éditions Stock, 1995), Matoub Lounès wrote, “I was turbulent, I still am.  I’ll be a rebel for the rest of my life.”   In many ways his beginnings were that of the Kabyle Everyman.   He was born in 1956, in the middle of a bitingly cold Kabyle winter, in Taourirt Moussa, a village of great beauty on the northern flanks of the Djurdjura Mountains.   His father had been living and working in France for the past ten years and so he grew up among women, strong women, the kind who can bear the responsibility of raising a family and keeping a home without their men around in the midst of a full blown war.  It was also the women of Matoub’s childhood, especially his mother Aldja and his grandmother, who mixed music with the blood in his veins.  Music-making went on everywhere, at work in the fields during the day, at home in the evenings, at weddings, henna feasts, parties; music and old Berber tales of Kings and princes, heroes and villains.  Matoub’s mother was illiterate, but like many Kabyles she possessed a trove of rich and evocative words with which to paint the world.

From the start ‘trouble’ was Matoub’s middle name.  School was death by boredom and he preferred to be off in the fields with his mates, trapping rabbits and running wild.  “I made the bush school into a way of life,” he wrote.  Nevertheless he did appreciate the way in which the French Christian Fathers who ran many rural schools in Kabylia would inculcate a sense of Berber history and identity, along with many of the positive aspects of French culture and thought, into the minds of their young charges.  Matoub’s schooling was entirely in French, and at home he spoke only Tamazight.  He never learned more than a few words of Arabic in his whole life.   This preponderance of French teachers in Kabylia and the fact that it was French historians and French philologists who did much to revive the study of Berber poetry, languages and the ancient Tifinagh alphabet in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, lead many a staunch Arab nationalist to claim that “the Berber is a creation of colonialism.”   Despite his respect for certain French teachers however and like many a young boy in the Kabyle Mountains, Matoub venerated the freedom fighters, the mujaheddin of the Independence struggle, who would sneak into the village late and night and pay their visits.   They were heroes, and the war of Liberation was a heroic struggle.   There was no doubt about that in Matoub’s mind.  The shelter that the impenetrable contours of their territory gave to the freedom fighters was Kabylia’s pride.

One day on the way back from school the young Matoub saw the bodies of three men hanging from a tree.  They were harkis, the name given by Algerians to traitors who collaborated with the French, and they had been executed by the mujaheddin.  Their skin was already black and sun-cracked.  Flies covered their eyes and faces, buzzing morosely in the evening heat.  The sight of these strange fruit stayed lodged in Matoub’s mind for the rest of his life.  It was his first encounter with death; close, intimate and real.   A haunting life-long flirtation had begun.

Matoub belonged to the generation of Algerians who grew up believing that their Revolution was a beacon for the world.  It was one of the greatest victories of a colonized people over its colonizers that the late 20^th century ever saw.  During the 1960s, Algeria seduced many into thinking it was model socialist state, a dynamo of new thinking and new ideas and a natural leader along with Cuba of non-aligned nations everywhere.  Che Guevara and Fidel Castro came to visit.  The youth were proud to be Algerian and free.   But under the surface, trouble was brewing.  For many Kabyles, Aït Ahmed’s uprising of 1964 had a traumatic effect, radicalising them and making them reject all things Arabic.  The result of this failed adventure was that Berbers became pariahs in their own country, afraid to speak their own language except in staunchly Berber enclaves.  The forced Arabisation of schools in 1968 was also traumatic.  Many, like Matoub, who spoke only Berber or French, were effectively robbed of their education.   In order to fill the vacancies left by sacked French teachers, the state had to import thousands of second-rate teachers from Egypt and Syria, who taught in a Middle Eastern form of Arabic, which hardly anyone understood.   This blind and destructive policy broke the momentum of a generation.  “It was then that Algeria’s descent into hell began then,” wrote Matoub.

Matoub’s own revolutionary dream finally turned into a nightmare when he was sent to Oran for his compulsory military service in 1975.  Algeria had just provoked a war with Morocco over the question of the Western Sahara.  Matoub saw Moroccan families, with many fellow Berbers among them, being rounded up and forcibly evicted from their homes in Oran and western Algeria and sent back over the border.  The treatment they received disgusted him.   Army life itself was a nightmare.   Matoub witnessed the cynical corruption of the high command and officer ranks.  He also suffered the prejudice of his fellow Arab conscripts.  His lack of Arabic and his Kabyle origins marked him out and attracted a plethora of insults: ‘peasant’, ‘yokel’, ‘backwoods kid’, ‘enemy of national unity’, ‘traitor’ and ‘idiot’.   Boumedienne’s secret police lurked in every dingy hole and corner.  The heroic vision of the great Algerian revolutionary army, scourge of the coloniser, liberator of the people, father and unifier of the nation, dissolved into nothing.   Matoub came away more disgusted, disillusioned and rebellious than ever.

For solace and mental survival, Matoub began to compose poems.  Back in Taourirt Moussa he had already made himself a guitar out of an old oilcan, a length of wood and some fishing tackle.  He mastered a few songs and even started playing at parties and gatherings.   When Matoub’s father eventually came back from years of economic exile to settle down with his family, he bought a beautiful mandole with him, a kind of large elongated mandolin popular in modern Kabyle music, as a gift for his son.  It had been bought with Matoub senior’s hard earned cash at the Paul Beuscher music shop in Paris.  Matoub was so awed by this splendid object that he didn’t even dare touch it for a while.   Eventually, with the help of some older local musicians, he began to master the instrument and even build a lively local reputation as a party and café entertainer.   However Matoub was also a regular at the card table and after a particularly bad run at poker he lost the mandole on a busted flush.  The shame was excruciating, but honour bound him to pay the debt.  His father was broken by the news.

This one dolorous little tale paints Matoub in all his vividness and darkness.  His wayward heart ruled his hand, and his mouth too.  In fact ‘Big Mouth’ was a title that would attach itself doggedly to him throughout his life.  His mouth made him many enemies, but it was also the vehicle of his greatness.  For him, pain, shame, danger and fear were there to be tested, confronted and then just brushed aside if they became too much of a barrier to living a full life.   An almost savage passion drove Matoub’s inner engine, spurred by a quick-fire temper.

In ‘Rebelle’, Matoub talks of an incident in a barber’s shop, when he sliced someone with a razor for some lost insult.  He was given two nights detention in a local jail and then brought in front of the magistrate.  “Because you are a minor I will release you, but I never want to see you again.  Have you anything to say for yourself,” said the magistrate.  “Have you got a spare cigarette?” asked Matoub.   The answer was one month in jail for contempt of court.  That was Matoub, a rare combination of intensity, cheek, courage and foolishness.   ‘Rebelle’ is a striking self-portrait inasmuch as Matoub’s failings and weaknesses are never glossed over but constantly revealed and even underlined with a kind of devil-may-care honesty.


* * * *

Exile in Paris and The Berber Spring

After the army had crushed his dreams, and life in Kabylia seemed to offer no future for a young man with a stunted education and a head full of songs and poems – all in Tamazight too which ruled out a career as a public performer in Algeria – Matoub did what so many Kabyles had done before; he left for France.  In the town of Annemasse in the French Alps he was astonished to discover that he could earn money, good money, by playing his songs in émigré cafés.   Soon after he moved to Paris where he slowly became a fixture in the cultural life of the ex-pat Kabyle community, playing in cafés and hanging out.  Idir, who was probably the most famous Kabyle singer alive at the time thanks to his enormous international hit ‘A Vava Inouva’, took Matoub under his wing, showed him the ropes and even gave him shelter when it was needed.

In a recent interview Idir gave an intriguing character assessment of his former protégé:  “It wasn’t so much his activist side which interested me.  It was above all his intimate side, the suffering and the inner pain.  That’s the part of him I liked.  I saw that he was a man, more in the ilk of Verlaine, in his non-conformism and in his ambiguities too.  Later he came to be considered a myth, hero, a brigade commander.  But that intimate side of him could be felt in certain songs, a side that had nothing to do with being militant and everything to do with the wounds of the heart.   He had this sensitive streak which was the root of his talent. ”

Not long after he arrived in Paris, Matoub attended a concert of Kabyle music at La Mutualité.  There he met one of his great heroes, the singer Slimane Azem, who, along with Cheikh El Hasnaoui, was responsible for laying the foundations of modern popular Kabyle music in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Like most Kabyles of his generation, Matoub had grown up in the thrall of these two singers and his meeting with Azem was charged with emotion and wonder.  The foundation of Matoub’s music are the Kabyle songs of Azem and Hasnaoui, amongst others, and chaabi, or the popular music of Algiers which dominated Muslim tastes in Algeria until the 1970s and even beyond.  “I’m following in the steps of Cheikh El Hasnaoui,” he once told the Le Matin newspaper.  “The precision, the accuracy in his tempo and scales dazzle me.  Technically I belong to him.  But in terms of the message, I’m closer to Slimane Azem and to the spirit of rebellion in his music.  Chaabi was also the music of my childhood.  I feel myself gliding when I hear El Anka or Fadela Dziriya.” Mohammed Hadj El Anka and Fadila Dziriya are among the greatest chaabi singers ever.

But the truth was that no previous Kabyle singer had gone as far as Matoub wanted to go in terms of the simplicity, power and provocation of his lyrics.  “When I started, modern songs didn’t carry that need to express anger,” he once said.   “They didn’t have any convincing protest lyrics.  I shouted out my anger in my songs.  Music is my anger.”   Many Algerian journalists who wrote about Matoub’s music often referred to the ‘violence’ of his songs.  To a western ear his lyrics don’t seem violent, just challenging in the manner of early Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg.  But their bare-knuckled spirit of confrontation is extreme in a North African context, where musicians and songwriters had always previously pulled back from head on confrontation, and couched their protest in rich and symbolic imagery.  That wasn’t Matoub’s style.  His words came from his own mountain world, simple, unadorned, rich in their colours and allusions, but often stark in their meaning.  “I don’t censor myself,” he once said bluntly.

Fame followed fast on the heels of the release of Matoub’s first album ‘Ay Izem’ (‘The Lion’) in 1978.   By 1980, he was already headlining Paris’ legendary venue L’Olympia, scene of memorable visits by the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Edith Piaf and Genesis among many others.   It was almost as if the timing of the concert was divinely ordained.   Trouble had been brewing back home in Kabylia towards the end of 1979 and the early part of 1980.  The political submissiveness that had descended like a blanket of lead on the territory after the defeat of the uprising in 1964 was finally beginning to lift and crack.  In the end, typically, it was a cultural contretemps that lit the fuse.

The revered Kabyle writer and Berberist, Mouloud Mammeri, was due to give a lecture on traditional Berber poetry at the University of Tizi Ouzou.  At the last moment the authorities sniffed Berberist subversion and banned the lecture.  The resulting student protests grew into an all out revolt, which was brutally repressed by the security forces and denounced by the new President Chadli Benjedid.   Over thirty people were killed and more than 200 injured.  This uprising, which became known as the ‘Berber Spring’, was enormously significant.  It was the first overtly popular large-scale show of dissent since Algerian independence.  It radicalised a generation and the anniversary of the uprising on April 20^th each year, known as ‘Tafsut’ in Berber, has become a day of protests, marches, parties, gatherings and celebrations ever since.   Kabyles felt that they were the conscience of the Algerian nation, expressing the anger and frustration not only of Berbers but of all Algerians.   Like Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the Soweto Uprising in South Africa, the Berber Spring was a pivotal event which strengthened the political sinews of the Kabyle nation and boiled the passions of its people.

In the midst of the uprising Matoub took the stage of L’Olympia dressed in army fatigues, thereby expressing his solidarity with the “war” that was raging in his homeland.  The event was highly charged.  The Berber Spring elevated the new breed of Kabyle singers, “the guerrillas of song” as the Kabyle writer Kateb Yacine called them, to a status of extraordinary power.  Due to the lack of any credible coverage or analysis of events in the state-controlled Algerian media, Kabyles in France were forced to rely on ex-pat Berber publications and the odd radio station to keep them abreast of the unfolding drama.   But for inspiration, insight, zeal and courage they turned to singers like Matoub Lounès, Ferhat Mehenni, Aït Menguellet, Djamel Allam and Idir.  They were the bards of the gathering revolt.  They were the pied pipers of the movement.   After Mitterand’s election as President of France in 1980, a new system of political and cultural associations became available to immigrant populations.  This new opportunity spawned the ‘Beur’ movement, a flowering of North African culture, politics and media in the old colony, France.  New radio stations, newspapers, theatre groups, publishing houses, sporting clubs, record labels and community groups appeared like blooms after a flash flood, offering new channels of information and cultural education which allowed Algerians to circumvent the oppressive state control of culture and media back at home.

Matoub Lounès rode this wave like a rebel surfer.  His plainly spoken words of revolt hit the bull’s eye of the times.  His message was clear and passionate.  North Africans, especially young Berbers, fed on that clarity and that passion.   A reviewer who attended one of a series of nine Matoub Lounès concerts at L’Atlas in Paris in the early 1990s, wrote in Parcours Maghrebin, “How does one describe the perfect symbiosis between the artist on stage with an audience completely dedicated to a cause…  The concerts of Lounès have the grandeur of a rite, a rite full of flowers which are offered every ten minutes by overwhelmed fans.  The presence of Matoub at L’Atlas, a total event in itself, has brought a ray of hope to people crushed by the cost of living, the riots, the deadly raids, corruption and the proliferation of ills in our country.  Cheikh Lounès sings about their pains and their hopes which have been tragically blighted thanks to a system made gangrenous by a bunch of criminals.”

As the eighties progressed Matoub’s big mouth also had occasion to make life intensely exciting and dangerous for all the wrong reasons.  Once he picked a fight with a music producer who owed him money.   The producer’s insults had to be avenged – Kabylia and Corsica have worryingly similar attitudes to revenge and retribution.   Matoub rushed up to his hotel room and fetched a knife while the producer ranted in the lobby.  During the ensuing street brawl Matoub stabbed the producer in the abdomen.  He thought he’d killed him.  He was arrested, beaten, showered with racist abuse by the police and spent one month in La Santé prison in Paris.  A few years later Matoub wrote a song denouncing the London Accords between Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed, two men who had fought each other mercilessly in the early sixties but had now decided to make up for purely pragmatic reasons.  Matoub felt that this “false reconciliation” was a betrayal.   The left-wing Libération newspaper called Matoub a fascist and accused him of wanting to throw the Arabs into the sea.   Matoub couldn’t find a single producer in the North African music community who would release the album featuring the song.  All of them received threats not to touch it.   In the end a Tunisian Jew agreed to put it out.  It was deleted soon afterwards and has never been available since.  A few weeks later Matoub was shot at by a group of North Africans in a passing car in the rue d’Amsterdam.


* * * *

Five Bullets and The Dangers of Homesickness

Despite these unnerving incidents, Matoub Lounès might still be alive today if he had only desisted from visiting Algeria.  But homesickness was an unbearable affliction, as it was for many Kabyles.  “That country is my refuge, my bolt hole, my consolation and the only place where I feel really good,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’.  The problem with going back however was that Matoub was now famous in his home country, despite the fact that RTA, the national Algerian state-owned radio and TV company, never ever broadcast his music until the day of his death when they suddenly realised that they didn’t possess a single piece of live footage, studio recording or taped interview of one of the greatest Algerian singers who ever lived.   However, thanks to the ‘alternative’ media of cheap cassettes and French associative radio stations, Matoub’s fan base among young Kabyles and other Algerians in Algeria itself was now huge.   But fame in Algeria was a dangerous, even deadly curse when it brought you notoriety among the security forces, the government and the Islamists as a troublemaker, a shit stirrer and a no-good protest singer.

Matoub experienced the downside of his fame in a very dramatic way in October of 1988.  It was a time of radical unrest when the tectonic plates of Algerian society were shifting in the most explosive way and immense geysers of dissent were spurting up everywhere.  On October 9th, Matoub decided to join a group of students in front of Tizi Ouzou University to distribute flyers calling for a two-day national strike in support of rioting students and workers in Algiers.  Together with a couple of students, Matoub then decided to drive to the nearby town of Aïn el Hammam to distribute more flyers there.  On they way they stopped passing trucks and cars to hand out more flyers.  All of a sudden a police car appeared in front of them, speeded past and then turned and sped after them.  After a brief chase along the snaking mountain roads, Matoub, innocently expecting nothing more than a verbal drubbing or a bit of rough stuff at the local gendarmerie, stopped the car and confronted them.  When he saw that they were from the quasi-military Défence Nationale, rather than the somewhat more lenient local police, Matoub began to worry.  He was handcuffed and treated to a broadside of abuse from his furious pursuers.  Then suddenly, without any clear cause or reason, one of the policemen took out his revolver and shot Matoub in the arm, after which he emptied four more rounds into the body of the horrified and astounded singer.  Matoub collapsed.  He was taken to Aïn el Hammam, every bump in the road doubling his agony, and then to the hospital in Tizi Ouzou.  After three days he was evacuated to the Clinique des Orangers in Algiers, a city still smouldering with unrest.

Matoub’s body was a wreck.  One of the bullets had sliced through his intestine and shattered his right femur.  The under-equipped and hygienically atrocious Algerian health service was in no position to put him back together again and their interventions often made matters worse.  Infections multiplied and Matoub spent his days in constant and excruciating pain.  The nurses started to administer Dolossal, a morphine based painkiller, to which Matoub eventually became addicted.  He also had to cope with deep depression, black moods, and moments when he just wanted to destroy everything in sight.  Eventually, after tortuous bureaucratic wranglings and needless, not to say intentional, delays, Matoub was given a permit to evacuate to Paris.  There, with better treatment, his recovery gathered momentum, although morphine-deprivation drove him to the brink of despair.  His scars were atrocious.  One of his legs was badly set after an operation in Algiers and it ended up measuring five centimetres shorter than other.  He would limp for the rest of his life.   And to cap it all, his bowels and intestine were permanently damaged, forcing him to carry around a colostomy bag, an indignity which the proud and sensitive Matoub bore with extreme difficulty.   It was only the ardent and sustained support of Matoub’s family and his fans, together with the time spent singing and composing songs that saved his sanity through the long months of recuperation.  In Algiers he received literally hundreds of well-wishers by his bed-side, and many more letters and gifts from far and wide.

Those five bullets sublimated his reputation, turning him from a popular singer with a big mouth into an existential hero, a man who had danced cheek to cheek with death, and whose words thereafter carried special magnetism and power.  As murder and violence became daily facts of Algerian life, Matoub was the one singer who could speak of its horrors from direct personal experience.  People loved and venerated him for that.  He was no longer a theoretical artist, but one who knew pain and suffering as intimately as it was possible without loosing a life.   “When one has flirted so closely with death,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’, “you feel this kind of debt which obliges you to respect life.  Suffering, it’s true, helps to appreciate happiness.”

After six weeks at the Beaujon hospital in Paris, Matoub discharged himself and went back to Kabylia with his crutches and colostomy sack, to perform at an emotional concert in Tizi Ouzou’s football stadium.  Such was his defiant headstrong gluttony for life and its inevitable punishments.  “Aggression, which could have annihilated me, ended up reinforcing me.  That day I knew that the five bullets of Aïn El Hamman were defeated,” he wrote.  Needless to say, the cop who had almost murdered Matoub was never brought to trial.


* * * *

Fundamentalism and the Descent into Hell

Meanwhile Algeria was plunging into hell.   When oil and gas prices plummeted in the mid 1980s, the country’s only real source of hard currency dwindled.  The state could no longer pay its bills and what had always been a fragile society, even at the best of times, began to disintegrate.  Forced by the massive nation-wide unrest of 1988 to take drastic measures, President Chadli Benjedid announced the first free multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections since independence.  The first round was held in December 1991.  The voter turnout was low, with many Algerians decidedly unenthused by the choices on offer. The Front Islamique du Salud (FIS), an ascendant fundamentalist Islamic party led by the imprisoned Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, won an overwhelming victory.

Like many extremist political organisations, the FIS offered simplistic starry-eyed solutions to complex deep-rooted problems.  Their ultimate goal was clear; an Islamic state run according to the precepts of sharia law in which democracy, the rights of women and the aspirations of ethnic minorities would have absolutely no place at all.  This programme held definite attractions for certain sections of a population crushed by years of poverty, corruption, and the mismanagement of the one-party FLN state.  It also seemed to provide an alternative to failed western ideologies like socialism and communism, an alternative that was defiantly Arabic and Islamic.  The more oppressed and socially deprived a people, the more inclined they are to cling to the rock of an unambiguous and proud identity, however bogus it may be. The FIS seemed to provide the answer to people’s needs, although many votes cast in their favour were more like gut rejections of the previous regime than positive endorsements of their programme.  The FIS were also masters of grass-roots organisation and they used mosques and religiously inspired welfare programmes to seduce the populace.

But in the fundamentalist mind, democracy is a heresy and a sin against God.  The first-round victory of the FIS presented the Army generals, who still held ultimate power in Algeria, with an excruciating dilemma.  Should they allow the second round of the elections to go ahead and thereby herald a fully-fledged Islamic state in Algeria?  Should they let democracy destroy democracy?  Was it worth sacrificing their own political dominance for a democracy that they had never felt comfortable with anyway?  The strong man of the ruling army council, Major-General Khaled Nezzar, had little doubt in his mind.  He purposefully provoked a constitutional crisis by forcing Chadli Benjedid to resign and appointed a High State Council to rule in his place.  Their first act in office was to annul the second round of elections.  It was a military coup d’etat, all in the name of democracy.  The FIS and their followers felt cheated and robbed.  The political system had betrayed them.  The time had come for direct action.  The gun, the bomb and the knife took over from the ballot box and the Islamic movement went underground.

Matoub had even less love for fundamentalist Islam than he did for Arabic nationalism.  “I’m neither an Arab nor a Muslim,” he once famously said in TV documentary, in a blatant refutation of the FLN’s rallying cry at independence; “One Nation – Algeria!  One People – The Arabs!   One Faith – Islam!”   As far as Matoub was concerned, the fundamentalists wanted to destroy anything that might help society evolve; intellectuals, doctors, journalists, teachers, young women who refuse the veil and of course, musicians.  The FIS and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) were unequivocal in their view that music is a sin and musicians are enemies of God.   Furthermore, Matoub liked to drink.  He loved spending time in cafés, chatting to friends.  It was his way of keeping touch with the people he loved most.  None of this helped to improve his image as a good Muslim.   In any case, he had never had any time for the marabouts, or holy men, who controlled traditional Kabyle society, preying on the simple faith of the people and enriching themselves in the process.  He suspected them of aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism in Kabylia and beyond.  “Religion exploits consciences,” he wrote.  “I don’t want it to exploit mine.”


* * * *

The Only One who Lived to Tell the Tale

Although Matoub spent a lot of his time in France and touring abroad with the help of an international network of Berber groups and activists, he could never stay away from Kabylia for long, and he always tried to be there for the annual ‘Tafsut’ celebrations commemorating the Berber Spring.  In 1994, when fundamentalist terrorist violence was reaching its murderous apogee, Matoub began to hear rumours that he was on the terrorists’ black list.  Friends urged him to go back to the safety of Paris.  Posters began to appear in Tizi Ouzou proclaiming that Matoub was next.  But he bluntly and stubbornly refused to leave.  It would look too much like a climb down, a loss of courage and a defeat.  Instead he took the precaution of avoiding main roads, where the GIA often set up false roadblocks.  But he still went to cafés to talk and drink late into the night with friends.

One night in late September, Matoub and a couple of friends were driving back to Tizi Ouzou when they decided to stop off at a road-side café for a pick me up.   All of sudden, fifteen men armed with knives, hunting rifles and sawn off shotguns burst into the bar.   They searched the place, pistol-whipping the proprietor with the warning that if he continued to run such an ungodly business he would be shot.   Eventually they found the gun that Matoub kept for self-protection in his belt.  The cry went up.  “It’s him. It’s Matoub!”   Their leader, whose war name was Hamza, said to Matoub, “Now you’re getting ready to die, have you decided to pray?”  “Obviously,” replied Matoub.  “Lounès,” came the stern answer, “it’s better to be alive and scared than heroic and dead.”   After taking the proceeds of the till and beating some of the other clients, the guerrillas departed into the rainy night with Matoub.

No one had ever survived being kidnapped by the GIA.  Throughout the two weeks of Matoub’s captivity, death was a constant presence.  His own execution seemed to be forever only a few hours away.  The young members of the GIA group who were holding him captive spoke about death all the time.  They revelled in it, boasted about it and glorified it.  They were also completely resigned to the idea of their own martyrdom in the cause of Islam and subsequent entry into paradise.  Matoub was astounded by how little political analysis or discourse went on in the stinking remote mountain camps of the GIA.  The will of God was the simple motivation behind their every thought and the justification of their every action.   Matoub felt his only possible survival strategies were wit and cunning.  He even joined in with the tearful prayer sessions which the guerrillas held five times a day.

Eventually Matoub was tried by two ‘Emirs’, or GIA leaders, and sentenced to death.  His trial was recorded on tape, so that his own expedient contradictions of his core beliefs could be used later to discredit him.  His judges had an intimate knowledge of his poems and lyrics, even though they claimed that they never listened to his music, or any music for that matter.   “You are the enemy of God,” they told him.  “Because of you and your songs, Kabylia is wallowing in darkness.”   Their arguments were simple and without nuance.   They urged him to follow the example of Cat Stevens, aka Youssef Islam, who had renounced the ungodly life of a musician and embraced the true faith.  Paradise awaited him if he started praying and adopted Islam.  Looking down the barrel of a gun, proverbially and literally, Matoub said anything to stay alive.  He promised to give up singing and open a respectable business, to which end the guerrillas in turn offered to lend him some money.   He also promised that he would try and persuade the Berber movement to give up its political aims.

In the second week of his captivity Matoub began to hear rumours that he might be released.  He refused to believe them, and kept telling himself that death was nothing to fear because he was dead already.  Part of him suspected that the GIA might be planning to manipulate his popularity and use his taped promises and declarations to influence his fans.  As part of this scheme they might just want him alive.  But mostly it was death that dominated his thoughts.  He pictured his own end obsessively, in the minutest detail.  “I imagined my assassination one hundred times,” he wrote.  “One hundred times, I lived my own death.”  A captured policeman was executed only ten feet away from him.  His captors considered Matoub responsible for the moral degeneration of Kabylia and they had fun playing games with his state of mind.

Eventually, on October 10^th, Matoub was driven to the village of Ath Yenni and released.  His joy and relief were unbounded.  After rejoining his family in Taourirt Moussa, where thousands of well-wishers gathered to greet him, Matoub began to find out what had happened during his absence.  The MCB had sent an ultimatum to the GIA, threatening all out war if Matoub was killed.  Groups of youths had braved the dangers of the remote mountain areas to look for him.  Tens of thousands took to the street of Tizi Ouzou and Algiers chanting “Matoub or the Gun!”   In the end, his execution was too hot, even for the GIA to handle.  Matoub was unequivocal about the significance of his own escape from the clutches of the fanatics.  “My liberation was their first set back,” he wrote.  “The terrorists freed me because they had no choice…  For the first time a whole region mobilised, arms in hand, to show that they would not give in to intimidation…  My songs, my music, my struggle will be even stronger now.”


* * * *

The Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Soon afterwards, Matoub released his album ‘Kenza’.  It was dedicated to the daughter of the Kabyle writer Tahar Djaout, a close friend of Matoub’s, who was murdered by the GIA in 1993.  Life, precarious as it was, went on.  Matoub now suffered from regular panic attacks for which he took valium.  Composing songs and writing his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ were the only forms of therapy he allowed himself.  Of course, his traumatic encounter with the GIA had been far from unique.  It is estimated that almost 200,000 people were murdered in Algeria in the decade after 1992.  But the fact that he was able to express his experiences and feelings in songs of such clarity and power set him apart.  “The essential thing for me is to fulfil the link between my life and my ideas, my struggle and my songs,” he wrote.  “My life is a permanent search for that equilibrium, from which I take my strength and my inspiration.”

Nothing in Algerian politics is simple and pure unsullied Algerian heroes are almost non-existent.  Matoub had his doubters and his enemies.  In the early 1990s the Berber movement had split into two factions.  One supported Aït Ahmed’s FFS party and the other a new political movement called Rassemblement pour La Culture et la Démocratie (RCD).  The FFS believed that ultimately peace and stability could only be won through dialogue with the FIS and other fundamentalist groups.  The RCD rejected this notion outright, and even went so far as to ally itself with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the army Generals in favour of an all out war on religious fanaticism and terrorism.  Kabyle society split along these party lines, turning neighbour against neighbour and friend against friend.  Matoub always claimed that he was a poet and that political machinations held no interest for him.  Nevertheless he was a fervent and declared admirer of Saïd Sadi, the man who had founded the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB) in the late 1960s and was also behind the creation of the RCD in the late 1980s.  Matoub was an MCB loyalist through and through.  “It represents that which is most important for us Kabyles: our identity,” he declared.  By association, he was also considered to be an RCD supporter, and this dragged him into the political fray, despite himself.

Soon after Matoub was released by the GIA and the joyous celebrations in Kabylia, Algiers, Paris and the rest of the Diaspora had died down, dark mutterings began to be heard.  Certain parties accused Matoub of ‘staging’ his own kidnap, in order to enhance his reputation and that of the RCD.  For them it was the only logical explanation for Matoub’s escape from the GIA, an organisation whose record of murdering all their kidnap victims had been hitherto watertight.  The singer Ferhat expressed his own doubts publicly, and many others did so privately.  With great insight, the journalist Catherine Simon, writing in Libération, pointed out that doubt was one of the few political reactions left to the Algerian people.  “In this theatre of shadows into which evil has plunged the country,” she wrote, “the only freedom left to the populace, pressured to choose between one camp or another, is to doubt, without let up, everything and everybody.”

Aït Meguellet, a singer revered by many Kabyles and Algerians, refused to comment on Matoub’s kidnapping when pressed by journalists.  For Matoub, his silence was a grave insult.  He went onto Beur FM, the biggest North African radio station in France, and accused Aït Meguellet, who continued to reside in Kabylia throughout the troubles, of buying his own protection from the GIA.  Matoub even claimed to have proof of this arrangement.  The normally reserved Aït Meguellet went public and denounced Matoub, accusing him of mythomania and megalomania.  “In the future, for each proffered lie, ten truths will be told about his person,” he said.

This sorry debacle became known as the Matoub affair.  Claim and counter-claim dogged him right up until the day of his death and beyond.  The French TV channel Canal+ even broadcast a documentary throwing doubt on the assumption that the GIA were Matoub’s killers.  Matoub’s sister Malika, and the Matoub Lounès Foundation are still trying to expose the dark forces which they claim were responsible for his eventual murder.  Ironically, her suspicions are focused on the RCD, the one political party which Matoub was supposed to have supported during his life.  Her argument is that since the RCD allied itself with the regime, it had the means and the motivation to eradicate her brother.  The party was only doing the government’s dirty business for them.  Once again Malika claims to have evidence to back up her accusations.  The RCD are suing her and the Matoub Lounès Foundation.  The case continues.

It’s easy to imagine the army Generals, the mafia who rule Algeria, rubbing their hands in glee at all this fractious in-fighting at the heart of the Berber movement.  And despite his natural tendency to mouth off and call a spade a spade, it’s equally hard to imagine that Matoub himself would have looked on this controversy with anything other than frustration and despair.  All Kabyles, whether FFS or RCD, share a similar dream and ultimately it’s the dream that suffers while the accusations fly.  But that’s the nature of crime and punishment in modern Algeria.  Army, FIS, Government, GIA, this party, that party – they all sometimes blend into one deathly and impenetrable medusa.   As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscínski wrote way back in the 1960s; “Algeria is unique.  At every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts.  Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.”

A perspicacious journalist once wrote that Matoub’s final end was like “the chronicle of a death foretold.”  People thought he was mad to even contemplate returning to Algeria.  They even told him so.  But Matoub couldn’t stay away from his beloved Kabylia for very long.  After he had put the final touches to what became his last album “Lettre ouverte aux…”, the thirty sixth of his career, he decided to accompany his new wife Nadja back home, in order to help her get a visa.  He knew the risks he was taking.  “I know I have been reprieved,” he wrote.  “Popular pressure saved me from the nightmare.  Next time my kidnappers will have my skin, and without any warning, of that I’m certain.”  But in the end, for Matoub, risks were just like red rags to a bull.  Contrary and stubborn to the last, Matoub turned a deaf ear to all the warnings and travelled back home for his final rendez-vous with death.  Ensnared like a brave but doomed insect in a tangled web of fate and foreboding, Matoub Lounès climbed into the car with his wife and her two sisters, and drove off up that lonely mountain road.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2003
First published in ‘Shoot The Singer! Music Censorship Today’ Zed Books, London, May 2004

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