Algerian Officials Promise Protection; Survivors Wary
Behind a door blasted away with explosives, the blood of wedding party celebrants mars freshly painted white walls and soaks a dish of couscous.
Charred homes, cafes and shops and doors broken down by marauders or left open by fleeing victims are what’s left of Rais, where witnesses and hospital officials say 300 people were slaughtered Friday. The carnage appears to be the worst of Algeria’s 5-1/2-year Islamic insurgency.
Algerian soldiers guarded Rais on Saturday as a handful of survivors returned. Zahia Mehdi surveyed the burned-out home where her parents were killed, wondering how the five-hour rampage went undetected by soldiers in a barracks a half-mile away.
“Why didn’t anyone come to our help? The barracks are just a shout away,” said Mehdi, 26.
About 200 survivors fled to the capital, Algiers, or nearby towns. With news filtering into Algiers Saturday of still more massacres - 47 more deaths in two attacks the day before - the exodus from this area south of the capital continued.
The government assures it is boosting security, but many rural residents have given up hope of protection from the military after a wave of nighttime massacres. They sit on hastily packed boxes and suitcases at an Algiers bus station. Slums of displaced people are growing.
“I left because there’s no more state to protect us,” Ali Benamrane, a 36-year-old farmer said in Algiers. “There is no state - only a government of the night.”
Trying to prove otherwise, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said on national television Friday night that the perpetrators “will not go unpunished.” The government said it was taking measures to thwart the violence but provided no details.
The government, usually tight-lipped about attacks, reported the massacre in Rais, putting the death toll at 98 with 120 wounded. But witnesses and hospital sources said 300 were killed and 200 wounded.
Permanent military camps are planned for rural regions in central and western Algeria that often are targeted by marauders, an informed source, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, told The Associated Press.
The task is difficult, with 90,000 soldiers to protect thousands of isolated villages. Authorities have organized tens of thousands of civilians into “self-defense groups,” but the militants have often targeted towns that have no such militias.
Rais had no militia, depending instead on the nearby military base.
In an unusually harsh editorial, the independent El Watan reported that the massacres showed “the failure of the government to effectively and solidly combat terrorism.”
The Grand Ayatullah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a leading Shiite Muslim fundamentalist cleric in Lebanon, condemned the massacres and blamed the government.
“The information confirms the participation of the authorities in them, along with armed groups, to implement policies aimed at tarnishing the image of the Islamic current through these backward groups,” Fadlallah said during Friday prayers.
About 1,500 people have been killed in attacks attributed to Islamic militants since early June, when the government swept Algeria’s first multiparty elections with promises to crush the insurgency. In August alone, about 700 people were believed killed.