Khaled Nezzar, general at the Center for Bloodshed in Algeria, has died at the age of 86
Khaled Nezzar, a wily, outspoken Algerian general and former defense minister who played a central role in the bloodshed that marked his troubled country's transition out of the 20th century, died on December 29 in Algiers. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his son Lotfi in a telephone interview from the capital Algiers.
General Nezzar, who was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity when he died in Switzerland, played a key role in the most traumatic episodes in his country's recent history.
Thought about sparingly in Algeria – in 2006 it became a criminal offense to “instrumentalize the wounds of a national tragedy” – this bloody history and the country's refusal to acknowledge it has contributed to the continued isolation of the North African neighbors and the Middle East.
General Nezzar, who was given a hero's funeral at a state funeral in Algiers attended by the prime minister, was at the center of the story.
As head of the army in October 1988, he ordered troops and tanks into Algiers to put down an uprising by young people enraged by deteriorating living conditions and egged on by Muslim fundamentalists. At least 500 people were killed in the narrow streets of Algiers.
“The army was given free rein to fire on crowds and torture arrested prisoners,” wrote Martin Evans, a historian, and John Phillips, a journalist, in the book “Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed” (2007).
In a 2018 memoir, General Nezzar largely blamed tired, inexperienced troops for the massacre, saying they had been pressured by a fractious crowd.
After that episode, he was promoted to chief of staff of the army, where he again played a central role in an even larger conflict, the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, known as the Black Decade.
As Minister of Defense from 1990 to 1993 and “de facto head of state,” said Mr. Evans and Mr. Phillips, General Nezzar led the first phase of the military's brutal suppression of a radical Islamist uprising that sparked the civil war. That conflict would last almost ten years and cost the lives of more than 100,000 people.
Both sides were involved in massacrestorture and other atrocities, and the Algerian population was caught in the middle. The Islamists slit throats, beheaded villagers and shot teenage girls for not wearing the veil. Government Special Forces units known as 'ninjas' carried out arbitrary arrests, killings and systematic torture using electrodes. About 20,000 Algerians had 'disappeared' and more than 1.5 million people were driven from their homes.
In Algiers, a private, unmarked memorial wall in the headquarters of an association of mothers of the disappeared displays hundreds of photographs of the young men and women who were never seen again, many kidnapped by state security services.
Although General Nezzar held some of his country's highest posts, he repeatedly denied any responsibility for the bloodshed. He broke the ruling elite's code of silence and published copious and combative memoirs justifying his suppression of the Islamists.
“Those who said that the fundamentalists would accept the democratic game did not understand the essence of their dogma,” he wrote.
General Nezzar portrayed the fight against the Islamists as a matter of life and death for his country. “Our belief was that if we let the Islamists take power, Algeria would collapse,” he said in 2002. “The Algerian army has fulfilled its duty. Although mistakes have been made, it is not an army of barbarians.”
However, historians have largely concluded that the military's brutality exacerbated an already rampant conflict.
In 2011, when General Nezzar emerged from a bank in Geneva – like many other senior Algerian officials he had bank accounts in Switzerland – he was arrested and briefly detained following complaints filed by a human rights organization, TRIAL International, and two victims of torture by the army.
Last August – after 12 years of hesitation by Swiss authorities and despite pressure from Algerian officials to drop the case – the Swiss Attorney General indicted General Nezzar, as Minister of Defense and ranking member of the Supreme Council of State, for had overseen the Algerian security services' brutal campaign against Islamist rebels. Because their goal was the total eradication of the Islamists, historians called hardliners like General Nezzar the “exterminators.”
General Nezzar's victims “suffered torture, with water or electricity, and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” the attorney general's office said in a statement. It added: “Nezzar knowingly and intentionally condoned, coordinated or ordered these abuses” with the aim of “wiping out the Islamist opposition.”
In December, authorities set his trial for June 17 this year. Two days later General Nezar was dead.
There are no known other prosecutions for crimes committed during the civil war and few of the accused perpetrators are still alive. The trial “would have been the final moment to open the box on the crimes committed during the Black Decade,” said Philip Grant, executive director of TRIAL International, in a telephone interview from Geneva.
Opinions about General Nezzar were divided in Algeria. Reviled by many, others saw that he had helped save the country from an even worse fate than the military rule he subjected it to: Islamist dictatorship.
“He was no angel,” Nacer Djabi, a leading sociologist, said from Algiers. But the Islamists “weren't angels either,” he said. “They were partners in a civil war.”
Khaled Nezzar was born on December 25, 1937 in Seriana, a town in the mountainous Aurès region of eastern Algeria. His father, Rahal, had been conscripted into the French army when Algeria was a French colony, and had fought in France's colonial wars. General Nezzar's mother, Rebiya, died when he was 8. As a youth, he attended French-run military preparatory schools in Algeria and then attended the National School for Junior Officers at Saint-Maixent-L'Ecole in western France.
In 1958, at the height of Algeria's war of independence against France, he left the French army and joined the Algerian National Liberation Army in Tunisia. He became part of a group of deserters who would exert great influence after Algeria became independent in 1962.
In the 1960s and 1970s he attended military schools in the Soviet Union and again in France. Along with other Arab forces, he commanded Algerian troops in the so-called war of attrition with Israel in 1968, an experience that helped him rise through the ranks.
After Algeria's Islamist party won a majority in the first round of the country's first free elections in December 1991, the government – with General Nezzar as Defense Minister – declared a state of emergency, suspended the elections, banned the party and formed a five-man party. committee, including him, to govern the country. Armed with what Swiss authorities described as an “extermination policy,” largely formulated by General Nezzar, security forces began killing Islamists.
General Nezzar narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in 1993, and resigned from government the following year at the age of 57. “He was a Republican,” said his son Lotfi. “Give back the key, don't hang around.” But he remained an influential voice in the shadow of military figures who still dominate Algeria's authoritarian government.
In addition to Lotfi, he is survived by another son, Sofiane; his daughters Lamia Nezzar Medjaher, Soumia Nezzar and Nassila Nezzar Johnson; and his wife Hassiba.
General Nezzar was fighting to the end. Recently an Algerian news site posted a video which shows him being accosted by a heckler shouting “Murderer!” shouts. at a Paris airport. General Nezzar initially appears to ignore the man before quickly turning around and hitting him with his baton.
The excesses of the civil war, he always maintained, were the fault of the Islamists, whose brutality had no parallel. “Have the Islamists elsewhere done what they did to us?” he said at a press conference in Algiers five years ago. “Never!”
But the human rights group's Mr Grant said: “The argument that the other side was worse does not hold water.”
“We have no evidence of him in the torture chamber,” he added, but when asked whether General Nezzar was guilty of atrocities the answer was clear. Mr Grant said: “In terms of his role, his directive, his knowledge – yes.”