Uniquely Algerian exercise in self delusion

WHEN the Algerian government uses words, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, the words mean exactly what the government chooses.

Hence the approval by referendum of the new constitution yesterday was a uniquely Algerian exercise in self delusion.

There was the turnout figure to start with. The Irish Times found no more than two or three lonely voters in polling stations around Algiers. Algerian journalists reported few voters in other major cities.

Yet, by yesterday afternoon, the government announced that 55 per cent of Algeria's 16 million voters had cast their ballots in the referendum.

The school directors whose premises were used as polling stations were among the few enthusiastic supporters of the new constitution.

"We have to vote `yes' or the fundamentalists will take over," said a schoolmistress on the heights above Algiers.

But hadn't President Zeroual promised to bring peace to the country when he was elected a year ago?

"It's not going to end all of a sudden. He doesn't have a magic wand," she said. "We need peace first. People want peace more than food."

But how can peace be achieved? The schoolmistress advocated the peace of cemeteries: "Peace can only come through victory over the fundamentalists. The army has to kill these people. They are wild and ignorant and they will bludgeon you with any piece of metal."

The schoolmistress picked up a radiator key from her desk and jabbed it at the air as she spoke. "I have one student, a boy of nine, whose father was murdered. He never sleeps. At recess he pretends to shoot other children."

The new constitution is a blend of flowery, triumphalist rhetoric from the 1970s and Orwellian absurdities.

The preamble notes that the National Liberation Front (FLN) - which brought the country to ruin in three decades of single party rule - "founded in all its fullness a modern, sovereign state", and claims that the entire world respects Algeria "for its commitment to just causes throughout the world".

Corruption? "Government service cannot constitute a means of enrichment or serve private interests," says Article 21.

Some 200 Algerians are murdered every week, but Article 24, says "the state is responsible for the security of property and people".

What about the 118 foreigners who have been assassinated in Algeria since 1993? "Every foreigner on Algerian territory, enjoys the protection of the law."

Police torture? "Fundamental liberties and human rights are guaranteed ... All forms of physical or moral violence or attacks on dignity are proscribed".

"This document consecrates military dictatorship," said Dr Ahmed Djeddai, of the opposition Front of Socialist Forces.

Sixty of Dr Djeddai's fellow activists in the FFS have been assassinated. Yet the party is one of the few which refuses to take up arms.

"There's no point - there are no more rules," he said. "You don't know where, when, how or why the threat comes." The government has now armed 200,000 civilians, more than the total number of the armed forces.

"If we arrive at a peace process tomorrow, how will we disarm them?" Dr Djeddai asked.

The Algerian state is slowly collapsing, he said. "Today in the countryside the state no longer exists. The militias run the villages in the daytime - they are warlords. At night the Islamic groups take over."

Terrified villagers are fleeing en masse to the slums around the capital, where many live as squatters or in tents.

The FFS claims more than 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria's civil war already. By proposing a peace plan in 1995 - to which the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was a party - and by making a joint appeal for peace earlier this month, the FFS and other opposition groups had shown that dialogue was possible.

More than 1,000 prominent Algerians have now signed the appeal, but the government has rejected it out of hand and state run media have observed a news black out.

"The most important question in Algeria today is not the constitution," Dr Djeddai said, "but the choice of war or peace."