Where journalists have a shorter life expectancy

A GREETING card is pinned to the wall of the office at El Watan newspaper. "It's very brave to work in a newspaper, with all the threats against you," says the message from one of their colleagues who fled to France.

"I hope you're putting the paper to bed earlier than usual. I wish you much courage, and ask you to be careful."

Since the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) began targeting journalists for assassination in May 1993, 69 members of the Algerian press corps have been murdered.

Some were tortured or had their heads left on pikes outside their homes, for their families to discover. In one terrible case, a journalist was skinned alive. Most were shot dead.

It's not surprising that half of the country's journalists have emigrated most of the remaining 500 how live under police protection in hotels on the coast near Algiers. Their life is one of constant watchfulness and fear, made more difficult by government harassment.

"I'm afraid morning, noon and night," Omar Belhouchet, publisher of El Watan, admitted. "It's a physical fear, despite myself. I live with it." Belhouchet survived an assassination attempt in 1993.

Fifteen of his best reporters have left, but Belhouchet doesn't blame them. "I understand them. Sometimes I say to myself that I may be among them one day."

Two years ago today, Le Matins columnist, Said Mekbel, was shot twice in the head in a pizzeria next to the newspaper office. "He was the best of us all," Belhouchet said. Anyone who read Mekbel's sad, funny, satirical column agrees.

Today, Mekbel's family and friends are holding a memorial ceremony for him and Algerian newspapers are reprinting his final column. It was published on the morning he was murdered.

An Algerian journalist, Mekbel wrote, is "the thief who slinks along walls to go home, the father who tells his children not to talk about what he does for a living. .. the one who leaves his home every morning without being sure he'll reach his office, and who leaves his office in the evening without being sure he'll arrive home. .. The man who makes a wish not to die with his throat slashed. This corpse on which they sew a decapitated head.

"He's the one who knows how to do nothing with his hands, nothing but his little scribbles, the one who hopes against hope.

Most of Algeria's non governmental newspapers have their headquarters at the Maison de la Presse Tahar Djaout, named after the first press victim of Algeria's assassins 3 1/2 years ago.

The complex is a former French army barracks, filled with photographs and other reminders of dead journalists. Omar Ouartilane, editor of the Arabic language El Khabar, was shot dead in October 1995, just outside the complex wall.

Next to Omar Belhouchet's window at El Watan is a parking lot. "That's where Le Soir's office used to be," he said. "The February car bomb was just the other side of the wall, 30 metres from here."

Four journalists were killed in the bombing. Had Belhouchet been in his office, he would have been wounded. He had gone to the funeral of an assassinated journalist in Blida.

El Watan's staff came back a few hours after the explosion to produce the newspaper.

Until 1989, all newspapers in Algeria were government run; the state still controls radio and television, virtual mouthpieces for the government. When private newspapers don't exercise enough self censorship, issues are seized, titles are suspended and journalists go to prison.

"Theoretically, there are many stories you could do here," Salima Ghezali, the editor of La Nation weekly said. "You could interview the families of disappeared people, the families of dead soldiers, and describe battles between the military and the armed groups.

"You could analyse power struggles within the government. But it would never get across the threshold of the printing press. And our life expectancy - as a newspaper and individually - would be dramatically shortened."