Word: algerias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Algeria, says Marlowe, "you're not worried about artillery shells or snipers but about the guy who might shoot you point blank or slash your throat while you're sleeping." Three times--once at night--Marlowe ventured out on tense patrols with the "ninjas," the country's masked paramilitary police. It is the only way to see Algiers' most violent areas. On the fourth day, she worked in her hotel while photographer Abbas accompanied the ninjas. His group was ambushed by remote-control bombs, severely damaging an armored vehicle but, fortunately, injuring...
Ironically, Marlowe feels at home in Algeria. It reminds her of Beirut, where she lives with her husband Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper the Independent. "Like Lebanon," she says, "Algeria is marked by French as well as Arab culture. Both countries have been tugged back and forth, and the resulting identity crises led in both cases...
...album handed out to visitors in Prime Minister Mokdad Sifi's office is gruesome testimony of civil war: 32 pages of glossy color snapshots from Algeria's morgues. Severed heads appear on most pages, eyes open, frozen in a terrified stare. Pools of blood fill the stumps of necks on headless torsos. The bodies of children caught in a bombing have been charred to cinders. The only discernible feature on a decayed corpse is the diagonal throat slash from right ear through to the spinal column-the ghoulish trademarks that every Algerian recognizes as the signature of the guerrillas...
...Algerian government showed when a handful of foreign journalists were permitted in the country last week under government protection. Even so, the visit offered a rare glimpse inside the maelstrom of a country where violence on both the Islamist and government sides has closed the door to outsiders, leaving Algeria to conduct its vicious hidden war in private...
...horrifying. But a special repugnance is reserved for internecine butchery of the sort that has enveloped Algeria (pop. 30 million) ever since the secular regime, widely discredited for its corruption and incompetence, embarked on an ill-fated attempt at reform in 1989. After the government reluctantly agreed to the first free elections in 29 years of independence, army generals pulled the plug when the F.I.S. won a plurality in the first round of voting. The generals installed a puppet civilian government rather than allow a second-round electoral victory for the fundamentalists, whose draconian vision of an Islamic republic...