ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, Algeria has been wracked by intense violence as a result of a crisis which started in October 1988 with massive riots, followed by three years of confused political and economic reforms in a new, formally democratic environment. In December 1991, the situation, however, was irredeemably worsened by the interruption of the legislative electoral process, which was supposed to introduce a multi-party parliament under a new constitution enacted in 1989. This, in turn, was followed by the army-backed coup in January 1992 which laid the ground for what became a virtual civil war in which the most appalling brutalities were committed, ostensibly in the name of Islam, justified by a narrow-minded intolerance and fanaticism, so extreme that the violence itself seemed profoundly irrational.