In the 1980s radical clerics seized the opportunity to build support for the Islamist cause through a network of neighbourhood mosques. They provided soup kitchens, food, clothing and welfare, building a political base as Sinn Féin was doing in Northern Ireland at around the same time. Political Islam began to flourish in the fertile soil provided by dire social conditions and endemic political repression.
The military government of the FLN ruthlessly put down the protests, that seemed uncannily like an Algerian intifada,2 with the army being given free rein to shoot demonstrators and torture those who had been arrested.3 The protests climaxed on 10 October 1988, when the army fired into a crowd of 20,000 people, killing fifty.4 The slaughter fuelled rather than stemmed the rise of political Islam. ‘Black October’ became Algeria’s equivalent of Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday or South Africa’s Soweto massacre.
The government saw the warning signs and began to ease off, legal-ising political parties to give voice to the dispossessed and discontented. By far the largest and most prominent of these was the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS – the Islamic Salvation Front), which campaigned for an Islamic state based on sharia law, the legal code derived from the Koran and the teaching and example of the prophet Mohammed. In 1991, in the hope that it would serve as a political safety valve, the government allowed multi-party elections for the first time since independence. In the first round, the FIS won such a clear victory that success in the final round seemed inevitable. The party accepted the principle of one man one vote as a means of achieving power, but once in power it would abolish democracy forever. The government cancelled the final round of the elections, probably fearing a repetition of Iran’s Islamic revolution, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, over a decade earlier.
Far from drawing the sting of the Islamist opposition, the cancellation made it even stronger. Many leaders of the FIS were arrested, and in response to the military crackdown various militant groups emerged, the most significant of which was the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA – the Armed Islamic Group). Its core consisted of veterans of the Afghan jihad, who trained and indoctrinated young Algerians in the skills and ideology of guerrilla war. The GIA had no shortage of recruits or targets. France had become an additional enemy, as the FLN’s ally in a civil war that became a terrible showdown between the Islamists and the military government. About 200,000 people are believed to have died in the violence.5 The scene was set for the hijacking that was to be a harbinger of 9/11.
The four GIA terrorists who hijacked Air France Flight 8969 at Houari Boumediène airport in Algiers on Christmas Eve 1994 planned to crash it into the Eiffel Tower, forcing the pilots to aim for it at the point of a gun. Even if they hadn’t managed to hit the tower, which realistically was a nigh-impossible task, the plane would have crashed on the French capital, with horrendous consequences. The outrageously ambitious plan came perilously close to succeeding.
I wanted to find out what such an experience was like for the passengers and members of the crew who had lived through the nightmare and talked to the terrorists at first hand. I also wanted to speak to members of the French special forces whose mission had been to storm the plane and rescue the hostages. They weren’t in the business of talking to terrorists – just killing them.
I met some of the passengers, crew members and elite commandos at a hotel in Paris, ironically in the shadow of the still-standing Eiffel Tower, and interviewed them over two intense days. We set up the camera in a room in the bowels of the hotel, and stuck a ‘Please do not disturb. Filming in progress’ notice on the door in both English and French. We do this more in hope than in expectation that the request will be heeded, and filming had to be stopped on several occasions because of the clinking of glasses or noisy exchanges outside the room. It always seems to happen at a crucial point in an interview. Other hazards regularly encountered during filming are aircraft noise, police sirens, drilling and barking dogs. Such interviews are intense, and their intimacy is the result of establishing a relationship with the interviewee which often results in his or her forgetting that they’re being interviewed. A single interruption, however brief, from chinking glasses or barking dog, can mean that the emotional bond is broken, and it is rare to get the same response again.
The interviews in Paris over those two days were harrowing, long and exhausting. I felt for my interviewees, who gave so much of their emotions as they recalled the most terrifying three days of their lives.
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The first indication that all was not well had come at 11.15 a.m. on Christmas Eve as the Airbus waited on the tarmac at Algiers, ready to take off for Paris. Four men dressed like officials came on board carrying Kalashnikov automatic rifles, and ordered the passengers to produce their passports, as they said they were carrying out routine checks. Some of the cabin crew were immediately suspicious, as Kalashnikovs weren’t normally carried by the police or customs officers. The captain, Jean-Paul Borderie, told me he feared the worst when one of them entered the cockpit: ‘He turned round for a moment and I saw something that looked like sticks of dynamite sticking out of his coat pocket. A stick of explosives! This was really weird.’ The crew’s suspicions were soon confirmed when one of the four announced who they really were over the plane’s intercom system. ‘We are the Soldiers of Mercy,’ he proclaimed. ‘Allah has selected us as his soldiers. We are here to wage war in his name.’
The hijackers were armed with guns, grenades and twenty sticks of dynamite. Their leader was twenty-five-year-old Abdallah Yahia, a petty thief and former greengrocer from one of Algiers’ most impoverished neighbourhoods, Les Eucalyptes.6 It was also an Islamist stronghold. Yahia had joined the GIA two years earlier, and had risen rapidly through its ranks. His notorious local unit was known as ‘Those who Sign with Blood’, and was responsible for the brutal murder of several foreigners, five of whom were French. Yahia demanded that the plane should take off for Paris immediately. But it was going nowhere. The Algerian authorities were determined not to give in to terrorism, and the aircraft could not move from the tarmac until the passenger steps that were attached to it were removed.
Inside the plane, Islamic law ruled. The women were ordered to cover their heads. One Algerian passenger, Zahida Kakachi, who had been looking forward to midnight Mass in Paris, objected. ‘I don’t want to wear a headscarf,’ she said. ‘I won’t wear it. It’s out of the question.’ But her cousin, who was travelling with her, entreated her to do as instructed. ‘At this point I realised that this was not the time to make a stand,’ Zahida remembered. One of the stewardesses, Claude Burgniard, also objected: ‘It was really degrading to put something on my hair because of an old-fashioned, ancestral belief. I disliked it very much, but I did it to be like the other women, to support them.’
By 2 p.m., with no sign of movement, Yahia was losing patience, and decided it was time to show that he meant business. One of the passengers, an Algerian policeman, was singled out, taken to the front of the aircraft and told to kneel down behind a curtain. The passengers and crew could not see what was happening, but they heard the policeman pleading for mercy: ‘Don’t kill me. I have a wife and child.’ A shot rang out, and his body was dumped on the tarmac. Shortly afterwards, a Vietnamese diplomat was ordered to the front of the plane, where Yahia’s second-in-command was waiting. The man, thinking he was on his way to freedom, wanted to take his bottles of wine with him but was not allowed to remove them from the overhead locker. He then asked if he could have his passport back. ‘You won’t need that where you’re going,’ he was told. He was then shot in the back of the head and thrown out onto the tarmac.
Half an hour later, with two lifeless bodies lying on the runway outside the plane, there seemed to be signs of progress. Yahia agreed to let some of the hostages leave in exchange for the release of two prominent Islamist prisoners. At 2.30 p.m. sixty-three passengers, all of them Algerian, got off the plane. But that was it. Stalemate followed. The hijackers refused to give themselves up, and the authorities refused to let the aircraft leave. The Algerians then tried another approach. At 9 p.m. they brought Yahia’s mother to the control tower