Khaled Nezzar, general who brutally suppressed protests during Algeria’s ‘Black Decade’ – obituary
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Major General Khaled Nezzar, who has died aged 86, was the Algerian army’s mailed fist in the suppression of anti-government riots in 1988 and in the war against the Islamists in the 1990s, precursors of the drive for change which would again be thwarted during the Arab Spring in the century to come.
Nezzar was one of a group of officers trained by France who were abroad during most of the fight for independence but later deserted to join the Algerian army and become the core of its general staff. Their concept of society has been described as “a militarised one where a docile population would unquestionably obey orders from on high”.
That illusion was shattered in October 1988 by the outbreak of widespread rioting against the single-party rule of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) under President Chadli Bendjedid. A state of siege was declared and Nezzar, commander of ground forces at Aïn Naadja in Algiers, placed tanks on the streets of the capital. The army was given carte blanche to fire on the crowds. It is estimated that 500 people were killed and that many of those arrested were tortured.
Five days after the start of the uprising, a shaken Bendjedid went on television to promise political reforms, which opened the way to a multi-party polity and the founding in 1989 of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS). Later, in his memoirs, Nezzar would accuse Bendjedid of conniving with the Islamists.
A month after he had restored order, Nezzar was appointed head of the army general staff. In 1990 he became defence minister, a post previously held by the head of state, and carried out a root-and-branch reorganisation of military security.
In local elections in 1990 the FIS far outdistanced the FLN. The following year it called for a general strike and organised a huge demonstration in Algiers to demand the immediate creation of an Islamic republic. The army was again deployed. A few people were killed and thousands more were arrested. Chadli declared a state of siege and the postponement of national elections.
The first round of these, held in December 1991 and contested by nearly 50 parties, resulted in a landslide victory for the FIS on a turn-out of just under 60 per cent. The second round, due three weeks later, never took place. “Le Pouvoir”, the opaque nexus of the security services and often aged politicians, fearing that the Islamists would win a two-thirds majority and thus be able to change the constitution, reasserted their authority through a putsch.
In January 1992 Chadli announced his resignation with immediate effect. Power was transferred to a newly created Haut Comité d’État (HCE) under Mohamed Boudiaf. This transitional body was supposed to prepare the way for new elections, at an unspecified date. Among its five members was Nezzar.
The army was back on the streets, battling the Islamists. A state of emergency was declared and the FIS was dissolved by legal fiat. Already more than 100 people were estimated to have been killed and hundreds wounded. In May Boudiaf was assassinated in the eastern city of Annaba, leaving Nezzar as de facto head of state until Ali Kafi, whom the army regarded as compliant, took over as HCE chairman. Algeria was peering into the abyss of prolonged civil war.
This conflict, its brutality reminiscent of the colonial struggle against the French, principally pitted the security services, notorious among them a special anti-terrorist force known as the ninjas, against various Islamist cells collectively known as the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). Among the victims were seven Cistercian monks, who were murdered at Tibhirine in the Atlas Mountains in 1996 and became the subject of the film Of Gods and Men.
Estimates for all those killed during what is called the “Black Decade” vary widely, from under 50,000 to 200,000.
In February 1993 Nezzar narrowly escaped an attempted assassination by car bomb in Algiers. Five months later, suffering from vascular problems, he stepped down as defence minister but remained a member of the HCE, which continued to exert a strong influence on the prosecution of all-out war against the Islamists.
In retirement his combative past caught up with him. In 2001 he issued a writ for libel against Habib Souaidia, a former ninja officer who in a book called La Sale Guerre accused the Algerian army of massacre and torture, and said on television that those who had deserted from the French army decades earlier were responsible. Nezzar lost his case.
There were much more protracted proceedings with the Swiss Federal Criminal Court, which in 2012 indicted the former general for war crimes and crimes against humanity and had set a date for his trial later this year.
In a final twist, Nezzar and his son Lotfi were sentenced in absentia to 20-year prison sentences by an Algerian military court for allegedly undermining the army and plotting against the state during the Hirak Movement, a series of protests after Abdelaziz Bouteflika, then aged 82, had announced in 2019 that he would stand for a fifth term as president. He resigned a few weeks later. Nezzar was able to return to Algeria from Spain without being arrested.
The son of a former non-commissioned officer in the French army, Khaled Nezzar was born on December 25 1937 in Seriana, eastern Algeria, and was educated at a school for soldiers’ children at Koléa in the north of the country. Having joined the French army, he studied at the Strasbourg military school in Algiers. After defecting to the FLN forces towards the end of the independence war, he attended the Frunze military academy in Moscow. As he rose through the ranks he received further training at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris.
Nezzar’s wife, Hassiba, predeceased him. As well as Lotfi, he is survived by three daughters and another son.
Khaled Nezzar, born December 25 1937, died December 29 2023
