TEHRAN The massacre of Algerian Muslim people has turned to a crisis in that country. With cooperation of the Algerian government, the West is trying to infuse the idea into the public opinion that Islamic groups are behind the killings. In this way they also aim to tarnish the image of Muslims throughout the world. The following is an article on Algeria published in the international newsmagazine Crescent based in Canada.

The Algerian regime's determined and brutal attack on any and all manifestations of Islam in public and social life is well known. At least 300,000 people have been killed by the authorities. The killing was usually blamed on Islamic groups. In this article, Ali Waliken discusses the regime's campaign of terror against Algerian intellectuals, on the first anniversary of the assassination of Abdulkader Hashani, a FIS leader and thinker.

This month was the first anniversary of the assassination of Abdulkader Hashani, number three of the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria, at the hands of the pro-French Algerian political police. Hashani was a fresh political leader, but he was primarily an intellectual, an ideologue of the Islamic movement. This is why he was gunned down. However, Hashani was but an Algerian Muslim intellectual among many to be silenced.

The persecution of Algerian Muslim intellectuals in modern time dates back, in a nutshell, to as early as independence' in 1962. Before that, was the constant 132-year effort to eradicate Islamic identity in Algeria during French rule. Islam was all along the underlying driving force of resistance to colonialism during that period. However, at independence, social, cultural and economic models totally alien to its people's values and worldview were imposed upon Algeria. This was to give rise to a cultural, ideological resistance, which culminated in the October 5, 1988 uprising.

The first casualty of independent Algeria was a Muslim scholar: Sheikh al-Bashir al-Ibrahimi was put under house arrest in 1962, the year of independence, for exercising freedom of thought and expression. Several other scholars were jailed or exiled to Algerian Sahara for the same reason. Intellectual repression continued throughout the seventies and the eighties.

One major example is that of Malek Bennabi. He is among the most prominent Muslim thinkers of the modern period, with over twenty published works to his name, written between 1946 and 1970, first in French, then (in the author's late years) in Arabic. Bennabi was known and read by Muslim intellectuals all over the Muslim world -- except in his own country. Except for one historical/biographical account, Memoires D'un Temoin du Siecle, his books have never been officially printed in Algeria, that is until today. For a decade of independence, he was kept away from the intellectual and educational limelight of his country; he died unknown in 1974. Most Algerians who went through the official educational system and are now in their twenties and thirties have not even heard of him. He was marginalized as soon as Algeria became independent, and later persecuted, just for being a Muslim thinker, using the Islamic intellectual paradigm. It was like Francis Bacon being barred from intellectual existence in British society.

The point is that Muslim intellectuals, whether under Marxist imposed rule up to the eighties or today, have always been identified as an ideological danger to state socialism and to French culture, the two models of the political and intellectual elite imposed on Algerian society by force.

Under Marxist rule, until popular pressure forced the regime to abandon it in 1989, Francophile and communist intellectuals and writers had been given all the necessary intellectual and material means to strive to undermine the very fabric of Algerian society: Islam and the Arabic language; as the French tried to do in vain for over a century.

When in the two successive free elections of June 1990 and December 1991, (after about 30 years of domination of French culture, anti-Islamic Francophile elite and Marxism) the Algerian people massively chose to vote for the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) -- a newly-established party which represented Algerian society's values, religion and culture -- this elite stepped in to abort the popular verdict, on the advice of its French masters.

The Algerian political and intellectual elite is unique in the world in that it is not only anti-Islamic, but also implacably against the Arabic language which is the dominant language of the country in two ways: it is the language of the majority of the Algerian Muslims, that is all the people.

In this respect, this elite cannot be compared to the Kemalists of Turkey: those are self-styled secularists, but profoundly attached to the Turkish language. Finally, it cannot be compared to the communists of the Arab Mashriq: these are secularists, but all speak and write in a beautiful Arabic, the language of their peoples, without any complex whatsoever. In Algeria, the various attempts to Arabize education since 1962 have all ended in failure.

This can only be due to a deeply-rooted cultural, civilizational alienation that has made French culture and all that it carries the blind dogma of the Algerian elite. If in the 1980s Algerian popular consciousness labeled this elite Hizb Fransa (Party of France), and continues to do so, then the signs that justify such dubbing are clear for all to see.

Since the military coup on January 11, 1992, Muslim intellectuals have been eliminated systematically from active existence: eliminated physically under torture, by breaking them down psychologically in jail, through a rigorous starvation policy, and by forcing them into exile to countries where they can barely survive with dignity. Their only crime is to have identified with the Islamic worldview, which an entire society has always adhered to! This has been an intellectual suppression, taking place before the watchful eyes of a silent Western world.

Since 1992, many prominent Muslim intellectuals, even without political affiliation or activity, have been kidnapped by the Algerian security services. They were targeted simply because they were Muslims. Kidnapping, as opposed to arresting legally', is a technique used by the Algerian political police, the Securite Militaire, so that if victims should die under torture, they can be quietly and permanently disappeared', while those responsible can deny any knowledge or responsibility.

Hundreds have been murdered in this way, with their bodies dumped in numbered rubbish bags in the corners of cemeteries, with disguised plainclothes security officers discreetly guarding these parts. Lists of names of such martyrs have been compiled by the Algerian Committee of the Free Campaigners for the Dignity of Man and Human Rights.

For more than three decades of Algerian independence', Muslim intellectual, cultural and political expression has been skillfully and systematically suppressed in order to impose social and cultural models and values alien to the Algerian people. Those responsible for this oppression today are the same as those who suppressed the Algerian people's choice in January 1992, which brought about a popular resistance. They have murdered well over 300,000 young men, who were the life force of Algeria, in almost six years of dictatorship. (This figure was reported by the French paper **********Le Figaro********* in April 1997, citing Western intelligence sources).

In doing so, they have been backed fully by France, which has made sure that no independent international inquiry is carried out to determine responsibility for the atrocities.

The international community' has repeatedly chosen to ignore human rights and the dignity of man where Muslims are concerned, and where the dominance of pro-Western Muslim regimes is under threat. Algeria is just one more case that Muslims should bring to mind when the crimes of the West and its Muslim proxies are remembered.