Conspiracy theories still grasp at the truth about the murder of seven Trappist monks at the height of Algeria's civil war, writes MARY BOLANDin Tibhirine
IF MOUNTAINS could speak, the Atlas valleys of northern Algeria would echo with the cries of a helpless witness to slaughter, their clear streams flowing with salt water in tearful memory of countless innocent victims.
The 19th-century Monastery of Notre Dame of Atlas, in Tibhirine, sits at a height of 1,100m, a couple of kilometres outside the town of Médéa, tucked between green peaks as lush as a Swiss landscape. A more idyllic pastoral setting is hard to find so near the sprawling capital of Algiers, 80km away, but the peaceful gardens and lavender-infused air here belie a tale of butchery meted out in punishment for the perceived crimes of kindness, solidarity and religious tolerance.
The monastery and its resident French Trappist monks were once the focal point of a Muslim community comprising 200 or so Tibhirine villagers and hundreds more in neighbouring localities. The monks viewed their role not as proselytising missionaries but as facilitators of Islamic-Christian dialogue who came to Algeria to serve the population in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding.
Brother Luc, a doctor, provided free care and prescription drugs to anyone who came to his dispensary just inside the main gate. The prior, Fr Christophe, worked on the monastery farm with his colleagues, and the fruits of their work were shared with the surrounding communities.
The monks made and sold their own jams and honey at the local market. Children were clothed; parents were helped negotiate the intricacies of the French-style bureaucratic system. No one was turned away.
Today the monastery lies empty save for three maintenance workers, its fruit trees a vestige of the thriving activity that came to an abrupt halt 16 years ago.
“That bell up there hasn’t rung since 1996,” says Youssef, the gardener, indicating the small chapel in the monastery grounds. “Ever since that night.”
While the monks were sleeping on the night of March 26th-27th, 1996, 20 armed men, believed to be members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA in French), broke in. Islamic militants had been fighting the army and attacking civilians since the military government voided the victory by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the first round of general elections in late 1991. The gang found seven monks and took them away on foot across the snow-laden mountains. The brothers would never come back to Tibhirine.
“Amédée and Jean-Pierre were left behind. The terrorists didn’t know they were there,” says Youssef, opening the door to the elderly Amédée’s sparse former bedroom and showing where he hid, terrified, until it was safe to come out. “They were the lucky ones.”
The remaining pair tried to contact neighbours and the police, but the phone lines had been cut. As there was a strict curfew in force, they had to wait until morning to drive to the police station in Médéa. For three weeks there was no news. Then a communique dated April 18th from the GIA demanded the release from an Algiers jail of one of the group’s leaders, Abdelhak Layaada, in return for the monks’ lives. On April 30th, an audio tape featuring the voices of all seven was delivered to the French embassy in Algiers. On it, they say they have been captured by the GIA and appeal to the Algerian and French governments to accede to the gang’s demands.
There was no further information until May 23rd, when another GIA message reported the monks had been murdered on May 21st. According to the Algerian government, their heads were discovered on May 31st. The bodies were never found.
The funerals of Fathers Christian (59), Bruno (66), Christophe (45) and Célestin (62), and Brothers Luc (82), Michel (52) and Paul (57) took place in Algiers, and their remains were buried back at the monastery on June 4th.
The GIA claimed responsibility for their deaths, but what exactly happened to the seven has been the subject of controversy and conspiracy theories through the years. The killings took place at the height of the Algerian civil war. The 1990s, known as Algeria’s décennie noire, saw the assassinations of an estimated 150,000 people by the GIA and its rivals in the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS). Foreigners were ordered out of the country. Journalists were especially targeted. Entire villages were wiped out.
“This is where they wanted to be,” says Youssef, standing beside the monks’ graves in a quiet corner of the monastery grounds that looks out over the Atlas Mountains. “They all said that if something were to happen, this was where they would like to be buried.”
The notion of “something” happening was not an abstract one – the monks knew they were in danger by staying on in Tibhirine after the GIA ordered foreigners to leave by December 1st, 1993. With that deadline long past, the government administrator for the Médéa region, known as the wali, had on several occasions appealed to them, for their own safety, to go. A gang from the Islamic Salvation Army even paid a visit on Christmas night of 1995 but left peacefully. And, in an embarrassing development for the Algerian army, some members of the GIA had presented themselves at Brother Luc’s dispensary, and were duly cared for.
The people of Tibhirine, on the other hand, pleaded with them to stay. They feared that, without the monks, they would be even more exposed to the fundamentalist violence sweeping the country.
As depicted in the 2010 film by Xavier Beauvois, Des Hommes et des Dieux/Of Gods and Men, which won the Palme D’Or prize at Cannes that year, the Trappists were faced with a quandary: walk away and ensure their own safety, leaving behind the endangered villagers whom they regarded as their extended family, or stay on in solidarity with a community that needed them more than ever. They took a vote and decided unanimously to stay.
The theories about their deaths include a charge that the Algerian government, which the monks had defied by staying on, had itself ordered their kidnapping with a view both to moving them safely on and to showing the world it could successfully negotiate with the armed insurgents. However, this theory goes, the set-up was botched when a rival gang ambushed the kidnappers and took the hostages.
Another, more recent, theory was advanced in 2009 when a retired French general, Francois Buchwalter, who was a military attaché in Algeria in 1996, testified to a judge that the monks had been accidentally killed by Algerian government helicopter fire during an attack on a guerrilla position. Realising what they had done, the Algerian military beheaded the seven to make it appear as though it was the work of the GIA, he said. This version is disputed by ex-leaders of the GIA, a group now considered defunct.
“It was the terrorists, no doubt about it, not the army,” says Youssef, who knew the monks well, having worked with them on the farm and in the gardens since he was 15. Now, several decades later, he still tends their garden.
No monks live at the monastery today. Jean-Pierre and Amédée moved to a monastery in Morocco, where the latter died in 2008. The Algiers-based Fr Jean-Marie Lassausse comes to Tibhirine regularly to carry on the monastic presence, but all has changed.
Some of the fruit trees are still tended to and jams produced. There are plans to offer embroidery lessons to locals, and volunteers from abroad come each year to help tend what remains of the farm and maintain the buildings, says Youssef.
Across the country, such atrocities as committed at Tibhirine were repeated thousandfold. While an amnesty in 2005 brought an end to most of the violence, Algeria remains a nation in grief, its memories of bloodshed still raw. Small wonder, then, that the Arab Spring has passed it by.
“We want peace,” says Youssef. “We just want peace.”