For the past decade, Algeria has served as a horrific test tube for a "war on terrorism" which has claimed close to 200,000 lives, most of them civilians, writes Lara Marlowe
George W Bush would probably reject comparisons between his battle against al-Qaeda and the one waged by Algerian generals against the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and GIA (Armed Islamic Group) since the beginning of the 1990s, but the two are linked.
Mr Jean-Francois Ricard, a French "anti-terrorist" judge responsible for pursuing Islamist networks in Europe, noticed an important change from 1996. "The Algerians I questioned were no longer interested in what was happening in Algeria," he says. "Their jihad had become international."
Since the Algerian military annulled the country's first democratic elections on the pretence of "saving democracy" in 1992, they and their Muslim fundamentalist enemies have maintained, like Mr Bush quoting Christ: "He that is not with me is against me."
That maxim, the polarisation and abuses it leads to, were the leitmotiv of an extraordinary libel trial which took place in Paris during the first week of July.
Algerian Islamists played no part in the courtroom drama, which saw retired Major-Gen Khaled Nezzar, Algeria's former defence minister, oppose Lieut Habib Souaidïa, the author of The Dirty War, the inside story of an Algerian special forces officer which has sold 85,000 copies in France since its publication last year.
The shadow of September 11th hangs over Algeria's war now. In April and July, French judges twice threw out lawsuits against Gen Nezzar by torture victims, saying there was insufficient evidence that the architect of Algeria's "war against terrorism" was responsible for their suffering.
In his summing up, Gen Nezzar's lawyer, Mr Jean-René Farthouat, defended the Algerian army's actions: "It was that or Afghanistan. The Islamist savages put the republic in danger."
Gen Nezzar filed the libel suit against Lieut Souaidïa not for his book -- it recounts rape, torture and summary executions committed by Algerian security forces - but for a statement the young officer made on French television in May 2001. Referring to Algeria's generals, Lieut Souaidïa said: "They're the ones who made this war...the ones who killed thousands of people for nothing. They are the ones who decided to stop the elections .... I cannot forgive Gen Massu and Gen Aussaresses the crimes they committed, as I cannot forgive Gen Nezzar. The guilty must be judged."
Algerians hold the military and the fundamentalists jointly responsible for their country's calamity, and words similar to Lieut Souaidïa's can be heard every day in Algiers. What stung Gen Nezzar was the comparison with hated French figures of the 1954-1962 independence war, and that fact that he was singled out by name.
At the Paris trial, credible witnesses said things long believed in Algeria but which no one dares to express publicly. "Our mission was to break the FIS, infiltrate it, attribute violent acts to the Islamists," said Col Mohamed Samraoui, a member of the powerful Sécurité Militaire who has sought asylum in Europe.
"The GIA is a creation of the Algerian security services. We wanted to radicalise the Islamist movement, but later we lost control of these groups." When he served at the Algerian embassy in Germany in the mid-90s, Col Samraoui recounted, his boss, Gen Mohamed Lamari, asked him to arrange the assassination of two FIS leaders there.
Mr Omar Bendera, a former director of the Algerian National Bank, spoke about the generals' hold over the economy. Algeria's oil wealth enabled the country to survive without producing anything, he explained. "That only leaves imports, which the families in power divide up in a feudal way, with no accountability: one controls grain, another sugar. Thirty or 40 generals are authorised to be in business. Four or five of them are rich financiers."
In the five-day libel trial, Algeria's contemporary history was dragged before the French justice system, a small irony of the two countries' fraught post-colonial relationship. Ms Fatiha Talahite, a researcher at the French scientific institute CNRS, praised the undertaking as a "starting point of recognition" of the suffering and humanity of hundreds of thousands of Algerian victims.
The verdict, to be given on September 27th, will almost certainly be inconclusive but the libel trial will have been significant. It took France half a century to admit to the state's role in collaborating with Nazi occupiers in the deportation of Jews, and torture by the French army during the 1954-1962 Algerian war is still controversial.
So it seems amazing that Algeria is examining its own war even as it takes place. If there were any need of a reminder, a bomb left in a pile of rubbish at Larba, 25km from Algiers, killed 35 people on July 5th, the last day of the trial and the 40th anniversary of Algeria's independence.