AT 8.15 a.m., six men holding hatchets, sawn off shotguns and knives burst into the classroom at Oued Djer, a small village 50 km southwest of Algiers. They seized 14 year old Fatima Ghodbane and tore from her head the Islamic scarf she had only recently started wearing. As Fatima's classmates watched, the men dragged her outside and bound her hands with wire. One of the guerillas pulled her head back by the hair and stabbed her several times in the face. Then he slit her throat.
"This is what happens to girls who go to university," the murderer then told Fatima's classmates and teachers, shaking the knife, which was still covered in Fatima's blood. "This is what happens to girls who talk to policemen. This is what happens to girls who don't wear the hidjab (Islamic covering)."
Before dumping Fatima's body in front of the school gates, the killers carved the symbol of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) on her hand. Fatima's death, in March 1995, is not an isolated case. According to the last recorded government figures, 101 teachers and 41 students of both sexes were killed in 1994 by Islamic extremists who attack schools because they are a symbol of the government.
No one is sure why the GIA, which was formed in 1993, singled out Fatima Ghodbane for this butchery. Until her death, she and her eight brothers and sisters had lived peacefully with their widowed father, a retired builder. "No one ever threatened us - neither me nor my children," Fatima's grieving father later told journalists.
So why was Fatima murdered?
"She was very beautiful," says Mouloud Benmohamed, a reporter on el Moudjahy the Algerian government newspaper. "Her friends believe she may have refused to have a `pleasure marriage' with the leader of the group, the Emir."
The GIA apparently believes the "holy warriors" of Islam have a right to claim sexual pleasure before they sacrifice their own lives in the name of Allah. The "pleasure marriage" is, in effect, a licence to rape.
Since the civil war between Islamic fundamentalists and the military backed regime broke out four and a half years ago, more than 50,000 Algerians have been killed. Of this figure, some 500 women have been murdered by rebels which amounts to 1 per cent of the total war casualties. But feminist groups and the government have given wide publicity to the kidnappings, assassinations and rapes that have taken place. A television series made by El Moudjahid's Mouloud Benmohamed this spring attained the highest ratings of any Algerian made programme. Viewers were shown the corpses of mutilated and decapitated women, and heard lurid accounts from several young women who had escaped captivity.
Nawel, a 28 year old divorcee, admits to being "completely hooked" on the macabre documentaries. "One girl told how she and her mother had been kidnapped and taken to the mountains by her own brother. He married them off to his friends in the GIA. The girl managed to get away, but the mother didn't. It scared me, but I watched the next Friday night because I wanted to know how these women were kidnapped, how they'd escaped ... I don't want it to happen to me."
Common criminals have been quick to take advantage of the anarchy to rape and pillage. No one can ever be sure whether envy, a recent snub or an old property dispute lies behind the killings. "We've got to the point where people are assassinated for the sake of assassination, because they're easy victims," says Zohra Flici, President of the government backed Association of Families Victimised by Terrorism, whose own husband, a doctor, was murdered in 1993. "Some women are killed because they are related to members of the security forces, some because they refuse pleasure marriages, and some because they are journalists, teachers or students."
The sad distinction of being the first woman "martyr" of Algeria's terrible war fell to 20 year old Karima Belhadj. Unknown outside her native country, her pretty face and long hair are now a familiar image throughout Algeria, printed as they are on posters which are carried in protest marches against the war.
Until her death in 1993, she lived in Les Eucalyptus, a dusty, sinister slum on the eastern outskirts of Algiers. As a secretary at the Police Welfare and Sports Association, she was among the 8 per cent of Algerian women to hold a paid job. With a salary of £150 a month, she supported her parents, three brothers and two sisters.
Karima had wanted to continue her studies, but had been obliged to find a job when her father lost his with a water bottling company and her brothers were unable to find work. She had fallen in love with the bus driver who used to take her to college, and they were engaged. Every night when she came home from work, she would embroider clothes for her wedding trousseau. "She loved life," says Karima's mother, Hassina. "She liked to sew and cook. She liked hairdressing for her friends and her sisters. We told each other everything. She was my best friend."
ON April 6th, 1993, Hassina was making preparations for Karima's wedding when she heard shots. Her son Rida ran out into the street. "Karima was lying on the ground," he explains. "Her eyes were open and there was a big hole between her eyes, and blood flowing out of her head. I see that image of her all the time, and I ask myself "Why? Why? Why?" For just £12, the boy across the street had pointed Karima out to the gunmen as she got off the evening bus.
A Koran lies under the TV set in her family's home, and a picture of Mecca hangs on the wall above the sofa. But the Belhadj family's version of Islam is unacceptable to fundamentalists, who want the Koran to rule every aspect of life. "For them, it's inconceivable that a girl goes to college or works," says journalist Mouloud Benmohamed. "They started attacking women because they're a symbol. Women are the back bone of the family in Algeria; if you terrorise women, you terrorise the whole society."
The seeds of Islamist oppression of women were sown by Algeria's post independence rulers. Women fought alongside men in the 1954-1962 war of liberation against France. But during three decades of eastern bloc style socialist government, they were given only a few token cabinet positions. Algeria's 1984 Family Code is considered one of the most backward in the Arab world, for it makes women lifelong wards of their fathers, brothers and husbands.
FUNDAMENTALIST scorn for women's rights is bound up with their hatred of the West, but it is also rooted in an Algerian tradition of misogyny. "No society that ever know prosperity," is a common adage in Algeria. When Sheikh Ali Belhadj, an imprisoned Islamic leader, said he would abolish unemployment by forcing women to stay at home, he was applauded. Yet the Algerian government itself is accused of abusing women in this war. Torture is routine in Algerian prisons.
A young man, who gives his name only as Mohamed, was accused of making inflammatory sermons against the government. The 19 year old, bearing visible marks of torture on his legs a few days after his release from Algiers's Serkadji Prison, provided shocking evidence of what can happen to a woman in police custody. Under interrogation at the Chateauneuf police station, he caught sight of the mother of a man he knew. "They tortured and raped her in front of her son," says Mohamed. "I saw her when she came out. She was naked and covered in blood. We heard other women screaming, but we didn't know where they were."
Only days before they murdered 14 year old Fatima Ghodbane, the GIA threatened to kill the wives of policemen, gendarmes and soldiers unless the government agreed to free all the Islamist women it held. Both the government and exiled Algerian fundamentalists have included women victims in the horrific photograph albums they publish of each others' atrocities.
Little wonder then that Algerian women are increasingly resentful of men. "The girls end up hating anything that has to do with men or religion," says 55 year old Ourida, an Algerian schoolmistress. Divorcee Nawel is more blunt. "I wept for joy when my daughter was born," she said. "If it had been a boy, I'd have thrown him away because he would have grown up to be like all Algerian men.
Women have most to lose from the GIA's campaign against education. Although Algerian schools are mixed, the GIA has insisted that girls and boys be separated, and that music and gym classes for girls be shut down. In the countryside, where government control is tenuous, most schools have dropped French classes and sports for girls, in an attempt to placate the militants.
Schoolmistress Ourida works in one of the more prosperous quarters of Algiers, but fundamentalists who pray at the mosque across the street keep a close eye on her school. "It's a sneaky, subtle pressure," she says. "We find tracts glued to the walls. Since 1993 we've stopped singing, dancing and sports. We still raise the flag at the beginning of the week, but I tell the children to sing the national anthem very softly."
Ourida has sent her own two adult children abroad. She no longer travels within Algeria and car bombs have made her afraid to go shopping. "Algeria is one big prison," she says. Even teaching, her lifelong passion, gives her little satisfaction.
"Children aren't the same any more. They're sad. I think often of Fatima, whose throat was slashed in front of her school last year. I think of the car bomb off the Place du Premier Mai; they set it off just as the kids were coming out of school. After the explosion, they found little hands stuck on the walls, heads without bodies. I think of the girls who have been raped some of them have committed suicide. These are the things that have marked us. We all feel raped in our souls, if not in our bodies.
