FRANCE: Sheikh Abassi Madani and Sheikh Ali Belhadj, the founders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), were freed yesterday, three days before the anniversary of Algeria's independence and 10 months before presidential elections, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Both men have been imprisoned for the past 12 years.
The liberation of Mr Belhadj, in particular, introduces great uncertainty to Algerian politics. It could bring about a revival of radical Islam, or confirm its decline.
FIS victories in municipal and legislative elections in 1991 precipitated the military coup of January 1992 and civil strife that has claimed 150,000 lives. For supporters of the regime, Madani and Belhadj were "terrorists" who would have transformed Algeria into a medieval theocracy. The sheikhs' followers claim the annulment of the country's first democratic elections and repression by security forces were the root cause of the bloodshed.
At 72, Sheikh Abassi, the titular head of the FIS, is reportedly tired and embittered. He spent the 1954-1962 war of independence in a French prison, after attacking a radio station. A poor orator but a shrewd politician, he earned a doctorate in child psychology in Britain.
Considered more moderate than Mr Belhadj, Mr Madani was freed in 1997 but placed under house arrest the following month for appealing to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, to intervene in the Algerian conflict.
Mr Arezki Ait-Larbi, a correspondent for Le Figaro in Algiers, says Mr Belhadj's tongue "is feared like a weapon of mass destruction." The 47-year-old cleric is often compared to the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, or the puritanical Florentine monk Savonarola.
In 1979 Mr Belhadj became friends with Mustapha Bouiali, the leader of the first armed Islamist group in Algeria, who was gunned down by security forces. Mr Belhadj was imprisoned from 1983 until 1987 for supporting Bouiali's group. He led the 1988 food riots, and co-founded the FIS with Sheikh Abassi when political parties were legalised the following year.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Mr Belhadj, dressed in combat fatigues, demanded that the government set up training camps for Algerian volunteers to defend Iraq.
Mr Madani reportedly signed a court order banning him from preaching or holding meetings when he was released from house arrest in the Belcourt district of Algiers yesterday. But Mr Belhadj refused to sign the document when he was let out of Blida military prison, 60km south of Algiers, at 8 a.m.
"The big question is whether Ali Belhadj will resume his inflammatory sermons," said Prof Benjamin Stora, the leading French expert on Algeria. "I tend to think he will, because in 12 years he never once made amends, backed down or renounced his convictions. He has a fighting spirit, and remains determined."
Last Friday young men with shaved heads and beards, wearing long kamis robes, haunted the streets around the Sunna mosque in Bab el-Oued, where thousands once gathered to hear Mr Belhadj preach. His assertion that "democracy is kofr (heretical)" is known to all Algerians.
In 1992 prison guards dragged Mr Belhadj out of his trial to stop his tirade against "the regime of infidel generals".
Mr Belhadj has said the acceptance of French nationality by Algerian emigrants is sinful and excludes them from Islam, and that djihad is the only possible relationship between Muslims and Jews.
He wanted women to stay at home, a belief he applied to his own wife and the mother of his six children. She has seen him only twice in the past decade. Mr Belhadj did not want her to visit him in prison because there were too many armed male guards present. He spent part of his captivity in the southern desert in Tamanrasset, and his family had no news of him between 1995 and 1999.
After visiting his family in the Kouba district and calling on Mr Madani, Mr Belhadj went to the Algerian television station where he was arrested 12 years ago. It seemed his way of signifying that despite 150,000 dead and setbacks suffered by radical Islam around the world, he was picking up where he left off.
In some ways, Mr Belhadj is right in believing that Algeria has not changed. The country still suffers from the poverty, injustice and corruption that nearly brought the FIS to power. Massacres in which hundreds of villagers were slaughtered at a time peaked in 1997 and early 1998, but an estimated 30 Algerians are still murdered every week.
Prof Stora believes society has changed profoundly in the intervening period, largely out of disgust and weariness at the blood-letting. The vocal plea for visas during President Jacques Chirac's state visit in March was a sign.
"Most Algerian young people are more interested in exile than in Islamic revolution now," he says. "In 1991 there was a hope that society could be changed through Islam. That feeling's not there any more." Yet Islam - along with nationalism - remains a powerful force in the country of 32 million.
After banning the FIS, the government attempted to satisfy religious yearnings by promoting the "tame" Islamist Movement for a Peaceful Society, led by Sheikh Mahfoud Nahnah. His death two weeks ago from cancer was interpreted by some Algerians as proof that Allah prefers Mr Belhadj.
And many Algerians have seen God's hand in a spate of recent calamities: floods, the earthquake last month, and now bubonic plague in western Algeria. Mr Belhadj may know how to exploit the heightened religiosity that comes with misfortune.