Gender and Diversity in the Middle East and North Africa

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Gender and Violence in Algeria:
Women’s Resistance against the
Islamist Femicide
ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
ABSTRACT In 1984 the Algerian government passed into law the Family Code, which
Algerian women have perceived as a major act of state violence against them because
it codifies their subjugation and renders them more vulnerable in the face of growing
conservatism and gender segregation in both the private and public spheres. Women
found themselves stranded between a patriarchal society generally hostile to women
and a set of laws that institutionalized discrimination against them.
The discriminatory provisions of the Family Code are symptomatic of the growing
misogyny in Algerian society and have facilitated violence against women, legitimized
discrimination in practice and made it particularly difficult for women to deal with
the consequences of widespread human rights abuses brought about by Islamic
terrorism, which have amounted to femicide, the most extreme form of sexist terrorism.
Throughout the 1990s Algerian women led a dual struggle: while the urgency of
the situation engaged them to resist the Islamist femicide whose main aim was to
preserve male supremacy under the cover of Islamic legitimacy, this did not detract
the women’s groups from their primary battle to have the Family Code repealed.
This violent decade was a formative period for women who intensified their actions
to raise awareness and build strong solidarity networks among women both nationally
and internationally.
This chapter argues that Islamist violence in Algeria reached the level of femicide,
as it targeted women’s bodies as a battlefield and executed women with unprecedented
violence not even seen during the Algerian war of independence. The terrorists’
conduct displayed the depths of inherent misogyny which validates the term femicide
as opposed to murder. Jane Caputi and Diana H.E. Russell argue that ‘Calling
misogynist killings femicide removes the obscuring veil of non gendered terms such
as homicide and murder’.1 In the case of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA),
honour killings and Islamist violence against women which results in murder are
the most frequent forms of femicide.2
1 M. Lazreg, ‘Gender and Politics in Algeria: Unravelling the Religious Paradigm’, Signs 15 (4) (Summer 1990), pp.
775–780, at p. 777.
2 Femicide is defined as the killing of women because they are women. Feminist sociologists differentiate between the
intentional killing of males (homicides) and the intentional killings of females (femicides). Gupta elucidates, ‘Femicide
is the killing of women … because they are strong and practicing their freedom of choice, because they are entering
male-dominated fields, because they are intelligent and choosing to live their lives without depending on men for
survival’. Balbul Gupta, ‘Femicide from a Feminist Perspective’, GW Feminist Review 9(10) (1999), pp. 9-10.
For more definitions of femicide, see Jane Caputi and Diana E.H. Russell (eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman-
Killing (NewYork: Twayne, 1992). Available at http://www.pinn.net/sunshire/book-sum/femicide.html (accessed 3.9.2009).

ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
While this chapter strives to understand the causes and roots of Islamist femicide
and the reasons why women are at the centre of the Algerian Islamist venture, it also
looks at the ways in which organized and spontaneous resistance by women worked
together for the same cause, and analyses the conditions which favoured the coming
of age of the Algerian feminist movement and the new prospects for Algerian women
in the post-terrorism era.
By exposing Islamist violence against women as femicide, this chapter hopes to
change existing perceptions of violence against women and alter the way in which
public opinion in both MENA and beyond responds to acts of femicide.
Introduction
In Algeria’s modern history the 1980s was the decade which witnessed the birth of
the movements for democratic liberties. Actors within civil society3 took over the
street4 and expressed various demands which in essence were fuelled by a deep
identity crisis. This crisis was mostly stimulated by an economic malaise resulting
from the failure of President Boumedienne’s socialist programme, embodied in the
‘industrializing industries’ and agrarian reforms. The falling oil revenues, especially
after 1985, the expansion of a newly urbanized population, the rising unemployment
figures coupled with the housing crisis were all elements that contributed to social
dissatisfaction and unrest.5
Nevertheless, such expressions of discontent would not have been possible under
the rule of President Boumedienne. With President Chadli Benjedid’s accession to
power in 1979, the political atmosphere became relatively relaxed and people’s
movements became less controlled.
On the intellectual level various factions were also growing and making diverse
demands on a weakening state. What had started in the 1970s as a conflict between
the Arabophones and the Francophones as they competed for power6 was joined by
3 In this research we adopt the London School of Economics, Centre for Civil Society’s definition of civil society,
‘Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In
theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries
between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly
embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and
power. Civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development non-governmental
organizations, community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade
unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups.’ For more details
see http//:www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS (accessed 3.9.2009).
4 On 20 April 1980, Tizi-Ouzou had seen three days of rioting. The insurgents demanded the recognition of the
Berber/Amazigh language and culture. From 1980 the Berbers annually celebrated the Berber Spring to commemorate
the Black Spring and reiterate their demands.
On 28 October 1981, a ‘Hundred Angry Women’ demonstrated in the streets of Algiers expressing their anger at
the government’s decision to debate the Family Code in secret.
On 16 November 1981 500 women gathered in front of the National Assembly as it met for a plenary session.
Women have not stopped demonstrating against the Family Code, which was instituted in June 1984.
5 For more details see Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830–2000: A Short History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2000).
6 For more details on the language issue see Abdelrrezak Dourari, Les malaises de la societé algérienne: crise de
langue et crise d’identité (Alger: Casbah Editions, 2003); Zahia Smail Salhi, ‘Between the Languages of Silence
and the Woman’s Word: Gender and Language in the Work of Assia Djebar’, International Journal of the Sociology
of Language, Special Issue on ‘Language and Gender in the Mediterranean Region’, 190 (2008), pp. 79–101.
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
other tendencies which were becoming rife and at the same time hostile to each
other. These main tendencies were known as the Amazigh/Berber movement and
the Islamist movement. While the first claimed Tamazight/Berber as the language
and identity of at least 30 per cent of the Algerian population, the second was directly
linked to the Arabophone faction in power and claimed Islam as the religion of the
state and Arabic as its sole national language.
Islamism as a political current in the Algerian context goes back to the colonial
period when the Association of the Muslim Ulema formed around Abdulhamid Ben
Badis in the 1930s and then merged with the National Liberation Front in the 1950s.
In the two decades following independence, the Muslim and Arab aspects of the
new nation stood on a parallel line along that of the secular and leftist tendencies in
power resulting in the nation being torn between two opposing forces: one Islamic/
conservative and the other secular/modernist.
As such, the Islamists saw themselves as the main political and ideological
opposition to the ruling elite and excluded all other tendencies that might contribute
with a third political voice. In this case the Berber Cultural Movement (MCB)
constituted the new voice. It was opposed by both the state and the Islamists, mainly
because the Berbers were calling for the safeguarding of the Berber language and
culture and for freedom of thought and speech, which directly opposed the Islamists’
wholesale Arabization and Islamization project.
The first violent manifestations of the conflict between the MCB and the Islamists
started at the Ben Aknoun University campus in Algiers, where on 2 November
1982 a Berber student, Kamal Amzal, was assassinated by the Islamists, known then
as the Islamic Brotherhood (les frères musulmans), while he was putting up a poster
to call for a general meeting to elect an independent and representative student
committee. While Kamal and his group wanted to create a functioning democracy at
the level of the university campus, the Islamists wanted to control the campus and
leave no space for free expression.
The Algerian regime violently repressed the MCB in April 1980, a date that was
from then on dubbed the ‘Black Spring’ (Le Printemps noir), and accused its
proponents of being separatists and pawns in the hands of the ex-colonialists who
were using them to destabilize the Algerian state.7
To control the MCB, the Algerian regime supported and encouraged the Islamist
clergy. Lazreg explains, ‘the Algerian government’s flight into Islam can only be
explained as an attempt to retain its power in the face of a dysfunctional economic
program and mounting political opposition’.8
In fact, President Chadli’s government used Islam as a rampart against civil society.
In return, it had to compromise with the clergy on many vital issues. The question of
language aside, the other vital area where the Islamists pressed for radical change
was the Personal Status Law, with demands that targeted women’s civil rights,
condemning them to the status of minors for life. The Islamic conservatives endlessly
argued that educated women were easy targets for Western imperialism and that
their conduct was reminiscent of French colonialism.
7 For more details on the MCB and the regime’s oppression of the April 1980 demonstrations see Hocine Benhamza,
L’Algérie Assassinée (Alger: Editions INES, 2008).
8 Lazreg, ‘Gender and Politics in Algeria’, p. 777.
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What is interesting at this juncture is how the MCB and the nascent women’s
movement were both accused of conspiring with the West, which in view of Algeria’s
colonial past signified treason against the principles of the national revolution and
therefore lack of legitimacy for their movements, while on the opposite side of the
spectrum stood the Islamist movement, enjoying wider legitimacy directly derived
from Islam as the religion of the nation, which had helped it resist colonialism and
safeguard its identity. For this reason alone, Islamists felt empowered to stand in the
way of everything that opposed the way of Islam and claimed the right of using all
means, including violence, to protect Algeria’s Islamic identity.
The assassination of Kamal Amzal in 1982 and the various verbal and physical
attacks throughout the 1970s and 1980s on women whose conduct was deemed too
westernized and therefore non-Islamic are but a few examples of such violence.
It is the aim of this chapter to investigate and analyse the roots, reasons, and
forms of Islamists’ violence against women in the context of Algeria, and to scrutinize
women’s reactions to violence and the various resistance strategies they have adopted
in the face of this violence.
Violence against Women
Violence is often defined as an assault on a person’s physical and mental integrity. It
is an underlying feature of all societies, and an undercurrent running through social
interaction at many different levels. The World Health Organization defines violence
as the ‘intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself,
another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high
likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, mal-development or
deprivation’.9
Violence against women reflects culturally defined notions of masculinity and
femininity which serve to reinforce women’s subordinate position. It is in most
cases, though not always, perpetuated by men against women and it embodies the
power imbalances inherent in patriarchal societies. It may take an endless spectrum
of forms, such as
rape, including marital rape and rape as a tool of repression against particular classes or
groups, domestic violence, child abuse, female foeticide and infanticide, denial of health
care and nutrition for girl children, sexual and emotional harassment, genital mutilation,
prostitution, pornography, population control, enforced sterilisation, war and state violence,
exploitation of refugees, political violence, including that directed at the families of political
targets, reduction in state services leading to increased stress and workload for women.10
Though not all of these manifestations of violence necessarily exist in the same way
across the Middle East and North Africa, two levels at which violence may strike
women’s lives across the region can be identified as follows: private (personal)
violence and public violence. The forms that these two types of violence may take
9 World Health Organization, World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva: 2002), p. 38.
10 Judy El-Bushra and Eugenia Piza Lopez, ‘Gender-related Violence: Its Scope and Relevance’, Gender &
Development 1(2) (1993), pp. 1–9. Online publication 1.6.1993, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp (accessed
7.6.2009).
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
also differ from one region to another according to cultural norms and religious
beliefs. To these two main factors one can add economic and political factors which
may exacerbate (or alleviate) the intensity and degree of violence.
Private Violence
Private violence occurs in the private sphere and may be physical and/or mental. It
takes various forms including marital rape, wife-battering, female genital mutilation,
honour killing, perpetration of violence by female adult victims towards children
such as in the case of battered mothers, forced marriages, discrimination against
girls in terms of access to health and education, segregation between males and
females in food and clothing, and exclusion of female household members from
participation in decision-making.
The materialization of these types of discrimination in the private sphere cultivates
an environment in which physical and mental abuse of women is seen as an acceptable
practice. Female children are not only brought up into an acceptance of gender
violence and segregation but also conditioned to accept their lot as part of being
female. They are taught from a young age that their behaviour and dress code may
provoke violence from men and that they should follow certain social norms. Male
children on their part are taught from a very early age that they should be in charge
of women (not only their sisters, female cousins, and in some cases neighbours but
also their elder female relatives) and that they should correct their conduct if they
transgress the prevailing social norm. In Muslim societies this tendency is accentuated
by the religious command that a good Muslim should change what they see as
wrongdoing, and it so happens that this is mostly applied in the case of women.
Consequently, while such codes boost male self-esteem and self-confidence from
an early age, they totally undermine women’s self-esteem and condition them to a
state of subordination and total dependence on male relatives in terms of decision-
making. It is often found that women are unable to take charge of their lives and
have to depend constantly on male relatives. This is especially the case for widows
and divorcees who in Muslim societies are compelled to return to their family homes
or have a male tutor (usually a father or brother) to take care of them and act as tutor
to their children.
In the case of Algeria, as is also the case across the Middle East and North Africa,
private violence is not considered a major concern despite its increasing levels and
direct links with public violence. State institutions across the region do not take
such violence seriously, and legislation to protect victims of violence is almost non-
existent. This general state of indifference to such violence arises from both religious
and cultural beliefs. Wife battering, for example, is justified as a corrective measure
towards disobedient wives, as prescribed in the Qur’an (IV, 34). Furthermore,
speaking about wife battering is silenced by the whole society, including the victim,
her family, the police, the health professionals, and so on, as a matter of family
honour.11 Dalila Djerbal-Iamarene argues that violence rests upon its toleration within
11 For more details on domestic violence see M.M. Haj Yahia, ‘Wife-abuse and Battering in the Socio-cultural
Context of Arab Society’, Family Process 39(2) (2000), pp. 237–255.
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the family, where until recently it has been seen as a trivial topic which no one has
thought to raise as a true problem.12 Indeed, while domestic violence is largely
discussed in the West and adequate policies are formulated to deal with it, in the
Middle East and North Africa this type of violence is not yet considered a key
concern despite its increasing occurrences and its grave consequences.13
Public Violence
As opposed to private violence, public violence occurs outside the home, in the
public sphere. It may take place in the street or at work in the form of sexual
harassment, verbal abuse, and in some cases physical abuse.
Public violence can also take the form of discrimination in employment
opportunities, and the absence of adequate legislation to protect women from abuse
and discrimination and guarantee equal opportunities for both men and women. In
this area, the role of government bodies is crucial to ensure citizens’ safety and well-
being. At the same time, local culture may prevent women from reporting violence
and encourage the perpetrators to wield more pressure on their victims. El-Bushra
and Piza Lopez demonstrate that,
Every government or authority structure has the power to introduce and uphold measures
which guarantee women’s rights in a wide range of areas, including rights to land and
other property, inheritance, employment and access to services, family law, and so on.
Such measures are not only positive in themselves but also foster positive public perceptions
of women’s rights and dignity.14
In most Middle Eastern and North African countries, which are known to be largely
patriarchal, women often find themselves underrepresented in the public sphere which
is mostly designated as the male space where male members of society aim to preserve
their supremacy. In this domain women have to keep a low profile and only make
timid appearances. From personal observations, I have found that a common aspect
of such societies is male domination of the street and intense harassment of women,
who become subjects of insult and verbal abuse in the public sphere. Another common
feature, however, is women’s passive reaction to such abuse: on the one hand they
refrain from engaging in losing battles and on the other they fear violent reprisals
which will ultimately tarnish personal reputation and family honour.
I contend that private violence against women has direct implications for public
violence in that such patterns of violence are cultivated in the private sphere and are
directly transposed into the public sphere. Furthermore, consciously or not the goal
of violence against women is to preserve male supremacy in both spheres, and the
tolerance of violence in the private sphere is ultimately reflected in the tolerance of
violence in the public sphere. This is symptomatic of a misogynistic culture which
12 Dalila Djerbal-Iamarene, ‘Violence familiale, violence sociale, violence politique’, in Hourriya/Liberté (ed.)
Droits de l’homme et violences au Maghreb et en Europe (Paris: Hourriya, 2005), available from 1997 at http://
www.maghreb-ddh.sgdg.org/liberte (accessed 25.8.2009).
13 S. Douki, et al., ‘Violence against Women in Arab and Islamic Countries’, Archives of Women’s Mental Health 6
(2003), pp. 165–171. Published online 17.4.2003 at http://www.springerlink.com/content (accessed 20.8.2009).
14 El-Bushra and Piza Lopez, ‘Gender-related Violence’.
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in some societies motivates extreme violence amounting to femicide. Such extreme
violence includes mutilation murder, rape murder, battery that escalates into murder,
the immolation of witches in Western Europe and of brides and widows in India,
and crimes of honour in some Latin and Middle Eastern countries, where women
believed to have lost their virginity are killed by their male relatives.15
Jane Caputi and Diana H.E. Russell argue, ‘Calling misogynist killings femicide
removes the obscuring veil of non gendered terms such as homicide and murder’,16
and in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, honour killings and Islamist
violence against women are the most frequent forms of femicide.
Violence against Women in Algeria
In Algeria, women are stranded between a patriarchal society hostile to women’s
presence in the public sphere and a set of laws in the form of the 1984 ‘Family
Code’ which institutionalizes discrimination against women and therefore constitutes
a form of public violence against them. The discriminatory provisions of the Family
Code have facilitated violence against women, legitimized discrimination in practice,
and made it particularly difficult for women to deal with the consequences of
widespread human rights abuses.17
In a briefing to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW), Amnesty International stated that Algerian women ‘have little
prospect of obtaining justice and redress for abuses they have suffered and that
current laws and practice continue to discriminate against women and facilitate
violence against them’,18 both in the private and the public spheres.
It has always been the case in Algerian society that male and female spaces are
strictly designated in the public sphere; women are not welcome in male souks,
cafes, beaches, and leisure places in general. Those who enter such places expose
themselves to open harassment and are classified as having low morals.
With the rise of Islamism in Algerian society, harassment in the public sphere
often amounted to extreme physical violence. Such violence is often justified by the
Islamists’ ‘re-Islamization from below’ project, which justifies as religious duty all
actions they take to correct whatever they see as wrongdoing (layajouz).
As early as the late 1970s women became a clear target for the Islamic
fundamentalists, whose aim was to bully them out of the public sphere through
intense harassment, verbal abuse, and segregation in the work place. This quickly
escalated into physical attacks in the street against women who were dressed
‘indecently’, throwing acid on their bodies and attacking them with knives.
In the face of these brutal attacks, which often disfigured the victims, the
government offered no rejoinder. It is often reported that when women complained
15 For more details see Caputi and Russell, Femicide.
16 Ibid.
17 ‘Algeria: Women Left Unprotected from Violence and Discrimination’, Amnesty International Press release, 10
January 2005. Available at http://news.amnesty.org/mavp/news.nsf/print (accessed 21.12.2005).
18 Ibid.
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to the police about their assailants they were told that they had brought it upon
themselves by their immoral conduct. It was in fact this silence and sometimes the
complicity of the neo-conservative state that encouraged the fundamentalists’ attacks
on women. The way a given society chooses to control the violence inherent in it
reflects the value it places on mutual respect and tolerance of difference, and on
human rights, democracy, and good governance.
The institution of the 1984 Family Code is in itself symptomatic of the Algerian
government’s lack of respect for women and its arbitrary neglect of women’s basic
human rights. This move is also symptomatic of the government’s lack of regard for
individual liberties as it paid no heed to the numerous demonstrations led by women
in 1981 and 1982 to demand the elimination of the project of the family code. The
Algerian government co-opted the ‘conservatives, and later, Muslim fundamentalists,
to safeguard their interests and stay in power. Various governments have many times
made compromises and sacrificed women’s rights and safety to keep peace with the
fundamentalists’.19 While the Berber demonstrations of 20 April1980 were crushed
by the military, the women’s movement was crushed with institutional violence in
the form of the Family Code.
The Main Provisions of the 1984 Family Code20
The 1984 Family Code reproduced provisions of Islamic Shari‘a law that embodied
the aspirations of the neo-conservative faction in society, which from the early years
of independence had stood against all government initiatives to emancipate women
and saw women’s primary role as homemakers and men’s role as breadwinners.21
Under this code women have no right to marry but can only be given in marriage
by a matrimonial guardian (article 11). Women cannot divorce their husbands and
can only obtain divorce by submitting to the Khol‘a practice, which stipulates that
they should give up their legal rights or claims to alimony. It has to be highlighted
that in the case of Algeria, women are asked to pay their husbands or give up their
financial share in any goods the couple owned in order to obtain a divorce. Divorce
is unilateral with no duty to pay maintenance or provide housing (article 54), and
men are permitted to take up to four wives (article 8).
The primary role of women, according to the Family Code is that of procreators,
making it their legal duty to breastfeed their children and care for them until adulthood
(article 48).
It is prescribed that women must obey their husbands, respect them, and consult
them in every matter concerning them. They should ask for permission to go out and
can only take employment if their husband grants them authorization. Women must
also respect and look after as well as obey their in-laws (article 39).
19 L. Ait Hammou, ‘Women’s Struggle against Muslim Fundamentalism in Algeria: Strategies or a Lesson for Survival?’,
in Ayesha Imam et al. (eds.) Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms (London: WLUML, 2004), pp. 117–124, at p. 118.
20 République Algérienne Démocratique et Populaire, Ministère de la Justice, Le Code de la famille, (Alger: OPU,
1993). For online version see
http://www.20ansbarakat.free.fr/codedelafamille.html (accessed 8.12.2004).
21 For more details on the institution of the Family Code and Algerian women’s reaction to it see Zahia Smail Salhi,
‘Algerian Women, Citizenship, and the “Family Code”’, Gender & Development 11(3) (November 2003), pp. 27–
35.
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
Women are given custody of their children; boys till the age of 10 and girls till
marriage. In case a divorcee does not have a male guardian to look after her, the ex-
husband will only support her if his means allow it. Furthermore, a divorcee is not
permitted to take her children abroad or allow them to be involved in certain school
activities without the father’s signature of consent (article 52).
The 1984 Family Code codifies women’s status as minors under the law, strips
them of their citizenship rights, and makes them more vulnerable in a society that
already favours its male members. From childhood girls are treated differently from
boys and are exposed to various forms of segregation, as explained above.
In fact, the Family Code is only an expression of what is well embedded in Algerian
society, despite the promises of the newly independent state under the late President
Houari Boumedienne that women should be part of the development project of the
state and that they should be rewarded for their active participation in the liberation
process of their country from French occupation. As such, the institution of the
Family Code is a clear betrayal of women and the principles of the Algerian revolution
which rallied to its ranks both men and women to liberate the nation.
While the institution of the Family Code seemed to have satisfied the clergy and
the neo-conservative members of Chadli’s government, the Muslim Brothers were
less than satisfied; in their view the code was not Islamic enough and they called for
a total implementation of the Shari‘a, and the institution of an Islamic State in Algeria.
The October 1988 Events and their Impact on Women
The social strife that had marked the 1980s culminated in the October 1988 riots.
Many regions in the country joined the demonstrations and in some regions the
movement was seen as a continuation of the Berber uprising of 1980, which is now
seen as not only a cultural movement but also a civil society uprising against social
injustice and government corruption.
Generally viewed as a result of a deepening economic crisis exacerbated by the
severe drop in oil revenues, which resulted in rising unemployment rates together
with shortages of water and housing, and soaring prices of basic consumer goods,
this movement is in essence an uprising of civil society demanding social justice in
the face of growing corruption.
On the 5 October 1988 the waves of discontent expressed initially through a
series of strikes and peaceful marches quickly degenerated into wide scale riots.
Alarmed by the intensity of the destruction caused by youths who attacked
government buildings, the military resorted to violent repression, causing the death
and injury of several demonstrators and the arrest and torture of many others, which
ultimately led to more anger and resentment.
The Muslim Brothers capitalized on this popular anger and exploited it politically
through a populist discourse which swiftly recruited many angry youths. At the
same time, many other groups joined the protest and took the opportunity to voice
their concerns and call for radical change and the toppling of Chadli’s government.
Algerian journalists, who for many years have suffered from state censorship and
absence of freedom of expression, published a declaration in which they denounced
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the ban on reporting and condemned the restrictions that were imposed on freedom
of speech. They also denounced the violence, torture, and arbitrary arrests used by
the state to try to curb the uprising.
The women’s groups, who throughout the 1980s had incessantly expressed their
anger at the institution of the Family Code, also joined the demonstrations and voiced
their full support for the youth movement and called for the recognition of democratic
liberties.
In short, the whole society joined together and more than ever before the political
system came under sustained attack.
In order to save his government President Chadli Bendjedid gave promises of
economic reform and political liberalization. These political reforms brought an
end to the one party rule and brought to the fore a new model of societal/political
organization based on citizenship rights in lieu of an abstract notion of development.
It seemed that the establishment of political pluralism served as an alternative to
addressing social and economic needs. It is true that since independence Algerian
people had yearned for both economic development and political openness, while
the ruling FLN preferred to suppress all forms of difference and repressed any kind
of political opposition. Lazreg explains, ‘The “discovery” of citizenship is a powerful
tool of protest in the hands of political opposition groups and social groups such as
women, traditionally excluded from the full enjoyment of their political rights. It
opens up a new era of inquiry into the many dimensions of citizenship and their
culturally specific expressions as well.’22
The situation of women in this new political climate is indeed most intriguing as
while they remain minors under the dictates of the Family Code, which denies them
their civil rights, they can now enjoy political citizenship and form their own
associations through which they can make claims for equality before the law.
The institution of the Family Code in 1984 was a strong wake-up call for Algerian
women and a re-launch of the Algerian feminist movement which started in the
1940s as the Algerian Women’s Union (UFA: Union des Femmes Algériennes). The
Union which was mainly affiliated to the Nationalist political parties joined the
National Liberation Front (FLN) and the armed struggle (ALN) from 1954 to 1962.
In the post-independence period it was made into a state-controlled organization,
namely the UNFA (Union Nationale des Femmes Algériennes: National Union of
Algerian Women). The UNFA was stripped of its militant platform and turned into
a conformist organization which was ultimately deserted by feminist women.23
Women war veterans and a new generation of women who opposed the UNFA in
their struggle to stop and eventually repeal the Family Code merged together and
solidified their ranks in a new feminist movement whose political platform is the
abolishing of the Family Code.
Immediately after the launch of the political reforms which followed the 1988
riots, three women’s associations were created and were granted permission to operate
22 Marnia Lazreg, ‘Citizenship and Gender in Algeria’, in Suad Joseph (ed.), Gender and Citizenship in the Middle
East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 58–69, at p. 58.
23 For a more detailed study of the Algerian feminist movement see Zahia Smail Salhi, ‘The Algerian Feminist
Movement between Nationalism, Patriarchy and Islamism’, Women’s Studies International Forum 32(6) (2009).
Online publication complete: 28-NOV-2009 DOI information: 10.1016/j.wsif.2009.11.001
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
as of summer 1989. These are the Association for the Emancipation of Women, the
Association for Equality before the Law between Women and Men, and the
Association for the Defence and Promotion of Women’s Rights.
Nevertheless, despite the genuine will and determination of the women’s groups
to exercise full political citizenship, the disjuncture between political and civil
citizenship has hampered Algerian women from enjoying full participation in public
life and from achieving autonomy in the conduct of their private lives. What
exacerbated this condition was the rise of the Islamic Brotherhood as a political
party, namely the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS: Front Islamique du Salut). Political
analysts described this move as ‘the government’s last-ditch effort to shield itself
from the political opposition it has allowed to surface’.24
Women’s associations and liberal political opposition parties (such as the FFS
and RCD)25 were alarmed and very worried by the Islamists’ non-democratic agenda
on the one hand and their populist discourse on the other; while the Islamist leaders
never supported democracy, but repeatedly asserted that once in power they would
fully implement Shari‘a law, their populist rhetoric recruited masses of frustrated
youths to whom they sold packs of dreams, and through the expression of their
outright hatred of the regime they have quickly managed to pose themselves as the
strongest alternative to the FLN. The danger of the domination of the public sphere
by the FIS proponents is the intimidation if not silencing of other political voices,
resulting in the democratic process being compromised. Michael Edwards explains,
In its role as the ‘public sphere’, civil society becomes the arena for argument and
deliberation as well as for association and institutional collaboration, and the extent to
which such spaces thrive is crucial to democracy, since if only certain truths are represented,
if alternative viewpoints are silenced by exclusion or suppression, or if one set of voices
are heard more loudly than those of others, the ‘public’ interest inevitably suffers.26
Substituting the voice of the FLN with that of the FIS would indeed jeopardize the
democratic process and kill the nascent democracy in its infancy. The undemocratic
claims of the FIS leaders and the attitude of the FIS supporters towards other civil
society members confirm this point.
Islamist Violence against Women in Algeria
This new political climate positioned women’s organizations and the members of
the FIS as clear opponents in a game in which the first group fought for their civil
rights while the second fought to suppress them.
The members of the FIS, who used the religious space of the mosque for
propagating their fundamentalist views, especially vis-à-vis women, whom they put
at the centre of their populist propaganda, rallied to their cause huge numbers of
unemployed youths whom they convinced that women should return to their homes
to fulfil their God-given roles as homemakers and leave their jobs to the unemployed
24 Lazreg, ‘Gender and Politics in Algeria’, p. 779.
25 RCD: Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Democracie, FFS: Front des Forces Socialistes.
26 M. Edwards, ‘Civil Society’, The Encyclopedia of Informal Education (2005). Available at www.infed.org/
association/civil_society.htm (accessed 5.8.2009).
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ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
males who needed them most. Over and over again Ali Benhadj, the second leader
of the FIS, portrayed women as needing male protection and reiterated that the
safest place for them was the home and that their prime duty was ‘to produce lions
to fight for the cause of Islam’.
This discourse resulted in making the public sphere even more hostile than it
already was to women, who are now designated as one of the wrongs of Algerian
society and who, if Islamic salvation is to prevail, should be ‘righted’ as a matter of
urgency. Islamist discourse repeated ad infinitum that society should be cleansed of
moral corruption, which is mostly personified in women, who are branded as ‘“the
avant-garde of colonialism and cultural aggression” and, because they opposed the
family code which legalised polygamy, they were dubbed, “the women who wanted
to marry four husbands”’.27
Alarmed by the Islamists’ populist discourse (such as in the above quotes), and
the danger they represented to the nascent democratic movement and to women’s
organizations, the Association for the Equality before the Law between Men and
Women called for a massive gathering to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8
March 1989. The members of the association emphasized their determination to
continue their struggle against gender segregation as exemplified in the Family Code,
which they described as an obstacle to justice, equality, and democracy, which they
highlighted as the main components of the full development of the Algerian woman
and of Algerian society as a whole.28 Women’s status as minors under the law prohibits
the society as a whole from progressing into a democratic society, and makes them
extremely vulnerable in face of the campaign of intimidation directed by the FIS
members against them.
As a response to this statement the leader of the FIS Abbassi Madani told Agence
France Presse, in an interview in 1989, that the recent anti-fundamentalist
demonstrations by women were ‘one of the greatest dangers threatening the destiny
of Algeria’. This was because the women participants were ‘defying the conscience
of the people and repudiating national values’.29 In no time at all the Islamists
dominated the public sphere, and because of the religious aspect of their party and
discourse, people did not have the audacity to stand against their intimidating moves,
not only against women, whom they openly ordered to adopt the Islamic veil, but
against society as a whole. Among their fundamentalist moves they removed satellite
dishes from people’s roofs and installed loud speakers which were connected to
audiotapes emanating from the mosques and through which they preached their
new way of life. Their discourse was loaded with threats and hatred directed at those
who did not follow their way. The loud speakers, which dominated cities such as the
capital, were backed up in Islamists’ shops with cassettes which played the Qur’an
instead of the usual music played in stores.
A whole new atmosphere dominated the public sphere, which was fully occupied
by bearded men wearing qami
-s and sirwa
-l (such as worn in Pakistan), while women
27 Karima Bennoune, ‘S.O.S. Algeria: Women’s Human Rights under Siege’, in Mahnaz Afkhami (ed.), Faith and
Freedom: Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 184–208, at
p. 197.
28 Feminist declaration on 8 March 1989 in Algiers, WAF Articles 1 (1989), p. 15.
29 Quoted in Bennoune, ‘S.O.S. Algeria’, pp. 197–198.
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
wore a plethora of new Islamic veils (hija
-b, niqa
-b, jilba
-b, chador…) which were all
alien to Algerian society.
The level of intimidation against those who did not follow their dress code reached
its peak at the point where they were feeling threatened in the streets, which were
‘decorated’ with graffiti, often in red, and subjected to shouted threats such as, ‘O
you woman who wears the jilba
-b may you be blessed by God, O you woman who
wears the hija
-b [long robe and headscarf] may God put you on the right path. O you
woman who expose yourself, the gun is for you.’30
Such intimidation resulted in many women wearing the veil out of fear and many
others carrying a headscarf in their handbags which they would wear in the street
and take off when reaching their destination. Bennoune quotes one such woman
who testified, ‘None of us want to wear the veil. But fear is stronger than our
convictions or our will to be free. Fear is all around us. Our parents, our brothers,
are unanimous: Wear the veil and stay alive.’31
In some municipalities the fundamentalists forced segregation between boys and
girls in schools, and deprived girls of physical education. They intimidated people
on beaches and at swimming pools and interfered with cultural life in general,
prohibiting wedding ceremonies and all forms of celebrations that used music. They
issued death threats against singers and performers, and cancelled all festivals. They
closed all cinemas and theatres and transformed them into party headquarters. In
1990–91 they imposed a six o’clock curfew on female university students living in
halls of residence. Saadi reports that anyone opposing this was ‘corrected’ with the
aid of a whip or bicycle chain.32
In brief, all manifestations of social life were banned and instead a deep feeling
of fear roamed the streets of the cities where the Islamists were dominant.
What started as verbal attacks, threats, and intimidations soon became transformed
into outbursts of extreme violence in 1992, soon after the government annulled the
December 1991 Parliamentary elections, in which the Islamists made major electoral
gains, and banned the FIS as a political party.
In February 1992 a state of emergency was declared and in March of the same
year the two main leaders of the FIS, Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, were arrested.
These moves by the government resulted in the Islamic Salvation Front as a political
party turning into several armed terrorist organizations, the most notorious of which
were the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé: Armed Islamic Group), the AIS (Armée
Islamique du Salut: Army of Islamic Salvation), and the MIA (Mouvement Islamique
Armé: Armed Islamic Movement). It has to be highlighted here that not all Islamist
parties were dissolved: other religious parties ‘were not banned by the various
Algerian regimes that succeeded after the departure of President Chadli Benjedid
and the onset of terrorism. On the contrary they were assimilated into the political
process, and provision was made for the expression of dissident views’, assert Roy
and Sfeir.33
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 187.
32 Noureddine Saadi, La femme et la loi en Algérie (Alger: Eds Bouchêne, 1991), p. 117.
33 Oliver Roy and Antoine Sfeir, The Columbia World Dictionary of Islamism, trans. John King (New York: University
of Columbia Press, 2007), p. 32.
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ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
The fear of civilians was intensified by the random killings of policemen,
journalists, intellectuals, and women. The armed groups issued death threats against
the intelligentsia, government security workers, and feminist activists. It became
very obvious to all that the terrorists harboured a worrying misogyny.
One of the first women to be gunned down was 21-year-old Karima Belhadj, who
worked as a clerk in the youth and sports department of the general office of national
security. She was shot in the head and abdomen on 7 April 1993. On 23 January 1994
Mrs Mimouna Derouche, a 28-year-old mother of five children, was decapitated in front
of her family. On 25 February 1994, two sisters aged 12 and 15 were kidnapped and
gang raped. On 3 March 1994 Samia Hadjou, an old woman aged 69, had her throat cut.
On 7 November 1994 two sisters named Saida and Zoulikha were gang raped, tortured
(their fingernails and toenails were pulled out), and their throats cut. Their bodies were
found on a roadside. Saida and Zoulikha received this punishment because they refused
to consent to temporary marriage with the terrorists.34 Unveiled women were now being
shot down in the streets; in March 1994 three unveiled high school students were shot
down,35 one of whom had been warned but refused to wear the veil.
Feminist activists were openly targeted. Their names were listed and pinned on
mosque doors and shouted over the loudspeakers. Khalida Messaoudi, whom the
fundamentalists sentenced to death in 1993, testifies, ‘Over the loudspeakers, whose
monotonous echoes penetrate into the very centre of the surrounding houses, imams
would hurl curses at me, describe me as “a woman of delinquent morals” and a
“danger to the morality of women,” and warn those women who might be tempted
to follow my example.’36 From this date onwards she lived in hiding, moving from
one place to another and disguising herself as she moved between places.
If Khalida survived the fundamentalists’ threats other feminists didn’t; on 15
February 1995 Nabila Djahnine, the president of the Berber women’s group, Thighri
N’ tmettouth (The Cry of Women), was gunned down in Tizi-Ouzou. In Sfizef (south
of Mascara) eleven women teachers were slaughtered in front of their pupils by an
armed group outside the Ain Adden school.37
It soon became evident that women were at the top of the terrorists’ agenda and
that their bodies were primarily targeted as symbols; the terrorists’ lists of women to
be killed were extensive and included women from all walks of life: women who
worked in government offices; women who owned shops such as hairdressers, beauty
salons, and Turkish baths; women teachers and university lecturers; women related
to government officers or security workers; feminist activists, women artists and
singers, schoolgirls, women who lived on their own,38 even husbands of important
women such as the husband of the government Minister Leïla Aslaoui39 were targeted.
34 Bennoune, ‘S.O.S. Algeria’, p. 186.
35 Salim Ghazi, ‘Deux Lycéenes assassinées’, El Watan, 31.3.1994, p. 1.
36 Khalida Messaoudi and Elisabeth Schemla, Unbowed: An Algerian Woman confronts Islamic Fundamentalism,
trans. Anne C. Vila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 87.
37 Amnesty International, ‘Algeria: Civilian Population caught in a Spiral of Violence’, Report MDE 28/23/97
(London, 1997) p. 18.
38 In the southern Algerian town of Ouargla, a group of fundamentalists set fire to the house of Saliha Dekkiche, a
divorced woman living alone with her children, resulting in her 3-year-old child burning to death.
39 In her book, Les Années rouges (Alger: Casbah Editions, 2000), Leïla Aslaoui testifies about the assassination of
her husband and the atrocities of Islamic terrorism in general.
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
After targeting individuals the terrorists soon moved to mass murders, bombings
of buses and public places, and the massacre and ransacking of remote villages.
When they attacked villages,40 whole populations were massacred. Daily
newspapers reported the kidnapping of young girls who were gang raped and turned
into sex slaves, those who disobeyed them or attempted to escape had their bodies
mutilated and abused, with their genitals often amputated. The hideous machine of
sexual torture reached unimaginable dimensions. It was reported in daily newspapers
that the terrorists used a technique they called Tafr ‘ to split women’s bodies into
two halves by attaching them to two vehicles which drove in opposite directions.
Ait Hamou describes the horror in the following terms, ‘Women were attacked in
their homes, brutally beaten, abducted, raped, taken as temporary wives of the
“emirs”, or as slaves. They were shot dead, torn apart when they were pregnant and
their foetuses smashed on the walls.’41 Abduction of women and rape became common
practice among armed groups. In 1998, Human Rights Watch reported that more
than 2,000 women were raped in five years of conflict,42 many of them were held by
armed Islamist militia, to be violated, beaten, and forced to perform domestic tasks
for the men.
When some of these women managed to escape, they were unable to secure any
support and were ‘therefore damaged by the initial rape, but also by the shame and
stigma which separates them from their families’.43
Such practices turned the terrorists’ war against women into a genuine femicide.
Women were truly petrified not of death but of torture and dishonour. Bennoune
reports that one woman told her, ‘I thought of buying poison so I can kill myself if
taken by them alive, so all they get is a corpse. I am losing my hair from nerves.’44
Practices which resembled madness and rage against women were reported on a
daily basis. Pondering on the Islamists’ femicide Khalida Messaoudi observes,
At the heart of their way of life, their mindset, their imprecations, and their savagery, I
perceived a constant obsession, of the kind that is symptomatic of madness: an obsession
with women. The truth is; no other theme looms as large as this one does in the ideology of
the FIS ... According to the fundamentalists, women are the root of all evil.45
Targeting women’s bodies and using them as battlefields makes it obvious that gender
is at the core of the issue of Islamic terrorism, and inflicting violence on their bodies
is a means of controlling women and terrorizing their community. As Aisha Lemsine
remarks, ‘The treatment of women raises serious questions about the level of faith
and Islamic behaviour on the part of the protagonists in the civil war in Algeria.’ She
adds, ‘As in Bosnia, Algerian women are the first victims of the civil war in their
40 In a single night in August 1997 the terrorists massacred 100–300 women, children, and men in Hay Rais, and in
September of the same year they slaughtered 64 women in Beni Messous and 100–200 in Bentalha. For more
details see Anissa Barrak, ‘Les Faits à travers la presse algérienne’, Confluences Méditerranée 25 (1998), pp. 11–
20.
41 Ait Hammou, ‘Women’s Struggle against Muslim Fundamentalism’, p. 120.
42 Human Rights Watch, ‘Algeria: Country Reports’ (Washington DC, 1998), p. 4.
43 Amnesty International and Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme and Human Rights
Watch, Algérie: Le livre noir (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), pp. 20–21.
44 Bennoune, ‘S.O.S. Algeria’, p. 185.
45 Messaoudi and Schemla, Unbowed, p. 100.
175
ī

ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
country. In the Balkans, rape and forced pregnancy were tactics of “ethnic cleansing”;
in Algeria, the persecution of women is a key element of “religious cleansing”.’46
Even Islamist leaders like Sudan’s Hassan Al-Turabi have disavowed the war
against Algerian women, and the Tunisian Islamist Rachid Ghennouchi openly
declared, ‘As Islamists ourselves, we are ashamed at what Algerian Islamists are
doing to women!’47
It has to be highlighted, however, that in their attempt to suppress women and
confine them to the private sphere, Islamists’ violence has made women more visible
and more central to the fight and resistance against their barbaric acts.
Women’s Resistance Strategies
Speaking of women’s resistance strategies might suggest an organized and
collaborative action taken by women against terrorism, which is not the case. Their
reactions and strategies were dictated by the circumstances they lived in and
experienced, and to say that these women were not afraid of terrorism would be too
pretentious.
Algerian women, like the rest of the population, were traumatized and deeply
scared for their lives and those of their loved ones. The whole society lived through
a general psychosis which they experienced day and night. No place in Algeria was
safe or spared from fear and danger. To ‘resist’ as opposed to ‘succumb’ was not
even an option. Women had to stand up to Islamism as a terrorist movement that
opposed progress and democracy.
Trapped between the dictates of an infamous Family Code and the barbarism of
the Islamic fundamentalists, women were not prepared to submit to the threats of
the terrorists or to give up their struggle to repeal the Family Code. At every
opportunity, women activists voiced their determination to have the code repealed
and their belief that Algeria, with its principles of liberation drawn from its
revolutionary not-too distant past, would eventually triumph over the retrograde
forces of terrorism. Women’s new struggle took a dual course of action: one was
social and spontaneous and the other was political and structured, mainly led by the
feminist groups.
On the social level women’s motto was ‘life as opposed to death’. As such their
strategy was to resist and oppose the destructive powers of Islamic terrorism by
simply continuing to lead ‘normal’ lives despite the atmosphere of war.
Women continued to go to work and do their daily errands. They continued to
send their children to school despite the fact that schools were targeted by the terrorists
who had burned down and ransacked many educational establishments. Both children
and teachers were also targeted. Sixteen pupils were assassinated while at school on
5 October 1997,48 and female teachers who were not sure of returning to their homes
46 Aicha Lemsine, Middle East Times (Cairo), 16.3.2001. Available at http://www.islamfortoday.com/Algeria/htm
(accessed 20.6.2009).
47 Ibid.
48 In September 1994 the GIA called for a boycott of schools and threatened reprisals in the form of school burnings
and murders of pupils and teachers if anyone defied the order. Quoted in Meredeth Turshen, ‘Militarism and Islamism
in Algeria’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 39(1–2) (2004), pp. 119–132, at p. 125.
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
in the evening (twelve teachers, some of whom were veiled, were assassinated in
front of their pupils in September 1997 and several others had already met the same
destiny) continued to attend to their duties; every time a female teacher was
assassinated another filled her post.49
Women continued to go to hairdressers and beauty salons despite the Islamists’
threats and they continued to find ways to celebrate births, weddings, and their
children’s birthdays and school achievements in the ways they always had done.
Despite the fear and difficulty of gathering, they continued to celebrate
International Women’s Day, during which they staged mock tribunals against
terrorism, and showed films and staged plays that highlighted the dangers of
fundamentalism and glorified women’s courage, women’s contribution to society,
and more importantly raised the morale of women. They highlighted the importance
of women’s solidarity networks and the active participatory roles which they had
yet to play.
In short, Algerian women celebrated life and the continuance of life while the
terrorists spread death every day (more than eighty people were killed daily) and
transformed the country into a huge graveyard. In the face of grief, women consoled
each other and helped each other by hosting orphans and widows and aiding the
needy at times of despair. The feminist groups launched many charitable organizations
to help survivors of rape who were disowned by their families because of the shame
they had allegedly brought on them. These organizations, such as ‘SOS Femmes en
Détresse’, took care of the children of the women and girls who were forcibly
impregnated by the terrorists and pressed the government to permit abortion in such
circumstances. They recruited doctors, midwives, psychologists, and lawyers as
volunteers to help in the rehabilitation process of the female survivors of violence.
In the absence of men, women stepped into new fields and positions traditionally
designated as male domains. In some areas they led funerals, and in the work place
they took positions in sectors such as construction and civic engineering. Women
took charge of small enterprises and ran new businesses. In short, at a time when
women were forcibly excluded from the public sphere they became even more visible
by adopting new roles and moving into new economic domains.
On the political level, women have never given up their demands to have the
Family Code repealed and have worked tirelessly to widen the spread of awareness
among high school and university students about the Family Code and its perils, and
most importantly about women’s human rights, which were denied to them by society
at large, in order to mobilize support for its abolition.
What is important to highlight here is that women’s organizations refused to have
their rights and claims for the abolition of the Family Code take second place, as
was the case after the independence of the country when they were constantly told
that economic development took priority over the issue of women’s rights. It was
now believed that no progress could take place and no democracy could be achieved
if half the population was excluded from the equation and denied its human rights.
Despite their status as victims of terrorist violence and minors under the law,
throughout the 1990s women engaged in consolidating their roles as agents of change
49 Aslaoui, Les Années rouges, p. 9.
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ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
and resistance to Islamist terrorism. On the 2 January 1992 women were the first to
stage a massive demonstration against the FIS and their electoral victory of December
1991. Having participated in this demonstration, I was surprised to see how what
started with a group of about a hundred demonstrators gathered in the centre of
Algiers recruited followers along the march, becoming a massive crowd. Alarmed
by the urgency of the moment, women and men joined spontaneously as the march
processed by their homes or shops.
The crowd called for the cancellation of the electoral process in which many
women’s voices were taken by the FIS through the proxy vote, and warned of the
danger of Algeria becoming an Islamic state.
With the choice between an Islamist regime which is known for imposing religious
law to the detriment of civil law, and a military regime that would limit democratic
freedoms in the name of national security, women chose to support the military. In
her book on the terrorist decade Leïla Aslaoui asserts, ‘On the night of the third to
the fourth of June 1992, the army came out to save the republic.’50 She explains that
without the army, which unlike the government was strong and unified, the country
would have become an Islamic republic. These same claims were shouted by the
women demonstrators whose banners carried slogans reading, ‘The Army, the People
and Democracy’, ‘No Iran, No Kabul, Algeria is Algerian’, ‘Algeria: Free and
Democratic’, ‘Let’s Save the Principles of the Republic’.51
The numbers of women participating in the demonstrations amounted to thousands;
their aim was to reclaim the public sphere which the Islamists were trying to dominate,
but more importantly to manifest their rejection of a fundamentalist rule which they
saw as a threat not only against women but also against society as a whole and, most
importantly, against the nascent democracy. Such demonstrations became almost
routine occurrences to affirm that Algeria would not submit to terrorist violence.52
On the women’s demonstrations the independent newspaper Al-Watan wrote, ‘Tens
of thousands of women were out to give an authoritative lesson on bravery and spirit
to men paralysed by fear, reduced to silence … the so-called weaker sex refused to
be intimidated by the threats advanced by “the sect of assassins”.’53
It has to be highlighted here that since the celebrations of national independence
in 1962, women had been almost absent as civil society members and had not taken
part in demonstrations. The institution of the Family Code and the rise of
fundamentalism in Algeria were the two main wake-up calls which roused them
from their passivity to become active agents and claim their space in the political
arena. Several feminist groups started organizing themselves and working together
50 Aslaoui, Les Années rouges, p. 144.
51 Such slogans were repeatedly shouted at subsequent demonstrations such as that on 25 October 1993. Such
slogans demonstrate women’s awareness of the replications of Islamic fundamentalism at the international level.
They also demonstrate a will to link the women’s movement in Algeria to other women’s movements internationally
but most specifically with Women Living under Muslim Laws. See http://www.newint.org/issue270/270edge.html
(accessed 21.12. 2005).
52 For more details see Shadow Report on Algeria to CEDAW, submitted by International Women’s Human Rights,
Law Clinic and Women Living under Muslim Laws (1999). Available at http://www.nodo50.org/mujeresred/argelia-
shadwreport.html (accessed 30.6.2004).
53 Valentine M. Moghadam, ‘Organizing Women: The New Women’s Movement in Algeria’, Cultural Dynamics 13
(2001), pp. 131–154, at p. 140. Available at http://cdy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/13/2/131 (accessed 17.6.2009).
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GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
to change the awareness of women’s issues in Algerian society and provide women
with the knowledge that would enable them to counteract fundamentalism and
produce a counter-discourse on both the national and international levels.
To do so, they maintained their stand as staunch opponents of fundamentalism
and terrorism, by voicing their views and making their suffering known to all. The
women survivors of rape testified on national television and in daily newspapers
about their ordeals, telling the whole nation and those who remained in doubt about
what the terrorists were doing to women and how their savage acts contradicted the
essence of Islam.
This act was a very powerful move in Algerian history and in the history of Algerian
women in particular; what had been an unspoken taboo during the war of
independence and in the years which followed was now spoken of openly and widely
mediatized.
Rape as a repressive measure was widely used by the colonists during the Algerian
war of independence. The stories of such ordeals were never told as there was general
consensus that these horrors which were directly targeting the honour of the victims
and their families were to be buried for ever. It is astonishing to remark that no one
ever talks about this subject whether in public or in private.
In her article ‘From Taboo to Transnational Political Issue: Violence against Women
in Algeria’54 Catherine Lloyd demonstrates how in the 1990s, women transformed
the issue of Islamist violence in terms of rape from taboo into a campaigning issue
that has taken on transnational dimensions.
The front pages of the Algerian daily newspapers carried pictures and stories of
the lived horrors while the feminist organization Rassemblement Algérien des
Femmes Démocratiques (RAFD) carried out the documenting of human rights
violations and the collecting of women’s testimonies. It is indeed interesting to remark
how these survivors of rape relate their stories in minute detail to magnify the human
tragedy they experienced. Their testimonies have even made the women of the war
of independence break their silence after many decades and relate, as well as compare,
their experiences. In summer 2000 Louisette Ighilahriz, a war veteran, came forward
and testified about ‘the torture of rape’ she underwent at the hands of French soldiers
in 1957, which she published as a book both in France and Algeria.55
This fusion of colonial and post-colonial stories of torture and resistance by women
is also displayed in political activism and the joining of forces between the war
veterans and the new feminists in the fight against the Family Code.
Algerian Women and Transnational Networking
Having strengthened their ranks on the national level as a resistance group against
terrorism and fundamentalism, the Algerian feminists reached out into the
international arena by forging solidarity networks with other women globally but
particularly with those living under Muslim laws.
54 Catherine Lloyd, ‘From Taboo to Transnational Political Issue: Violence against Women in Algeria’, Women’s
Studies International Forum 29(5) (September–October 2006), pp. 453–462. Available at http://
www.sciencedirect.com/science (accessed 20.8.2009).
55 Louisette Ighilahriz, Algérienne, récit recueilli par Anne Nivat (Alger: Casbah Editions, 2006).
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ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
In 1995 they joined the Maghreb Egalité Network together with Moroccan and Tunisian
women’s groups to represent Maghrebi women at the Beijing Conference in 1995, where
they made violence against women a priority and cooperated in this with organizations
such as Women against Fundamentalisms and Women Living under Muslim Laws. By
joining such groups and international networks Algerian women also sought to secure
resources for female survivors of violence and to widely publicize their cause.
According to Lloyd, in order to establish resources for women who had
experienced violence, the women activists began to liaise with international funding
agencies, building their capacity for effective action.56 This work has generated
solidarity and funding, most recently for equipment and premises, such as shelters
for women. Algerian women’s regular contacts in the diaspora provide useful
resources: for example many Algerian women’s organizations continue to use France
as a base for activities such as confiding their funds to bank accounts in France
managed by trusted colleagues who regularly send them small sums of money.
Algerian women in the diaspora raised funds and bought medicines which they
regularly shipped to Algeria during the years of the civil war.57
Along with raising funds these women were keen to secure the support of many
Western countries whose media often portrayed the Islamists as victims of the
undemocratic Algerian state who had crushed their victory by cancelling the electoral
process in 1992. Their main aim was to create a counter-discourse to that of the FIS
and demonstrate to world opinion that the FIS had used democratic means to eradicate
the nascent democracy in Algeria. Feminists publicized FIS leaders’ statements
against democracy58 and presented themselves as an alternative voice to that of the
state, which had lost its credibility on the international scale. The women of the
RAFD filed a civil action suit in Washington DC against the FIS and its US
representative, Anwar Haddam. The founder of the RAFD, Zazi Sadou, was given
an award for her work for Algerian women’s human rights from the US-based network
Women, Law and Development International.59
Zazi Sadou, Salima Ghozali, Khalida Messaoudi, and other feminist leaders
became tireless ambassadors in various countries across the world telling Western
audiences about the realities at stake in Algeria. At the height of the Islamic terror in
November 1994, Saida Ben Habylas, the official Algerian representative to a UN-
sponsored regional meeting that took place in Amman, gave an impassioned speech
denouncing the violence against women.60
56 Lloyd, ‘From Taboo to Transnational Political Issue’.
57 The same actions were also conducted by the fundamentalists whose supporters in the diaspora were actively
gathering funds and generating financial support for their fighters in Algeria. Such groups were seen in many
places, especially after Friday prayers, calling loudly for support for the ‘Algerian bothers’. It is interesting to notice
how women and the Islamists were the two most visible contenders in the 1990s, both nationally and internationally.
58 As an example, this is what the two main Algerian fundamentalist leaders/co-founders of the FIS party had to say,
even long before the December 1991 elections were cancelled in Algeria, about their programme and democracy: ‘I
do not respect either the laws or the political parties which do not have the Qur’an. I throw them under my feet and
I trample them. These parties must leave the country. They must be suppressed,’ Ali Benhadj, Alger Républicain,
5.4.1991; ‘Beware of those who pretend that the concept of democracy exists in Islam. Democracy is Kofr’, Ali
Benhadj, Le Matin, 29.10.1989. Quoted in Mariemme Hélie-Lucas, ‘What is your Tribe? Women’s Struggle and the
Construction of Muslimness’, WLULM 26 (October 2004), p. 26.
59 Moghadem, ‘Organizing Women’, p. 142.
60 Ibid., p. 143.
180

GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
The reality which the Algerian feminists aimed to explain to the world was that
Islamic terrorism was not a home-grown phenomenon and a result of socialist
mismanagement, as claimed by Mark Paris, the acting assistant secretary for Near
Eastern Affairs, in a statement before the Subcommittee on Africa of the Foreign
Affairs Committee in March 1994,61 but the result of the US and other Western
governments’ actions in promoting Islamism and training Arab fundamentalist armed
men in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s.
In The Jordan Times, Miriam Shahin wrote, ‘The West indirectly supports the
FIS with its IMF and World Bank demands on Algeria. It is weakening the middle
class and making the poor poorer and the rich richer.’62
Bennoune reports that a visiting US delegation told a former Algerian Prime
Minister that the continued existence of a public sector in Algeria was a far greater
problem than terrorist violence.63
In brief, while world opinion in the 1990s supported the view that Algerian
authorities should have given the FIS the opportunity to rule after winning the 1991
elections, Algerian public opinion thought the opposite; members of the FIS were
terrorizing society well before they won the elections. Letting them rule the country
would have resulted in the Talibanization of Algeria. The rise of the FIS in the 1990s
coincided with the return of some 3,000 Algerians who had fought and trained in
Afghanistan. General Belkheir declared in an interview that what the army did in
Algeria was to prevent it from becoming another Afghanistan. The task was made
very difficult by the moral embargo imposed by the West on Algeria, which prevented
it from supplying its units and men with adequate weapons such as reconnaissance
and night-vision equipment.
By the end of the 1990s the Algerian army had succeeded in neutralizing the
threat that Islamism represented for the state. Yet, the international community
still had not recognized the legitimacy of the war against Islamic terrorism and
continued to hold Algerian authorities responsible for human rights abuses, while
the terrorists’ acts which resulted in a death toll of 200,000, the dislocation of
thousands of people, and the destruction of both state and private infrastructure
remained underestimated.
The 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York resulted
in a radical change in world opinion towards Islamic terrorism and a reassessment
of the violence in Algeria. At this stage charges of human rights violations by the
Algerian security forces were dropped and the legitimacy of the war against terrorism
in Algeria was recognized. President Bouteflika wrote in his letter of condolence to
President Bush, ‘Algeria understands better than others the pain of the families of
the September 11 victims. For these reasons, Algeria supports the initiative of
launching an international action against terrorism.’64
61 Bennoune, ‘S.O.S Algeria’, pp. 200–201.
62 Miriam Shahin, ‘Algerian Women fight Terror’, The Jordan Times, 13.11.1994, p. 1.
63 Bennoune, ‘S.O.S. Algeria’, p. 201.
64 Luis Martinez, ‘Why the Violence in Algeria?’, Journal of North African Studies 9(2) (Summer 2004), pp. 14–27,
at p. 21.
181

ZAHIA SMAIL SALHI
Conclusions
With the end of the most terrible violence in Algeria and as the Islamist threat subsides,
Algerian women are emerging from a difficult yet formative period. The legalization
of their associations in 1989 has allowed them to organize themselves as pressure
groups and become active actors in the public sphere. Their continuous demands for
their legal rights, while combating and resisting Islamic terrorism, has made them
real political actors and maintained them at the centre of political manoeuvres.
This trajectory, I would argue, is only the continuation of the political struggle
they started in the 1940s which led them to become active agents in the fight against
French colonial domination in the 1950s. Moving back to the centre of political
action in the 1980s gave the women’s movement more legitimacy and made their
struggle for gender equality a concrete possibility, though fraught with difficulties
in terms of changing prevailing mentalities.
In the post-terrorist period, women are once again represented in government;
eleven women won seats in the national assembly in 1997 and in 2003 Khalida
Messaoudi (now known as Khalida Toumi) became the government spokesperson.65
On the subject of gender and violence, the Algerian government has come under
continued pressure from both regional and national women organizations as well as
from international bodies to take serious action to address the problem of violence
against women. Violence is now debated as a social phenomenon and is treated as a
health problem which society has to fight. Various media have been used to encourage
women to bring violence into the open and report it to the authorities, whose attitude
towards domestic violence has also changed.
In October 2000 the organization SOS Femmes en Détresse66 convened a
conference in Algiers on violence against women and children and set up a network
which has published its own report on the violence. Lloyd contends, ‘These actions
were significant in that they acknowledged the problem and recognised a role for
specific legislation to protect women from violence. This would be backed up by
data from bodies such as the police, social services, the courts and other state bodies
that serve as points of contact for victims of family violence.’67
The work of NGOs resulted in lifting the veil of shame from all forms of violence,
be they domestic, sexual, or institutional and the website of SOS Femmes en Détresse
regularly publishes testimonies of victims of domestic violence, rape, incest, and
child abuse, subjects which Algerian society refused to acknowledge in the past.
They have also set up a legal and psychological aid hotline for women and children
to report all forms of violence.
Women’s groups asserted that the government campaign against domestic violence
could not be successful as long as the Family Code remained unchanged. They
insisted that women ought to be protected by laws which would punish perpetrators
65 Turshen, ‘Militarism and Islamism in Algeria’, p. 130.
66 The objectives of SOS Femmes en Détresse are the abolition of the Family Code, the defence of women’s rights,
spreading awareness about women’s legal rights, eliminations of all forms of violence against women, providing
shelter for distressed women (victims of all forms of violence, divorcees, single mothers, etc.) and their children,
the rehabilitation of women, providing professional advice for women to create small businesses, providing legal
and health advice to women and so on.
67 Lloyd, ‘From Taboo to Transnational Political Issue’, p.460..
182

GENDER AND VIOLENCE IN ALGERIA: WOMEN’S RESISTANCE AGAINST THE ISLAMIST FEMICIDE
of violence. Women’s NGOs pressed for government action to repeal the Code. By
2004 the group ‘20 ans Barakat’ (20 years are enough) had become very active and
was pressing hard for repeal of the Code. Although this has not been achieved, in
2005 some changes to the Code were introduced after heated debates and long protests
by conservative political parties who opposed its modification.
Although the draft is believed to stop far short of eliminating all discriminatory
provisions of the Family Code, most women activists and organizations in Algeria
recognize these amendments to the Code as a significant improvement to the present
law, and what is most important is the shifting of the sacred aspect of the Code
which was viewed as an almost God-given document.
183

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