The worst of the attacks peaked around 1995 and recently the government has experimented with an amnesty, which seems to have reduced the levels of violence.
The damage nowadays is more likely to be inflicted by bored teenagers throwing stones, which happens all the time and explains not only the number of Plexiglas window panes but also the scattering of dents on the bodywork which caught my eye as I was boarding.
We’re climbing now, through a long tunnel and into a station called Ain Torki. The only people on the platform are soldiers wearing camouflage, but in the distance, my eye is caught by a procession of women leaving a graveyard, scarves and veils streaming behind them, plumes of colour in a hard brown landscape.
At Chlef, two and a quarter hours into the journey, our guard is changed and no less than eighteen black-clad members of the Gendarmerie Nationale, wearing body armour, squeeze aboard. Eamonn casts a professional eye over them and notes that one or two have Simonov precision rifles.
‘They’re serious.’
The soldiers settle down behind us, but when Nigel raises the camera they all move away and hide.
The last few miles into Oran are particularly sad. An arid landscape of stony ploughed fields is covered with blowing rubbish and drifting plastic bags. The stations, once trim symbols of French civic pride, are falling apart, with gaping holes in pantiled roofs, windows smashed, red-brick walls stained and grafittied. It pains me to say so, because our Algerian hosts are charming, cooperative, friendly and above all desperate to please, but this is a vision of callous decay.
And, perhaps, a perfect metaphor for post-colonial Sahara. The old owners have been thrown out and the new ones still haven’t decided what to do with the property.
Oran Station emphasises the point. It is a magnificently stylish example of the Mauresque style, full of height and light and space, set off by ornate wood mouldings and iron-work screens. It’s been kept in very good condition, but not so the Hotel Terminus next door. Beneath the layers of dust, the broken lighting and the holes in the ceiling, the grand vision of the French railway builders is unmistakable. Solid Moorish arches rise from the mosaic floor, a fireplace in massive blocks of grey marble is incised with the initials P. L. M., the Paris, Lyon and Marseille Railway. Above it is a mirror 9 feet high. Everything is intended to elevate and inspire, but this purpose has sadly been forgotten. No pastis here now, no freshly opened bottles of wine, no apronned waiters bustling amongst tables buzzing with gossip from Paris and Algiers. Instead, there’s Coke or Fanta and a handwritten sign above a lifeless bar: ‘La maison ne fait pas du credit’.
We are eating later at the Comet, a plain old-fashioned restaurant, whose wine list and entrecotes go a long way to making up for the Hotel Terminus, when the flow of conversation is interrupted by the chanting of a crowd outside. It sounds like football supporters celebrating, and Said, who goes outside to check, confirms that this is the case, Kabilya JSK having defeated AC Africa from Cote d’Ivoire, to win the African club soccer championship.
The hooting and shouting grows louder and more vociferous and seems no longer entirely to do with football. I’m sure I hear the word ‘Assassins!‘ repeated over and over. The proprietor pushes his windows shut, which doesn’t do much good, and, if anything, urges the crowd on. There seem to be only two words they’re chanting now.
‘Pou-voir! Assa-ssins! Pou-voir! Assa-ssins!’
Said goes to the door, but peers out a lot more warily. For the first time I begin to wonder where my cordon sanitaire has gone. Probably been given the night off for getting us to Oran safely.
After a few more minutes, during which the stamping and shouting rises to a frightening intensity, the crowd moves on.
I ask Said what it was all about.
Don’t worry, he reassures me, it wasn’t directed at us. Kabilya, where the winning team comes from, is a mountainous region of eastern Algeria, not Arab but Berber. They are a strong-willed, proud and enterprising people (the actress Isabelle Adjani is Kabilyan) and have their own quarrel with the government over suppression of their language and culture. After a recent protest march in Algiers, forty young men disappeared, and the word is that they were taken away on police wagons. The military-backed government is known by its opponents as Le Pouvoir, The Power, hence the shouts of ‘Pouvoir‘ and ‘Assassins‘.
In Algeria it’s quite common for football teams to be used for political protest.
‘Were you as worried as I was?’ I ask Said.
‘If this had been in Algiers, yes.’
Day Ninety-Seven
ORAN
The good news is that my hotel overlooks the sea. The less good news is that between me and the sea is a warehouse, a grain silo, two fuel storage tanks, a stack of containers and a chimney. The positively bad news is that at six o’clock this morning I was bent double with stomach cramps. Since my emetic experiences in Western Sahara I’ve kept a bottle of Pepto-Bismol nearby and am gulping the thick chalky fluid every hour on the hour.
I don’t think I’m the only one with problems. The hotel itself looks distinctly off colour. My bathroom ceiling has been partly removed to provide access to a water pipe, and every now and then strange, animal-like cries issue from the gaping hole. The tap on my basin coughs and splutters in a horrible parody of my own lurchings and strainings, and I can find no taps on the bath tub at all.
I make my way gingerly to breakfast. I’m on the tenth floor but I haven’t used the lift since I saw the owner banging the control panel to make the light come on, so it’s a long walk down. As I pass the third floor I have to step over a stream of water, which is running down the corridor from beneath the door of Room 306.
As if things aren’t delicate already, my first walk through Oran reminds me that this is the city immortalised by Camus in his novel La Peste (The Plague).
In it one of the characters actually keels over and dies of the plague on the stage of the Opera House. This splendidly florid edifice still stands at one side of the Place du 1er Novembre 1954, formerly the Place d’Armes. It makes for an interesting culture clash. Brazenly bare-breasted women loom large at the top of the Opera House, whilst a statue in the middle of the square bears a quotation from the Koran: ‘And Victory is from God and God is merciful.’
This then is the end of the road. It looks as if the only way from here to Morocco might be by sea, and, given the current state of relations between Morocco and Algeria, even that could be tricky.
Back to the hotel. Get talking to a tall, rather striking Algerian with a family in Stockholm. He is curious to know what I think of the bombing of Afghanistan. Something in his manner rubs me up the wrong way and instead of expressing my doubts I dither indecisively. He thinks it will only strengthen the hand of the Islamists. I shift the discussion to something that has worried me ever since I came to Algeria. What happened after the glorious armed struggle against the French? How come the freedom fighters of the FLN became the oppressors? How did the anti-colonial legacy of the 1960s become today’s ‘Pouvoir‘, a military state almost wholly dependent on oil and gas exports to the West?
He looks witheringly at me.
‘A hundred and forty years of colonialism cannot be destroyed right away.’
He shrugs and reaches for his briefcase.
‘Mistakes will be made.’
Day Ninety-Eight