The Algerian Massacres must be understood within the context of the Algerian Civil War. In 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front, an Islamic fundamentalism party, won Algeria’s legislative elections. With a total of 47.3% of the votes, and winning 188 out of the 231 seats, it was a complete shakeup, especially considering that this was the very first round of elections the party had been qualified for. The reason for this populist appeal can be viewed within the revitalization of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 20th century that affected many other countries. Simply put, there were many people in North Africa and the Middle East who wanted to run their government based upon Islamic Law. While in some cases sitting authoritarians such as Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein had quieted these rebelling factions through political repression, Algeria’s Islamists had broken through using the democratic process that, ironically, many of them loathed.

The unpopular sitting government was devastated at this loss and sought to keep power through a military coup that aimed to negate the election results. The Islamic Salvation Front was banned and thousands of party members were arrested. This resulted in the party’s supporters forming several guerilla groups to take down the Algerian government.

One of the most notable of these groups was The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. They employed violent tactics for complete government overthrow, including assassinations, bombings, and hijackings (one of he few times the war received Western media attention was when a plot was foiled in which they planned to crash a passenger plane into the Eiffel Tower). They also frequently fought completing guerilla organizations and declared all foreigners on Algerian land as targets in their campaign. The Algerian government fought back hard against these groups, going so far as to sever ties with other Muslim nations that they accused of supporting the terrorists.

So, what happened in the months leading up to the 1997 massacres? There were two large factors. One was the 1997 elections, which saw the main Islamist party, Movement of Society for Peace, formed a ruling coalition with a liberal party, National Rally for Democracy. Keep in mind that The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria did not want to cooperate with the government at all and saw Islamist groups who were looking for a ceasefire as traitorous. They did not like seeing Islamists cooperating with liberal Muslims. Second was that the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria had a new leader. Antar Zouabri, just 26 when he took the role of the organization’s “emir” in 1996, was widely seen as more violent than his predecessors. Under him the group pushed its most radical position yet, a mass declaration of takfir. Takfir is an extremely controversial practice of declaring other Muslims non-believers, it’s basically excommunicating Muslims because you believe that they are apostates.

Now to get into the controversy of who committed those massacres. There is some dispute on The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria’s role in these war crimes. Zouabri seems to have supported them, calling them “offerings to God” and stating all who opposed him were worthy of death. They claimed to be the perpetrators for several massacres shortly after they occurred. The problem arose if members of the Algerian government are in any way complicit. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch report that there were army barracks right outside many of the targeted villages, yet the men stationed there did little to nothing to stop this violence. Several former members of the national security forces, and survivors of the massacres, said that their colleagues were in fact responsible in interviews with Western media. Yet there is also as much testimony by survivors that the government, while doing little to prevent these massacres, did not actively kill civilians, and that Zouabri’s people acted alone.

Probably the best online resource I can recommend about massacres in the Algerian Civil War is this paper by Stathis N. Kalyvas, who specializes in civil wars. It’s an interesting read that argues that these events should be understood more in the “rationale” of jihadist organized violence rather than random events, brings up possible government cooperation with the terrorists, and compares the massacres to those of other wars. Very in-depth and has much, much more information than I could place here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080912003025/http://research.yale.edu/stathis/files/Wanton.pdf

As for the war itself, violence greatly declined following the passing of amnesty laws in 2000 for Algerian Islamists. Zouabri was killed by the government in 2002, and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria passed with him, though there are still a few Islamists operating in the country. The violence has greatly shaped the Algerian public to this day, and some say has left them with a great fear of political instability. It is perhaps not surprising they were one of the few Arab countries to not largely partake in the Arab Spring.