En 31 år gammel algerier, Rachid, har flyktet fra hjemlandet der han var fengslet, til London der han oppholder seg ulovlig. Han snakker til The Observer om «the mesh of religion, politics and violence that creates killers.»

«…Algerians combined noisy support for Chirac’s anti-American stance last weekend with pathetic pleas for visas. France denies us even one week’s stay in return for the 100 years she spent in Algeria uninvited. France’s very strength as a capitalist nation was founded on stolen goods, our goods, yet France complains about Algerians coming over to ‘milk the country’.

For the terrorists, this plundering of our resources amounts to a declaration of war. They steal from Westerners and from the Algerian elite, calling it the ‘redistribution’ of resources confiscated from unbelievers. Women are kidnapped and carried off for sex with this excuse, as the legitimate gains of a holy war.

During the French occupation, we called our terrorists freedom fighters. The French used guns to enforce bans on the Arabic language, Arabic street names and, most upsetting of all, the Arabic Qur’an, to break the Algerian spirit. Small groups of nationalist ‘terrorists’ spread into mobs of soldiers and in 1954 the ‘War of Liberation’ began. The French response included a shiny guillotine. Many old inhabitants of the kasbah still remember watching their neighbours dragged out and beheaded on the whim of a French general. Our fathers faced bombs, gas and snipers and in 1962 the French gave up. At last, the people were free to be Algerians, free to be Arabs and most importantly for us, free to be Muslims.

My generation of Algerians knows what our fathers endured for our liberty. But, instead of relaxing in a land of peace and plenty, we found ourselves still bitten by poverty, with inflation and unemployment and successive governments hoarding the nation’s wealth.»

«…..For more than a decade, the regime copied French tortures – the blowtorch, the drill, fingernail extraction, toilet-water drinks through chiffon, electric shocks to the genitals, with some new refinements, such as buggering suspects’ mothers and forcing prisoners to commit acts of bestiality, prompting suicides.

The paranoia about terrorism among the pro-Western governments of North Africa has done everything to fertilise its seed. One terrorist said: ‘I wasn’t a terrorist, until they came for me and told me I was.’ Every beating pushed him further over the line between the Islamist and the terrorist.

Ask any North African terrorist whom they hate more – the decadent Westerner or the treacherous Arab governments – and it will always be the latter. The cheers for Chirac’s peace campaign on his trip to Algeria didn’t mean we have forgotten French crimes, it’s just that the murderers since ‘liberation’ have made the old French generals look about as frightening as Tintin. War bruises a nation; civil war twists and splits it, driving it insane.»