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On the morning of 26 May 1993 the young Algerian novelist Tahar Djaout was attacked by several would-be assassins as he was leaving his home in Bainem, just west of Algiers, to go to the office of the journal Ruptures that he and friends had launched earlier in the year. His attackers shot him several times, dragged him from his car, and used it to make their escape. Djaout died on 2 June after lying for a week in a deep coma.
The assassination was generally attributed to the armed branch of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Two days after the attack, two of Djaout's aggressors were shot and killed by police near the Notre Dame d'Afrique cathedral on the heights above Algiers and a third was captured. Early newspaper reports quoted the latter as saying that Djaout's assassination had been ordered because "he was a communist and wielded a fearsome pen which could have an effect on Islamic sectors." Djaout was a victim of the internicine power struggle between the FIS and the government (the FLN), a struggle which grew violent after January 1992, when the government aborted elections that seemed to point to an FIS victory. In March 1993, after more than a thousand people had been assassinated, the FIS escalated its campaign, targeting judges, professors, editors, doctors, and writers. More recently, foreigners have been killed, and a warning was issued that after 1 December 1993 all foreigners in Algeria would be subject to attack.
The politics of the area is murky, and much speculation goes on about responsibility for some of the killings and about possible alliances between "strange bedfellows." The headline of an article in the 1 July 1993 issue of the Wall Street Journal declared, "Algerians wonder who's really behind [the] recent series of high-profile murders," and as one of the writer's friends has stated, Djaout was "apparently killed by the Islamic fundamentalists ... or by those who would like us to think so."
The fact remains that Djaout is dead as the result of a tragic, senseless killing. His premature death represents a great loss for literature, for Djaout was one of the most promising Maghrebian writers of his generation. He was also a gentle and generous man who...