By Gerard van Veen
A French film opened last year in Britain, telling of the kidnapping and murder of seven Trappist monks in Algeria in 1996. Islamic extremists were blamed, although it seems the truth is far more complicated.
Numerous books, articles, television documentaries and now a film have been made on the subject, but the mystery of the assassination of seven French Trappist monks in Algeria 15 years ago has never been fully elucidated. The French movie “Des hommes et des dieux” directed by self-styled agnostic Xavier Beauvois, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2010 and released in Britain as “Of Gods and Men” last year, simply relates the known facts without expressing a political opinion. It was an immediate success, with one and a half million people seeing the film in the first three weeks after its release in France in September 2010.
Fresh information has come to light recently; thanks to the declassification by the French Government of some secret documents, suspicious clues have emerged and new hypotheses have been aired – not to mention the ongoing investigation by the French judiciary. But many questions remain unanswered.
Who kidnapped the monks in March 1996 in their Algerian monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in the village of Tibhirine at the foot of the Atlas Mountains? What role did the Islamist chief Djamel Zatouni play? Who murdered the monks and why were they beheaded and their bodies never found?
The history of the French Catholic Church in Algeria is a long and troubled one. After the colonization of the country in 1830, a monastery of the Trappist order was founded in Staoueli, near Algiers. The Emperor Napoleon III visited the abbey, and Charles de Foucauld stayed there several times on his way to his hermitage in the Hoggar Mountains. The monastery was closed in 1904 for political and financial reasons. In 1934, five Trappist monks, who had been expelled from France after the separation of church and state, settled in Tibhirine in a mansion surrounded by a large agricultural estate. The monks kept bees and farmed. In 1962, Algeria gained its independence from France after a bitter war lasting eight years. The Superior General of the Trappist Order in Rome planned to close the monastery a year later, but the Archbishop of Algiers, Cardinal Leon-Etienne Duval, dissuaded him from doing so, and Tibhirine remained the only Trappist monastery in the whole of North Africa. In 1964, eight new monks arrived at the monastery; and in 1976, the first meeting was held between the monks and a group of Muslim Sufi mystics. A movement called Ribat-es-Salam (“the Link of Peace”) was created to foster Christian-Muslim dialogue.
In 1993, during the celebration of Christmas, armed men forced their way into the monastery, demanding medical assistance for Islamist rebels hiding in the mountains. The superior Fr. Christian de Cherge spoke with their leader, explaining that weapons were not allowed to enter the monastery, which is a place of prayer, and while he was willing to tend to the wounded, he had no medical supplies to spare, since they were used to minister to the sick villagers. Three years later, an armed group broke in at night and kidnapped seven of the nine monks in residence. Two of them escaped the kidnappers’ notice because they were staying in a different part of the monastery and were not found. After the kidnappers left, the two remaining monks attempted to contact the police, but found that the telephone lines had been cut. Because of the enforced curfew, they had to wait until morning to drive to the police station in Medea.
After the first incident on Christmas 1993, the Superior, Fr. Christian de Cherge wrote a moving spiritual testament, found among his papers after his death, in which he showed his love for Algeria and its Muslim population. Addressing his family, he wrote: “If one day it should happen to me – and it could be today – to be a victim of the terrorism that threatens to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my church and my family to know that my life was given to God and to this country.” After a long meditation of his possibly violent death “which I do not desire since I cannot rejoice in the thought that the people I love will be accused of my murder,” Christian de Cherge ended by forgiving his future assassin, “who would not be aware of what he is doing.”
On May 23, 1996, two months after the disappearance of the seven monks, a statement issued in the name of the Muslim extremist Armed Islamic Group GIA claimed responsibility for the killing of the monks, two days before. The Algerian government announced that their heads had been discovered on May 30; their bodies’ whereabouts were unknown. It was and is still unclear who killed the monks. Was it the Islamists terrorists? Or was it, as some suggest, the Algerian army, because the monks had refused their demands to leave?
The two surviving monks left Algeria and have set up a monastery near Midelt in Morocco with the help of other Trappist monks from elsewhere. The surprising news did not come before 2008. Then, an anonymous high-ranking Western government official, then based in Algeria, told a newspaper that the kidnapping has been orchestrated by a GIA-group, and that the monks had then been killed accidentally by an Algerian military helicopter attacking the camp where the monks were being held captive.
One year later, in 2009, the retired French general Francois Buchwalter, who was military attaché in Algeria at the time, testified to a judge that indeed the monks had accidentally been killed by a helicopter from the Algerian government during an attack on a guerrilla position, and then were beheaded after their death to make it appear as though the GIA had killed them. A third testimony came from Abdelhak Layada, ex-GIA leader, who was in prison when the monks were killed but was later freed under a national amnesty. He claimed that the GIA had indeed beheaded the monks after the breakdown of negotiations with the French secret services. What is the truth? The story of the beheaded monks remains a mystery.
