Algerian Notebook

• This is surely a mistake, I thought, stooping to kiss the hand of Algeria’s minister of culture. Madame la Ministre Toumi Khalida is throwing a party to mark the start of Algeria’s annual book fair, the Salon International du Livre. This year’s line-up includes a contingent of South Africans led by Breyten Breytenbach, the dashing poet and former revolutionary, now resident mostly in Paris. My inclusion is a complete mystery, given the event’s broadly anti-imperialist tenor. Clearly, Algerians do not read The Spectator. But one doesn’t turn down a busman’s, so here I am, helping myself to a drink off a passing tray. The drink is green, sickly sweet and dismayingly bereft of crusader intoxicants, but there are compensations — nearly everyone here is smoking. Indoors. In the heart of one of President Bouteflika’s palatial residences. This one is an ice-white concrete structure, with lifts sliding up and down the walls of its cavernous inner atrium. We could be in Whiteleys, the West London shopping centre, if not for the band armed with doumbeks and flutes of the snake-charming variety.

• I am in the posh Hotel El-Djazair, boning up on Algerian history. It is a story of ceaseless conquest, starting with the Romans and culminating with the French in 1830. After that came the liberation war (1954-62), and then the dirty war (1992-1997), which pitted authoritarian socialists of the FLN against an uprising of the Islamic masses. The struggle ended badly for the insurrectionists, who eventually turned against ‘anyone who spoke French and wore a suit’. (One crazed jihadi sect went so far as to issue a fatwa against the entire Algerian population on account of its reluctance to martyr itself.) Such own goals enabled the FLN’s generals to reassert control, but Algeria remains the subject of alarming travel warnings, a place where Islamic bombs go off from time to time and al-Qa’eda lurks on the fringes.