c. 2004 Religion News Service

TIBEHIRINE, Algeria _ The seven French monks lived in a stone farmhouse fringed with pine and apple trees outside this small village, tucked into the soaring hills of northern Algeria.

As Islamist violence tore the country apart, they cared for the sick and visited their Algerian neighbors. When the village mosque collapsed with age, they offered a room in their red-tiled monastery as a Muslim prayer hall.

But when the terrorist came knocking on a March day in 1996, they disappeared. Two months later, their heads were found near Tibehirine. The monks became among the most horrific footnotes of a conflict that killed up to 150,000 people. Islamist extremists were blamed, and the case of the Cisterian monks was shelved, if not forgotten.

Until now.

Prodded by plaintiffs representing the monks, and startling confessions by former Algerian agents that implicated the government, France has recently opened an investigation into what happened to the Roman Catholic fathers nearly a decade ago. In February, the case took another murky turn, when a French reporter probing the monks’ fate turned up dead.

“What the plaintiffs want is the truth,” said Patrick Baudouin, a Paris-based lawyer representing the family of one of the murdered monks, as well as a member of their Cistercian order. “They hope that if justice is rendered in the affair of the monks of Tibehirine, then it can rekindle the hopes of other victims or families of victims.

“And that impunity will cease to be a master of Algeria.”

But the inquiry also risks creating diplomatic problems for Algeria, even as it begins to repair frayed ties with the West, including with its former colonizer, France. And it raises questions about when _ if ever _ the country will come to terms with its bloody past.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika suggested as much earlier this year. “There is certainly a mystery, but also a problem of timing, time,” he said in an interview with a French reporter, when asked about the Tibehirine assassination. “Not all truth is good to say when it is hot.”

The monks are hardly Algeria’s only lingering mystery. Along with tens of thousands of people killed by Islamist guerrillas, some 7,000 others simply disappeared in the fray. Their families and human rights groups suggest many may have been arrested and possibly killed by Algerian security forces.

Despite Bouteflika’s promises to delve into their deaths, not a single case has been resolved to date.

Complicating the matter are long-standing reports that Islamist extremists and government forces sometimes collaborated, even as they fought against each other. As violence raged during the 1990s, and while villages were decimated just a few miles from army barracks, Algerians began asking a troubling question: Who is killing whom?

The question still haunts Tibehirine, where cars jostle with donkey carts for space along the narrow, rutted roads. Even today, residents reminisce fondly about the French “babas,” or fathers, but clam up about their deaths.

“Everybody knew them,” said 18-year-old student Samia Sedoque, as she walked past the gray cement walls of the old monastery one recent afternoon. “Sick people would go to them, and they would treat them. They gave us medications and clothes.”

Worker Ahmani Sami reluctantly opened the heavy, iron gates of the monastery, which the Cistercians abandoned after the killings. Asked about the 1996 events, he laughed nervously and shook his head.

“I can’t talk about that,” he said, before an Algerian policemen came and shooed a reporter away.

Eight years ago, the Tibehirine tragedy appeared clear-cut. Djamel Zitouni, then-head of the radical Armed Islamic Group, issued a pair of statements, claiming responsibility for the monks’ abduction and killing. He was killed in 2002 during an armed gunfight with security forces near the capital.

French officials endorsed the verdict of the Algerian government _ that Zitouni’s Islamic Group was to blame for the monks’ death. So did the head of Algeria’s Roman Catholic community, Algiers Archbishop Henri Tessier.

But statements by several former Algerian agents now living overseas dispute the official conclusions. They say Zitouni acted as a double agent for Algerian security forces.

Indeed, Abdelkader Tigha, the former head of Algeria’s military security, claimed in interviews that the monks’ kidnapping was planned by state security officers to get the monks out of a highly contested area. The plan went badly awry, he said, and extremists ultimately assassinated the fathers.

Tigha now lives in the Netherlands, where he is seeking political refugee status. He counts among a number of witnesses being sought in the new French investigation.

“The monks sensed themselves to be in the middle of two violences _ the violence of the extremists and the violence of the army,” said the Rev. Armand Veilleux, who served as spokesman for the Cistercian order after the monks’ murder, during a telephone interview from Belgium.

“They did what they could to remain neutral. But both sides wanted people to take a position. They didn’t want people to be different.”

Veilleux is among the two plaintiffs prompting the French inquiry. His own doubts budded shortly after the monks’ death, he said _ and after being stonewalled by the Algerian government and the French embassy in Algiers as he sought more information.

“I think without a doubt the French government knew a lot, and that there were negotiations,” he said. “I think they did what they could to save the monks. But with whom did they negotiate? With the Algerian secret service? With the Islamists? They’ve never said. And it’s about time they talk.”

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More recently, French free-lance reporter Didier Contant fell to his death from a seven-story Paris apartment, shortly after returning from a reporting trip to Tibehirine. French police ruled his death a suicide. But Algeria’s more sensational media rushed to dub Contant “the eighth victim of Tibehirine,” and to suggest he had been pushed.

For its part, Paris is handling the monks’ investigation carefully. French officials deny they bargained with anyone for the monks’ release, and say no proof exists that Algeria’s military was involved in their disappearance. Nonetheless, they have assigned a top anti-terrorist judge to the case.

Veilleux is also careful to note he is representing only himself _ and not the Roman Catholic Church _ as he seeks to find out the truth. “I didn’t want to implicate my order in an affair that may affect French-Algerian relations,” he said. “But to have only one individual do it kamikaze style _ that’s not a problem for them.”

KRE/JL END BRYANT