The latest wave of savage bloodletting in Algeria goes on, with at least 160 people massacred, allegedly by Islamic extremists, the country's press reported yesterday amid mounting international pressure for action.
Algiers newspapers, which have begun using the term "genocide", said the latest killings were on Saturday and Sunday in three western villages and on a bus in the north. There was no official confirmation of the reports.
The massacres were part of the worst violence against civilians in six years of war between extremists and the secular government. The press said the death toll of the latest attacks could surpass 200.
The daily La Tribune said 117 civilians were killed on Saturday night at Meknessa in the Relizane region, which was the scene of
attacks last week in which as many as 400 people were reported butchered in a night of slaughter targeting poor peasants. The paper also said another village, Had Chekala, was "razed" over the weekend by attackers who killed every man, woman and child. It gave no figures.
An isolated village in the mountainous Souk el-Had region was attacked on Sunday. More than 20 people were killed and their bodies burned, according to newspapers. The daily Le Matin said regional hospital sources put the death toll at 80.
As families and sometimes entire tribes fled towards towns, no reliable information was available on operations by security forces, though the army-backed government claims that Islamist "terrorism" is being defeated.
Other papers reported massacres in the western Tiaret region where at least a dozen people were killed and in Medea, 80kms south of Algiers, where a bus was ambushed. Le Matin said the bus attack left seven people dead and 13 injured.
The bloodletting marks an upsurge of violence since the December 31st start of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, regarded as an auspicious time for jihad, or "holy war".
Extremists took up arms after the January 1992 cancellation of elections which the now-banned fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win. Fighting and killings since have claimed more than 60,000 lives, according to western estimates, with Amnesty International putting the toll at 80,000.
The killings have provoked renewed foreign appeals on Monday for the government of President Liamine Zeroual to take action to protect its people.
A former French foreign minister, Mr Herve de Charette, said yesterday that the European Union should make aid to the Maghreb country conditional on "the opening of talks with the Algerian authorities".
"In spite of reforms undertaken and what Algerian officials call institutional normalisation, insecurity is in reality growing," Mr De Charette told radio Europe 1. He said the EU could not remain unconcerned.
Earlier, Paris reminded Algiers of its duty to ensure the people's "legitimate right to be protected", while the United States called for an international inquiry.
The French statement met with a furious reaction from the north African state, which told its former colonial rulers that they had "neither right nor reason to be reminding the Algerian government of its duties".
Britain, which has just assumed the rotating EU presidency, said that providing aid to survivors of the recent massacres was an option to be discussed.