Algeria's Shameful War

Habib Souaïdia is 31 years old, but you wouldn't know it to look at him. Since its recent publication, his book The Dirty War (La Découverte; 204 pages) has been making waves in France and Algeria. The back cover shows him in 1992 as a fresh-faced young second lieutenant, proudly wearing the uniform of an Algerian parachute regiment. The man sitting with an overflowing ashtray in a Paris publishing house is haggard, with sunken eyes and a faced gouged by deep lines. The interval between then and now has been eventful. It includes two and a half years in the Algerian...