Feature
The Culture of Hope
by Gordon Campbell
Interviewed in prison, Ahmed Zaoui shares his hope that over time New Zealanders will come to know him.
In his grey prison tracksuit, Ahmed Zaoui looks springily in shape these days, and totally different to the beefy Middle Eastern stereotype of some of his early photos. He is now 12kg lighter than when he first set foot in New Zealand, mainly thanks to the dubious blessings of prison food. “Maybe I become more handsome?” he says, smiling.
The smile is a genuine, thousand-kilowatt affair – Zaoui remains an optimist, despite his years on the run – but is also a sign of his best efforts to be a good host, even in this plaintively forlorn prison chapel. No hot tea and sweet cakes today, though, as there might have been if we were at home in Algeria. Still, the guest must be offered a drink (Coke, from the slot machine next door?) and made welcome in the spirit of voluntary charity (Sadakat in Arabic) expected of a good Muslim.
Sit, sit. Please. So little time, so much to discuss about his journey from his childhood village of Al-Iddrissiya to his cell in Auckland Central Remand Prison. Zaoui was born 44 years ago, one of 10 children from a religious family. His maternal grandfather was a respected Sufi preacher – “Like Quakers,” Zaoui explains, “very peaceable.” In fact, it was the moral sobriety and dedication of Zaoui’s father that finally won him the hand of the preacher’s daughter.
So, at 20, what sort of man was Zaoui – was he rebellious, shy, studious? “Ah, nice question,” he says. “You are a psychologist. I was … playful. That might have been the reason why my father pushed me to go to Saudi Arabia to study. He wanted to push me more into studies, to make me more serious.”
His options at university in Saudi Arabia were religion or literature – and young Ahmed chose religion and excelled at it. If left entirely to himself, though, he might well have tried his hand at professional sport. “But back then, there wasn’t a future in playing ping pong” – Zaoui has pretty much cleaned up the other prison inmates at table tennis – “and I was pretty good at tennis, too. I’d have liked to be a soccer player, really. It is like Jacques Derrida – he wanted to be a soccer player, too, but he became a philosopher.”
Soccer fan, ping-pong ace, theologian, poet and an exceptional cook – his couscous recipe is legendary among the posse of young students who assist his lawyer, Deborah Manning – Zaoui may have followed a road in life that has taken him far from his mosque in Algiers, but not in spirit. By the time he returned from Saudi Arabia in the mid-1980s, Algeria was in ferment. Public rage was rising at the corruption and repression of the FLN, the nominally Islamic party that had won the war of independence in 1962, but which had retained most of its corrupt economic, military and security links to France. The FIS, a loose coalition of Islamic groups opposed to the regime, sought out the young intellectual.
Zaoui joined the FIS only in 1991, as a late recruit. Early the following year, the FIS won the election handsomely. It was immediately crushed by a military coup that plunged Algeria into a bloody crisis that has cost the lives of more than 150,000 people since 1992, a nightmare from which it is only now slowly emerging. Hundreds of people like Zaoui were forced to flee into exile. “Of course I love my homeland,” Zaoui writes in his prison poems. “If I didn’t love it, I would not have left.”
Although he was always a religious and social moderate – he helped to organise a peace conference in 1994 about the Algerian crisis, with the help of the San Egidio Catholic community in Rome – Zaoui was wooed into joining the FIS by people he had known at the University of Algiers, in an effort to lend the party greater moral authority and spiritual coherence. “I won’t say I opposed the FIS, but I had no interest in politics at the time. Academic work attracted me more. And I had been doing social work [connected to the mosque] with the people in my area.”
Not that he had been immune to the politics of the streets. During the 1980s, he had been picked up and tortured by the dreaded Algerian security forces, and still bears the scars on his body. Government forces had also massacred hundreds of protesters during street demonstrations, and imprisoned his father. Even so, his diehard critics would say: the FIS was being co-led in 1991 by Ali Benhadj, a man who had publicly dismissed democracy as kufr, or blasphemy. Why join a movement co-led by such a person?
First, Zaoui replies, Benhadj was not the leader of the FIS. Second, the FIS was an umbrella group with almost as many factions, he suggests, as the various versions and perversions of democracy to which Benhadj may have been referring. Basically, did Zaoui see himself as a counterweight to the likes of Benhadj? “Yes!” Regardless, Zaoui has been systematically confused – through the malice of the Algerian regime, and through the incompetence of the New Zealand security services – with the very extremists he has always opposed. “Benhadj is not Zaoui,” he says patiently, “and Zaoui is not Benhadj.”
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