The Black Decade

On the night of September 22, 1997, the lights went out in Bentalha. By morning, hundreds were dead, and a country was left with a question it still cannot answer.

Between 1991 and 2002, Algeria slid from a fragile democratic spring into a war that left a hundred thousand or more dead, thousands disappeared, and a nation bound to silence. Who killed whom? Who knew, and who looked away?

The Black Decade is a narrative history of Algeria's civil war, from the colonial roots of the conflict and the riots of October 1988, through the halted election of 1992, the rise of the GIA, the assassinations of writers and journalists, the massacres of 1996-1998 and the mystery of the monks of Tibhirine, to the amnesty laws and the organized amnesia that followed.

Drawing on human rights documentation, press accounts, and the testimony of survivors, it separates what is established from what is probable, what is disputed, and what remains in the dark, and it says plainly where sources disagree.

A story of a war without a name, and of the secrets it left behind.