Tag Archives: Of Gods and Men

Of Gods and Men

I recently watched the movie CD Of Gods and Men, in French, with English subtitles. The story is loosely based on the kidnaping  in 1996 of eight Cistercian monks by fundamentalists in the north African country of Algeria. The monks had lived as a community, ministering to the people of the area.

Algeria has suffered one of the bloodiest struggles among former countries colonized by European powers. French settlers, some of whom had been there for generations, were forced to leave by native Algerians who wanted their country back.

Early governments after the French expulsion were managed by former Algerian fighters but ended up themselves corrupt. As is often the case, fundamentalist Islamists saw an opening and began a campaign of terror to gain power.

Fear gripped areas where government forces now fought the fundamentalists. The monks attempted to minister to all in need, which included a wounded fundamentalist fighter, brought to them one night. This action made them suspect by the national army forces.

The fundamentalist soldier was later captured by the army and allowed to die, the army soldiers joying at his suffering. The commander of the government forces then brought in the leader of the Cistercians to identify the dead fundamentalist soldier. The monk, named Christian, does so.

Christian prays over the dead fundamentalist. The army leader is angered—angered that sympathy would be shown to this man, who has probably killed and perhaps tortured some of the commander’s men. As the army is now responding in kind. No doubt the commander believes that torture must be met with torture—leading, of course, only to more torture . . .

That scene so poignantly illuminates for me the absurdity of war. One should not show sympathy toward one’s enemy. The only way for war to take place is to inspire hatred for the other.

But, of course, killing and torture, once loose, keep escalating on each side.

Meanwhile, ordinary people, to whom the Cistercians have ministered, suffer the consequences of a reign of terror.

We don’t know exactly what happened to the Cistercians after their capture. Their deaths were announced a couple of months later by an armed Islamist group. Their heads were found three years later, but we don’t know the circumstances in which their deaths took place.

No matter. The examples of those who defy hatred live on after their deaths to inspire us.

My Lost Algeria

My assignment from the U.S. State Department to the North African nation of Algeria in 1993 was supposed to last two years. I was evacuated out within a few months of my arrival because of terrorism concerns for embassy personnel. I’ve always felt a sense of loss for not completing that assignment, something like one feels for a lost friend.

A few weeks before I left, I had accompanied the ambassador on a “show the flag” trip around the northern section of the country. I got to know our Algerian driver, a Berber from the mountainous Kabyle region. We visited several sights, including an ancient Islamic mosque. The stone walls around its well were scarred from more than a millenary of providing water for the faithful to wash before the call to prayer.

Just after my arrival to the capital, Algiers, I had visited a Christian church. It was open to the public, but the lay worker reading papers at a desk as we entered seemed nervous. I’ve often wondered what happened to him and his church when the country shut down because of the terrorism.

I thought about these people again when I read an article by Stephanie Saldana, “The Martyr in Street Clothes” in Plough (Spring 2020).

I left Algeria in December, 1993. A group of monks who had chosen to stay and serve in that country were kidnaped and killed in 1996 by extremists. Their story is told in the film Of Gods and Men.

Another incident occurred in August 1996, when a bishop, Pierre Claverie, and his Muslim driver, Mohamed Bouchikhi, were killed in a bomb blast. Mohamed, a Muslim, had grown up next to the bishop’s church and become a volunteer there. Pierre at one time, concerned for the death threats he was receiving, asked Mohamed to consider no longer helping so that he would not be in danger. Mohammed became upset that the bishop would consider such a thing. Thus, they were killed together.

I studied the picture of the painting along with the article in Plough. All these martyrs are depicted, including Mohamed, in his street clothes, beside a small depiction of a mosque.

I have loved other assignments—in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia and Canada—but I will always grieve for the one in Algeria.

Algeria Haunting

 

My assignment in 1993 to the U.S. embassy in Algiers, Algeria, lasted only about three months. During that brief period, I served as notetaker on an official trip to the western part of the former French colony in North Africa.

We traveled through rounded brown hills that reminded me of the wheat growing region of Washington State’s Palouse. However, an occasional abandoned farmhouse scarred the landscape, left from the bitter civil war between Algeria and France from 1954 to 1962.

Thousands on both sides lost their lives. Torture was common. After the French defeat, the French settlers in Algeria, some of whose families had been there for more than a century, left and wandered France like the exiled Acadians of Longfellow’s poem, “Evangeline” They were called Pieds-Noirs, “black-feet,” a sometimes derisive term that denoted their farming background.

Our official trip in 1993 was shortened when we learned of a terrorist incident in Algiers. Though we did not know it then, the incident foreshadowed a second reign of terror, this time  by insurgents against the native Algerian government. An election which threatened to put an Islamist party into power had been cancelled by the government.

A few weeks after our official trip, our embassy evacuated many of the staff, as the insurgency increased, making travel difficult. I left Algeria and never returned.

Some Christian monks who had remained in Algeria were murdered by extremists in 1996. The French movie “Of Gods and Men” is a fictionalized account of the tragedy. The Algerian farmers who were there for so long were mostly Catholic, of course, though the monks served their mainly Muslim neighbors.

I remembered our passage through a village on our long-ago trip. I noticed a building which could only have been a church at one time but wasn’t anymore. I wondered when the last Christian service was held there. Who attended? Where did they go?