He received a state funeral in Algiers with mourners including the prime minister, Nadir Larbaoui. In Switzerland, prosecutors just days earlier had set a June date for his trial on allegations that included crimes against humanity.
The country’s “Black Decade” marked one of the most violent chapters in North Africa in recent decades and foreshadowed the expanding political power of Islamists across the Arab world and beyond. Under the crackdowns, Algerian authorities canceled elections that put Islamist factions on the cusp of power in Parliament and then began systematic attacks to crush the Islamists and intimidate their supporters.
The rifts and recriminations from the era remain so sensitive in Algeria that the government in 2006 made it an offense to “exploit the wounds of national tragedy” for political or other motives.
Gen. Nezzar and his allies long portrayed the attacks they directed as part of an existential struggle to protect the country’s secular rule. Rights groups and victims decried the state-sponsored brutality and had sought for decades to hold Gen. Nezzar and others accountable.
Last August, Swiss prosecutors announced an indictment that Algerian authorities had long tried to block, charging Gen. Nezzar with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Algerian officials had argued strongly against reopening the trauma of the “Black Decade.”
Swiss prosecutors, using the principles of universal jurisdiction, described Gen. Nezzar as the alleged leader of a network of death squads and torture centers for the purpose of “exterminating the Islamist opposition.” Gen. Nezzar, in interviews and statements, remained defiant about his role in seeking to stamp out the Islamist political movement.
“We were ready to do anything,” said Gen. Nezzar, who served as military leader, defense minister and the country’s de facto leader in the early 1990s. He stepped into the power vacuum after the 1992 assassination of the head of state, Mohammed Boudiaf, by a security officer with alleged ties to an outlawed Islamist group, the Islamic Salvation Front.
The “Black Decade” had atrocities on all sides, according to rights groups and international monitors. Islamists attacked or killed opponents and others, such as women not wearing head coverings, seen as rejecting strict Islamic codes. The reprisals by security forces, however, were far more sweeping, according to historical records.
A state of emergency was imposed after the Islamic Salvation Front won by a landslide in the opening round of Algeria’s first multiparty legislative elections in December 1991. The party was banned and a five-member ruling junta, including Gen. Nezzar, took control. Carrying his previous portfolio as defense minister, Gen. Nezzar was put in charge of the first phases of the battles against Islamists and their supporters.
“Our conviction was that to have let the Islamists take power was to let Algeria go under,” he said in 2002. “The Algerian army fulfilled its duty.”
Some of the raids allegedly ordered by Gen. Nezzar came from a unit of secret police — dubbed “ninjas” because of their hoods and balaclavas — that were blamed for the disappearance of thousands of people who were later presumed dead, rights groups said. In echoes of the anguish amid authoritarian rule in parts of Latin America, groups of Algerian mothers displayed images of their children and others who were missing.
“The military and police would come together,” recounted Nassera Dutour, president of the Algerian Association of the Disappeared, whose son Amin was taken and never seen again in public in the early 1990s.
“They’d circle a village looking for so-called ‘terrorists.’ It was like the Gestapo,” Dutour told NPR in 2011. “They’d knock at the door, lock up the women and take the men. And if they couldn’t find who they were looking for, they’d take other family members.”
Under Gen. Nezzar’s command, security forces subjected detainees to “torture, with water or electricity, and other cruel, inhuman and humiliating treatments,” Swiss prosecutors said in a statement.
To the end, Gen. Nezzar challenged rights reports, accounts by journalists and witness testimony on the brutality of the government-led repression. When a man shouted “Murderer!” at Gen. Nezzar at a Paris airport, he ignored him at first, a video posted in 2019 on an Algeria news site showed.
Then Gen. Nezzar swung his cane at the man.
Khaled Nezzar was born in Seriana, in eastern Algeria, on Dec. 25, 1937. The country was under French colonial rule, and his father was conscripted into the French military. Khaled was a child when his mother died, according to his official biography.
He studied at an officer’s training academy in France in the 1950s but defected and joined the Algerian National Liberation Army during the war seeking to end French control. After Algeria’s independence in 1962, Gen. Nezzar rose through the military ranks and studied in the Soviet Union and France.
He was stationed along the Moroccan frontier during a border war in 1963 and commanded a battalion sent to Egypt in a demonstration of Algerian solidarity after Israel defeated Arab forces in the 1967 war.
In one of the first major displays of Gen. Nezzar’s role as government enforcer, he led a punishing backlash in 1988 after street protests and riots against the single-party rule of the Front de Libération Nationale under President Chadli Bendjedid. Gen. Nezzar ordered tanks into the streets of Algiers and troops fired on crowds. An estimated 500 people were killed.
After five days of street battles, Bendjedid promised political reforms, which opened the way for opposition parties that included the Islamic Salvation Front. Years later, Gen. Nezzar blamed Bendjedid, who resigned in January 1992, for making too many concessions and allowing the Islamists to gain a political foothold.
In 1993, Gen. Nezzar narrowly escaped assassination when a powerful car bomb exploded as he drove past in Algiers. He stepped down from his government posts the following year but wielded behind-the-scenes influence with security forces and other agencies for decades.
Gen. Nezzar traveled frequently to Europe despite repeated attempts by Algerians to seek charges against him in European courts. The Swiss case stemmed from a criminal complaint filed in 2011 by the rights group Trial International. Gen. Nezzar was arrested and formally charged while he was visiting Geneva later that year.
“This is the very last opportunity if and when the case goes to trial for the victims to have the possibility to be heard,” Philip Grant, Trial’s executive director, said after the indictment last year, “and to have the court adjudicate on what happened in the war.”
Gen. Nezzar’s survivors include his wife and five children.
Algerian authorities said Gen. Nezzar had said he had no plans to attend court proceedings in Switzerland. “I’m not just fighting for myself,” said one of the claimants in the case, Abdelwahab Boukezouha, after the indictment, “but for all of the victims of the Black Decade.”
