BALLOTS, NOT BULLETS

By LARA MARLOWE/ALGIERS

IF YOU GO INTO THE VOTING BOOTH, IT will be your coffin, threatened the notices glued to the walls of mosques by extremist guerrillas of the Armed Islamic Group. "Ballots on Thursday, blood and bullets to follow," promised a rhyme chanted in Arabic by the fundamentalists. In a country where beheading, throat slashing and car bombs have become daily occurrences, no one doubted the militants' fervent wish to drown last Thursday's presidential election in blood.

Many Algerians heeded fundamentalist warnings to stay home. They stocked up on food and supplies ahead of time, and the streets of Algiers, the country's port-city capital, were eerily silent when the time for voting came. Open-air markets and schools were closed all week, in fact, lest they be targeted by the Islamists. As security forces 200,000 strong took up posts in Algiers and other large cities, motorists were stopped every few hundred yards at police and army check-points. At campaign rallies, supporters were often outnumbered by bodyguards and police brandishing pistols and AK-47 assault rifles.

But incredibly, Algerians went to the polls--75% of them, if government figures can be believed. On Friday morning, ex-general and incumbent President Liamine Zeroual was declared victor, with 61% of the vote and a mandate to bring peace to the country in his five-year term, beginning this week. The news broke the spell of silence, and a society long cowed by terror erupted with relief. The President's security forces indulged in a daylong binge of celebratory shooting. "The war's over! We won! This is democracy!" a policeman shouted as he fired his 9-mm pistol into the air. Middle-class women laden with jewelry and dressed in tight-fitting Western clothes waved flags from the windows of cars that sped through Algiers with horns blaring. Temporarily at least, the Establishment had lost its fear of the guerrillas.

The elections were called because the hard-pressed government wanted to create the appearance of legitimacy at home and abroad for Zeroual, 54, the head of state appointed by the army in January 1994. Zeroual's race against three other presidential candidates was the chronicle of a victory foretold. But his victory left the North African country of 30 million as uncertain of its future as at any other time since its ill-fated first attempt to hold multiparty voting four years ago. Then, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (F.I.S.) won the first round of legislative elections, which the army aborted. Cheated of victory and outlawed, F.I.S. went underground and splintered into violent armed groups whose struggle to overthrow the military plunged the country into a bloodbath.

In the circumstances, the willingness of Algerians to risk their life voting last week was even more amazing than the government's ability to bring off the election without disastrous violence. Many voted as they had for three decades of one-party rule--mechanically and without conviction. Others saw the poll as a fresh start: "I don't care if the F.I.S. is excluded," said Farid Harssani, 38, a printshop worker. "This is the first time we've had more than one candidate to vote for." Above all other considerations, Algerians voted in the desperate belief that their gesture might somehow stem the violence wracking their country.

That the week before the election was considered "peaceful" showed just how chronic this ghastly civil war has become: army special forces stormed an apartment in Tizi-Ouzu, 50 miles east of the capital, killing seven guerrillas, including the regional leader of the Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.). Two French nuns were gunned down, one fatally, as they left their home in an Algiers suburb to attend Mass, bringing the number of foreigners murdered in Algeria by Islamists to 94 in the past two years. A car bomb outside a voting station south of Algiers killed five people. Three activists from different political parties were assassinated. Then, on the eve of the election, the government announced that security forces had shot dead 16 "terrorists"--the government's invariable term for the guerrillas--and seized large quantities of weapons and explosives.

If Zeroual was capable of restoring security to Algeria, his opponents asked, why hadn't he done so in nearly two years in office? They portrayed the retired general as the continuation of a corrupt system, a charge he vehemently denied. Like other former Presidents and many of Algeria's high-ranking officers, Zeroual was born in the northeast of the country--reputed for its tough, insular people--and fought in the 1954-62 war of independence against France. He later received military training in Jordan, the Soviet Union and France, becoming Algeria's Deputy Chief of Staff in 1988. He resigned the following year in a dispute over a restructuring of the military.

The conclave of generals who secretly make all key decisions in Algeria brought Zeroual back as Minister of Defense in July 1993, then promoted him to the presidency six months later. He has twice initiated talks with imprisoned F.I.S. leaders Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, and twice blamed them for the failure of these negotiations. His unsettling fluctuation between policies of "eradicating" the fundamentalists and seeking "conciliation" with them reflects the wavering debate between hawks and doves within Algeria's armed forces.

The search for a strategy to end the civil war without giving in to the fundamentalists lay at the heart of the presidential campaign. Sheik Mahfoud Nahnah, 53, the avuncular leader of the moderate fundamentalist Hamas party (unconnected to the Palestinian group of the same name) came in second with 25% of the vote. Nahnah's designer suits and silk ties, like his campaign pleas for democracy, failed to reassure secular Algerians. His alleged links to Saudi Arabia and his desire to bring the banned F.I.S. back into the mainstream aroused fears that he planned to make Algeria an Islamic republic by stealth.

Said Sadi, 48, a psychiatrist from the mountainous Kabylie region, came in third, with 10% of the vote. Sadi has built his political career on opposition to the government and abhorrence of political Islam. His deep hatred for the F.I.S.' charismatic No. 2, Ali Belhadj, goes back to the 1980s when the men were imprisoned together. Legend has it that Belhadj promised to cut Sadi's throat if the Islamists ever came to power. "Fundamentalism is like death," Sadi told supporters. "You try it only once." At Sadi's instigation, the government has allowed Algerian peasants to establish village "self-defense committees" to fight armed Islamists.

The government continues to ignore reports of systematic torture and summary execution of Islamists by the security forces. Former Cabinet member Leila Aslawi, whose husband was stabbed to death a year ago by guerrillas, campaigned for Zeroual. She is enraged by Western "complacency" toward Algerian fundamentalists: "This state is fighting terrorism. You don't do that with the declaration of human rights in one hand and the constitution in the other. You don't fight terrorism with kid gloves."

Security officials interpreted the relatively untroubled election as proof that the Islamist rebels were too weak to mount a major attack. The army has hit the G.I.A. and other armed groups hard since last spring, and the guerrillas have reportedly lost control of three outlying regions. In Algiers G.I.A. members still extort protection money in the "triangle of death," as the slums to the east of the city are known, but thousands of Algerians have fled areas of conflict. The young assassins who stalk victims with knives and pistols in the capital's center are fewer in number. "Some were arrested," explains a major in the paramilitary gendarmerie. "Some were shot dead, some gave up and some are in hiding in the mountains. We think a lot are still in the city, waiting for the holes in our net to grow wider."

But military officers fear that when the reservists called up for the elections go home and the noisy celebrations are over, Algeria will begin burning once again. Until now, those who hold power have refused to share responsibility for the country's descent into chaos, or to acknowledge the deep roots of Islamic fundamentalism in Algerian society. And if there is to be peace in Algeria, secularists and Islamists will have to bridge the chasm that lies between them. The election seems unlikely to provide such a solution and, tragically, may prove little more than a momentary pause in a long and bloody war.