Top Algeria Islamists to end exile-associate

ALGIERS, Sep 16 (Reuters) Three leaders of Algeria's main banned Islamist party will return from exile tomorrow in a further sign of rapprochement between the government and radicals who once sought purist Islamic rule, a colleague said.

Rabah Kebir, Abdelkrim Ghemazi and Ould Ada would be the first leaders of the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) to end their self-imposed exile since the north African oil producer descended into chaos following cancelled elections in 1992.

''This is a happy day for Algeria as we are going to receive three brothers,'' Madani Mezrag, former leader of the FIS's armed wing during Algeria's violent 1990s, told Reuters.

''This shows that the national reconciliation is a big success.'' Kebir, the head of the FIS foreign department, fled ho use arrest in 1992 and has been based in Germany since 1993 where he has worked as a coordinator for the party's mostly Western-based network of overseas members and admirers.

Ghemazi is deputy leader of the department and Ada is a spokesman.

Islamists launched an armed insurrection in 1992 after the then military-backed authorities scrapped a parliamentary election that the FIS was set to win.

The authorities had feared an Iranian-style revolution.

Up to 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed in more than a decade of fighting marked by horrific massacres in the mountains of the northern coastal strip.

Mezrag negotiated the surrender of his Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the FIS armed wing, in the late 1990s and has spent the intervening years trying to persuade former colleagues to abandon the armed struggle.

He and his FIS colleagues still want to set up an Islamic state, but this time through political means.

Mezrag has called on the government to lift a ban on the FIS, which remains outlawed. A state of emergency declared in 1992 remains in place.

The government says all former FIS leaders are welcome to return home provided they do not seek to rebuild the party.

FIS leader Abassi Madani lives in Qatar. But most FIS leaders are based in the West, where some built links with Western human rights groups in the 1990s and worked vigorously to portray Algerian authorities as violators of human rights.

The FIS officials have no influence on the main armed group still fighting, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which has rejected an ambitious reconciliation drive pursued by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

To draw a line under the violence, which still sputters on in isolated areas, Bouteflika this year introduced a package of reconciliation moves to try to shore up the country's stability.

As part of the programme, 2,200 Islamist fighters were freed from jail and many have signed up to receive state help in obtaining work, a move that won praise from Mezrag.

A six-month amnesty for the few hundred Islamist fighters still battling the army expired at the end of August but the government has said it will nevertheless provide amnesty to any guerrilla who quits the bush and hands in his weapons.

REUTERS SAM VC2101