Top Algeria Islamist urges rebels to disarm

ALGIERS, Sep 19 (Reuters) A senior Algerian Islamist newly returned after 14 years in exile urged the few rebels still fighting the state to disarm, saying the reason for their struggle no longer existed.

Rabah Kebir, a leader of the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), added at a news conference yesterday he would work with young people to create a democracy in which those seeking an Islamist government enjoyed ''new ways to have political activity''.

''I call on those who are still in the mountains to give up the fight and join the national community because reasons for jihad does no longer exists in Algeria. The time is for reconciliation now,'' Kebir, in his late 40s, said.

''My number one priority is to support and strengthen the national reconciliation policy. But I will never give up my right as a free citizen to have political activity,'' he said.

With his return from Germany on Sunday Kebir became the first FIS leader to end his self-imposed exile since Africa's second largest country descended into chaos following cancelled elections in 1992.

Islamists began an armed revolt in that year after the then military-backed authorities, fearing an Iran-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election the FIS was set to win.

Up to 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the fighting. The violence has sharply subsided in recent years.

Kebir fled house arrest in 1992 and had based himself in Germany since 1993 where he has worked as a coordinator for the party's mostly Western-based network of overseas members.

Kebir's return is one of the most prominent signs to date of a rapprochement between the state and Algeria's large Islamist movement, most of which is now committed to peaceful politics.

A reconciliation drive pursued by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has given blanket immunity to members of the security services for any wrongdoing committed during the violence.

But also under its provisions more than 2,200 former Islamist fighters have been freed from jail, and about 300 fighters have given themselves up under a six-month amnesty that officially expired at the end of August.

Up to 500 are estimated to be still at large, most of them members of the al-Qaeda-aligned Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which has rejected the reconciliation drive.

DEMOCRACY HAS NO RELIGION Kebir said that he was not tempted by the strict ''Taliban'' model of Afghanistan's former Islamist rulers but rather by what he called social democracy based on the values of Islam.

Democracy was the best tool for a fair and free political competition, he said. ''Democracy has no religion. This is why we have to accept it as a system of governance. It guarantees alternation of parties in government,'' Rabah Kebir said.

He added that ''exclusion and lack of equal treatment between Algerians were behind the crisis'' of the early 1990s.

Kebir suggested the ban on the FIS and a continuing state of emergency first imposed in the oil-producing state in 1992 were not insuperable problems.

''The FIS was a political tool, it was not the Koran. We can imagine new ways to have a political activity in Algeria,'' Kebir said, adding that: ''I will try to focus on the youth whose spirit has not been polluted by the last decade.'' REUTERS LL HS0951