Hadj-Moussa 275event.^26 A few days after the bombing, I met Adel, a young unemployed
man who was still shocked and totally disillusioned by the national news:
Normally in other countries, a newscast is used to show what
is happening in that country. But not in Algeria. The bomb,
for example. There should have been human interest stories,
accounts of the casualties, if only to provide some comfort to
the relatives and [they] should not have waited for two days
before printing a story.n the face of such an information blockade, satellite television I
becomes fundamental, especially when the state television network tries
to shield the populace from the Islamist influence by co-opting it for
itself. Algerian television begins and ends its programming day with the
national anthem, followed by a recitation of a passage from the Qur’an.
On Fridays, national television broadcasts the sermons associated with
mid-afternoon prayers. Although this does not perturb viewer sensibili-
ties, it is nevertheless perceived as an instrumentalization of Islam by the
state, as noted by 26-year-old Youcef, a laboratory technician I met in one
of the eastern Algiers suburbs:
Before, ENTV [Entreprise nationale de la télévision] used to
run the religious program at a specific time, that is at 2 o’clock
in the afternoon. Now, in the middle of a program, they switch
to the call to prayer. Even in the midst of a sports broadcast,
just as one team is scoring!s indicated above, satellite dishes were prohibited by the FIS in a A
number of neighborhoods in several cities, and the prohibition was often
supported by the force of arms. At the height of the prohibition between
1993 and 1995, certain subscribers had to dismantle the dishes very often
because there was no counter-force, such as the police, the army or the
gendarmerie, whose presence would have discouraged incursions by
armed groups. At first, the satellite collectives obeyed the commands to
dismantle the devices, but as time wore on they invented resistance tac-
tics. For people who individually owned a satellite dish the response was
less direct, as in the case of Hammoud, a professional who lived in a vil-
lage in which armed groups were very present: