ALGERIA - Feb. 13 - Vedrine Visit.

French FM Hubert Vedrine ends a day's visit with an announcement of further improvement in bilateral relations. He met with top officials including Pres. Bouteflika. (But the visit coincided with fresh allegations of Algerian security forces' involvement in civilian killings in the nine-year conflict with Islamist militants, and with pressure on the French government to distance itself from a military-backed regime accused by human rights organisations of abuses. A group of French and Algerian intellectuals published a letter last week in Le Monde accusing the government of "an active and militant role to prevent any condemnation of Algeria and opposing the dispatch of special rapporteurs". Calling for an international inquiry into Algerian violence, they warned that Vedrine's visit risked sanctioning the regime and stifling the efforts of those seeking the truth about the killings. Vedrine denied the intellectuals' allegations of covert French military aid to Algiers and insisted France had not obstructed a mission of special UN rapporteurs to look into the thousands of cases of people who have disappeared.

The intellectuals' calls appear to have been sparked by the recent publication in France of The Dirty War, the first account by a former Algerian officer who accuses Algeria's military security of manipulating extremist Islamist groups and carrying out atrocities against civilians in a civil strife that has claimed more than 100,000 lives. The book by Habib Souaidia received wide coverage in Paris. It comes a few months after Yous Nesrouallah, a survivor of the 1997 Bentalha massacre in which 400 people were slaughtered in one night, concluded in a book also published in France that a death squad was behind the killings. Algerian authorities reject allegations of complicity in civilian killings as well as calls for international investigations. They blame the unrest, sparked by the 1992 cancellation of elections an Islamist party was poised to win, on Islamists. But the political controversy stirred by the two books puts further pressure on a regime that has failed to end the violence and continues to be torn by internal power struggles pitting the army against the presidency. Although Bouteflika can claim some success in ending Algeria's international isolation and giving its regime a more credible facade, his efforts to bring peace have faltered. Last weekend, 27 people were massacred in Medea, a province south-west of Algiers).