Christianity in Algeria
Currently, North Africa is primarily Muslim: Islam is the state religion of Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. While the practice and expression of other faiths is guaranteed by law, the same legal framework tends to restrict minority religions from actively seeking conversion to their religion, or even building or repairing churches. Converts to Christianity may be investigated and searched by the authorities as well as punished. There is some evidence that there has been an increase in conversions to Christianity among North African Muslims in recent years, even though in many cases the government will not change the religion from Islam on any citizens' identity cards. Despite this, the total number of Christians remains very low relative to the populations of these countries. In 2009, the percentage of Christians in Algeria was less than 2%. In this same survey, the UNO counted 100,000 Roman Catholics and 45,000 Protestants in the country. Although Christians are a religious minority in Algeria, churches built during French rule can still be found.
Human rights in Algeria
The government's main opponent in the war was the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an Islamic terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate that was described by John R. Schindler in The National Interest in July 2012 as "supremely violent" and as the perpetrator of "a wave of bombings in Paris in the summer of 1995" that were "Al Qaeda's first attacks on the West". Schindler notes that "Algeria's nightmare years of 1993–1997 were a focus of the international human-rights community" but that "the terrible fratricide [of] the 1990s got little coverage in Western media, despite the fact that it probably claimed twice as many lives as the Bosnian conflict, which ran concurrently and received nonstop Western attention." Schindler added that "Algeria's bloody civil war, which began twenty years ago, never really ended."