For the first time in four years of civil war, Algerians have a real chance to end the tragedy that has claimed 40,000 lives. By including Islamist parties in their presidential elections last month, they have also set a model for political inclusion that is bound to influence the rest of the Arab world. PNS commentator Mamoun Fandy, a professor at Georgetown University, writes widely on the Middle East for the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times.

Last month's Algerian vote for Lamine Zeroual as President may well mark the beginning of the end of Algeria's four year civil war -- a turning point which has profound implications for other Arab states challenged by Islamist opposition forces.

For the first time in the history of any Arab state, more than one candidate contended for the presidency -- a phenomenon that was not lost on Algeria's neighbors. It will be difficult, for example, for Egypt's President Mubarak to run for election unopposed as he did last year.

More significant, the elections put an end to the debate in the Arab world over whether an Islamist party should be allowed to run for elections. Mahfoud Nihnah of HAMAS was not only accepted as a candidate but came in second, with 25 percent of the vote (Zeroual won 61 percent). The message was clear: the Islamists have a constituency that can be ignored only at the risk of bloody upheaval. But it is also a constituency capable of imposing limits. In the 1992 parliamentary elections, the Islamists won a clear majority in what was partly a protest vote against the mismanagement of the ruling Front for National Liberation. Last month they took a far smaller share in what may be part of a general backlash against the violent actions of some Islamists.

So far, neither Nihnah nor the leaders of FIS have questioned the integrity of the presidential elections. On the contrary, they are endorsing its results and the direction the President is taking. To some extent their flexibility reflects the great strides they have already made in Islamizing Algeria's once French dominated culture -- a key goal when the Islamists first ran for parliament in 1991.

But that willingness to participate in the electoral process is also bound to influence how Islamist forces like the Muslim Brotherhood are perceived elsewhere in the Arab world. Currently, Mubarak's government insists on excluding the Brotherhood from politics and declaring them an illegal organization. With Jordan having set the model for inclusion and Algeria now implementing it with success, other Arab states, including Egypt, are going to find it more and more difficult to resist.

Many Algerian observers believe the real import of the vote has less to do with which side won than with voters' profound yearning for peace, security and democracy. "Algerians are tired of the killing," says Muhamad Alouache, editor of the Algerian weekly "Al-Hourria." Zeroual won a mandate to bring Algeria back to normality. To do that he will need to open a dialogue with all the salient political forces including the moderate factions of the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS). If he fails to do that he will squander his political capital and violence will prevail again.

In fact there are encouraging signs that Zeroual is moving toward reconciliation. As soon as he was sworn in on November 27, he released about 700 political prisoners, all of them FIS supporters. This was a clear acknowledgment of the FIS's one precondition for talks -- to have the issue of political prisoners as an agenda item.

Were the U.S. and other Western countries -- namely France -- to encourage the trend toward reconciliation by offering some incentive for the Algerian president, they would help reduce the risk of a new massive influx of Arab refugees to Europe.

After the brutally repressive policies of the past four years, however, Zeroual must do more to demonstrate that he is moving away from the country's military hardliners. One step would be to allow parliamentary elections in the near future. The ultimate test will be to show he is capable of reining in the security forces who want to eradicate all Islamists, without regard to international human rights let alone the distinction between moderate and violent revolutionaries.

But the way out of the bloodletting now exists. If Zeroual pursues it, Algerians have a real chance to end the violence that has gripped the country since 1992. And the Arab world may finally free itself from the vicious cycle of violence that comes from excluding Islamists from the electoral process.