"Algeria’s ‘Disappeared’ Stranded by Bouteflika’s Peace Program
By Daniel Williams and Ahmed Rouaba
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Each Wednesday in Algiers, a group of women gather at the hilltop headquarters of Algeria’s government human-rights commission and hold aloft photos of missing husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and uncles.
The relatives disappeared without a trace at the hands of police and soldiers during the country’s 1992-2006 war between the government and Islamic-rooted militants and guerrillas, the women say. Finding the truth about what happened may become even harder under a planned government anti-terrorism initiative.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, re-elected to a third five- year term April 9, is promising to expand a 2006 amnesty that has encouraged militants to lay down their arms in return for avoiding prosecution. The women say they fear it will also apply to security personnel, closing the door on information and further sacrificing justice for reconciliation.
“It’s impossible to have hope,” said Safia Fahassi, who heads the National Association of the Families of the Disappeared, which represents 1,000 relatives of missing Algerians. “We are not even told where bodies were dumped. It is not just the past that is important: It is part of our task that this not happen in the future.”
Amnesty International, the London-based human-rights monitor, placed the stakes in the context of Algeria’s continuing violence in an April 9 report.
“There can be no genuine national reconciliation unless the authorities take steps to establish the truth and face up to crimes of the past,” the report said.
Gas Supplier
A stable Algeria is a preoccupation on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. The country, with a population of 36 million, is the biggest supplier of natural gas to the European Union after Russia. On April 13, Energy MinisterChakib Khelil said Algeria plans to expand annual gas exports to 100 billion cubic meters from the current 62 billion cubic meters by 2015. The violence has targeted foreigners involved in both fossil-fuel production and construction.
Algeria is also the source of terrorist exiles who have taken root in Spain, France and Italy, according to a report by the Real Instituto Elcano, a Madrid-based research group.
Bouteflika issued a partial amnesty for guerrillas in 2006 that induced more than 20,000 of them to turn themselves and their weapons over to the police and answer questions, avoiding prosecution. At the same time, it declared that security forces were immune from prosecution, and that talking about their responsibility for deaths and disappearances was banned.
No Proof
Algeria Watch, a human-rights monitor based in France and Germany, estimates the number of disappeared at 10,000. The government provides about $13,000 to families able to document that their relatives disappeared -- although it declined to provide any supporting information to them.
Government abuses endure, according to the 2008 U.S. State Department human-rights report on Algeria. It cited “abuse and torture, official impunity, abuse of pre-trial detention, poor prison conditions, limited judicial independence and restrictions on freedom of speech, press and assembly” and “failure to account for persons who disappeared in detention during the 1990s.”
Three years after the amnesty, violence has not ended. It is mostly instigated by an estimated 500 members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), associated with Osama bin Laden’s global network. On election eve, three Algerian security guards were killed while escorting foreign workers in the eastern part of the country. Twenty people died in ambushes and bombings in March, according to the Interior Ministry, which pinned the attacks on the AQIM.
‘National Reconciliation’
In an April 2 speech in Medea province, Bouteflika said that “national reconciliation,” the official euphemism for amnesty, would provide everyone rights, including those who “fought terrorism,” according to press reports in Algeria. In his April 19 inauguration speech, he pledged to “continue and strengthen the national reconciliation that the Algerian people have massively supported, that permitted a return to civil peace.”
Mustapha Ksentini, president of the government’s National Consultative Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, said Bouteflika’s priority is to ensure no return to the 1990s level of violence, when between 150,000 and 200,000 people died, adding that details of the program hadn’t been worked out.
“An accounting of the missing will have to wait,” Ksentini, 65, said in an interview at his law office in the town of Blida. No matter what occurred during the war, the state, army and police acted in defense of law, he said. “The government is responsible, but it is not culpable.”
No Elections
The war broke out when the army forcibly stopped parliamentary 1992 elections that an Islamic-based party was set to win. An Islamic victory would have ended the dominance of the National Liberation Front, which had ruled the country since independence from France in 1962.
Ksentini compared the action to the present U.S. focus on Afghanistan, once home to al-Qaeda. “We would have been Afghanistan if the army had not intervened,” he said. Demonstrations by relatives searching for missing persons began as early as 1997, said Fahassi, 42. She formed her group in 2004 and began the Wednesday protests three years ago.
On May 6, 1995, her husband, Djamel Eddine, was picked up by four men with walkie-talkies as he left an Algiers restaurant, she said. He worked for a government radio station and had been jailed once for five months for writing articles perceived as harming national unity. He hasn’t been seen since.
The Algerian women stood outside Ksentini’s fenced-in offices mostly in silence on a recent Wednesday as traffic flowed along the hilltop road. Police looked from afar.
“We’re not officially permitted to do this, but we do it anyway,” Fahassi said. “We understand that foreign governments don’t care either, that we are alone, but we will go on.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Williams in Algiers at dwilliams41@bloomberg.net; Ahmed Rouaba in Algiers via London at rouaba@bloomberg.net"
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