If Algeria Won't Stop the Killing, UN Must Step In

By Flora Lewis, Herald Tribune, October 3, 1997

PARIS — At long last, international concern is stirring at the atrocities committed day after day in Algeria. Just this week, 11 schoolteachers had their throats slit in front of their horrified pupils and a baby was beheaded, along with many other barbaric murders.

Mary Robinson, outgoing president of Ireland and now UN High Com-misstoner for Human Rights, had a run-in with the Algerian foreign minister in New York.

She told him that "human rights cannot be contained within frontiers." He issued a statement saying her protest was, "inadmissible" and violated his country's "sovereign right" to refuse. "foreign interference in its internal affairs."

Carol Bellamy, director of Unicef, called for a high-level UN official to investigate the killing of Algerian children. The M6decins du Monde (Doctors of the World) organization took out full-page ads in leading international newspapers addressed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. They said, "In the name of the mandate the peoples of the world have entrusted to you, we call oh you to take immediate action to protect life in Algeria." It is Mr. Annan's right, indeed his duty, to present the situation for formal consideration by the Security Council. It is as hard to understand the Algerian government's position that what is going on is nobody's business but its own as it is to understand the extravagant cruelty and ferocity of the killers. If the government is unable to '-protect its people, it should welcome outside help as it would after an earthquake or other natural disaster.

If it is unwilling to protect them, as seems to be the case when the horrors go on and on in the neighborhood of military posts without any attempt at intervention, the international community must put pressure.

Nobody is suggesting the dispatch of armed force. But there are many political and economic measures, particularly, involving international credits, which could be taken to show the Algerian-government that it must take seriously these demands that the abominations be stopped.

But other governments are reluctant to do anything except quietly deplore. They will only begin to react when public opinion becomes noisily insistent, as it was about ending the war in Bosnia. There is a mixture of reasons for this reticence. One, in the words of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of France, is that "we don't really know how to explain what's happening ,.. it is not like Pinochet's Chile where democrats were fighting a dictatorial power. There is a fanatic and violent opposition fighting a power which itself in a certain way uses violence and the force of the state. So we are obliged to be rather prudent."

Mr. Jospin was candid enough to give another reason as well, the threat of a terror campaign on French soil, such as took place two years ago. "The French population also has to be protected. It is a heavy thing to say, but you will understand why it is my responsibility to say it."

At least he promised to relax a bit the tough French visa policy denying asylum to Algerians whose lives have been threatened. Just now, over half a century later, French Catholic bishops have issued a formal confession of guilt for silence and indifference to the per-

secution and murder of Jews under the Vichy regime. Where are the Muslim prelates now in the face of all these massacres in the name of Allah?

An Egyptian woman who works at a UN agency said she wished the officials at Cairo's Al Azhar University, as close as the Sunni world has to an overall religious authority, would issue a fatwa proclaiming these murders a sin against Islam. Muslims who rightly decry a distorted view of their faith as inherently bloody and bellicose should echo her. Silence carries a responsibility. Arab regimes hesitate to criticize one another, but they all have a stake in this and they must recognize it.

But as the Médecins du Monde ad said: "Although everyone has the right to life, liberty and security, no one today can ensure this right to the population of Algeria. We all have a responsibility in seeing that this right is respected."

That's what the United Nations is supposed to be about. Governments that compose it have 10 be reminded by their people, their philosophers, their eminent personalities, their religious officials that they must respond.

Flora Lewis