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Open letter to world public opinion
Dr.
Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
Algeria
‘Today
truth and justice need witnesses, witnesses able to suffer martyrdom
if need
be.’
Robert Barrat
Nine years ago the secret police of the regime tried to silence me by accusing me of «subversive activities» on the basis of false confessions extorted by torture from two academic friends. The secret police fabricated against me a case that brings to mind Stalinist trials. The plot was so crude that the judiciary initially refused to be an accessory of the secret police, and it withdrew the case.
This very secret
police then proceeded to mobilize the press it handles against me and
threw me to the death squads. As if that was not enough,
it sent a few months later three of its contract killers to my home
to assassinate me, in vain though. The hour of my final fate had not
yet
struck. At that moment I decided that, in front of this unbridled state
terrorism, the only option left to me was to go underground. Friends
here in Algeria and in Europe advised me to leave the country but I
refused to do so categorically because I considered, in my heart and
conscience,
that the political struggle for human rights and the right of self-determination
of the Algerian people must be carried out in Algeria, whatever the
price may be.
With God’s help, I have continued the struggle for dignity and
truth despite huge risks and constraints.
In 1996 the secret police trumped up again a new case against me, accusing me of ‘subversion, involvement in a rebellious movements, plotting against the security of the state, and attempting a coup against the regime’. These charges call to mind the sinister ‘revolutionary courts’ and the ‘state security courts’ of the 1970s and 1980s which used to hatch the same accusations to condemn genuine patriots, opposed to the dictatorship of the colonel-presidents. In 1997 the secret police activated its judiciary to condemn me for 20 years of imprisonment.
Thus, my political
activities and work for human rights were criminalised under the cover
of the state of emergency and special laws.
That was the time of all out eradication in camera, the time of
selective indignation when denouncing state terrorism which plunged
the country
into an infernal cycle of violence was politically incorrect and
considered a ‘complicity with the terrorists’.
That was the era of ‘specifically Algerian democracy’ in which criticising the January 1992 pronunciamiento and calling for a political solution to the crisis was equated with ‘complicity with the slaughterers’.
Before such dramatic
events in my country, my beliefs and values challenged me to face up
to my responsibilities. I opted for an
ethical resistance
against the totalitarian regime which had decided to wage an
insane war against part of its own people.
The atrocities perpetrated against the people and the veil of
lies and disinformation that covered them made it my duty to
contribute
to restoring
the truth. It was my duty to struggle, with other human rights
activists, against one of the most crude myths of the century
by publishing
hundreds of testimonies and thousands of names of citizens who
fell victim of ‘eradication’.
Against the impressive
propaganda machine of the regime, we only had the truth of the facts
and a will to see through its bringing
out into
the open.
We denounced the violation of the sovereignty of the people,
when tanks were sweeping ballot boxes aside, while the fashion
of the
many was
to shelter behind the tanks and insult the people.
We condemned the serious violations of human rights and the policy of ‘eradication’ that underlay them when some kept silent, others engaged in selective denouncing, while some others approved and applauded the violations and the policy.
We were the dogged
witnesses of the errors and horrors of this regime. And we did witness!
With time and the iron will of many human rights activists,
intellectuals and officers, the wall of disinformation
finally cracked and
the world was able to see another side of the Algerian
tragedy. Damning
testimonies
and irrefutable evidence have been piling up on the desks
of international institutions, organisations and lawyers.
Today the whole world knows that those who have claimed to ‘save Algeria from fundamentalist barbarity’ are more barbaric than those they say they are fighting. The world knows now exactly the nature of the Algerian regime, a regime which did not think twice about executing monstruous and criminal plots to polarise the people and pit Algerian against Algerian.
Today the world
knows that those who projected themselves as the last bastion against ‘terrorism’ are in fact criminals against
humanity.
Today, after nine years of struggling, besides other
Algerian men and women, for the ideals of truth and
human dignity,
I have decided
to
end my journey underground, and to challenge the unjust
condemnation sentencing
me to twenty years of prison. In my heart and conscience,
I believe that I only carried out my duty, and nothing
but my
duty: to
be a witness of the Algerian reality.
It is with a peace
of mind that I am ending my life underground to face the repressive
apparatus of this
regime the free
world knows
well today.
I will probably be arrested and imprisoned. That’s a small price
to pay for any free man in a country where there is no rule of law. Yesterday
our elders paid it for independence, today we have to pay it for freedom
and justice.
I shall pursue my struggle in prison to obtain the
status of political prisoner and guarantees of a
fair trial
in the presence
of international
observers.
I shall continue in prison, with God’s assistance, my struggle
for the self-determination of the Algerian people,
for the respect of human dignity, for an inclusive Algeria equal in rights
and opportunities
to all, for justice, and for a democracy rooted in
the civilisationnal values of Algeria yet wide open to the universal.
God is Witness
of my words and my acts.
Algiers, the 29 September 2003
Dr Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
Campagne Internationale pour la Libération de Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
