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Human Rights Watch
World Report 2000
President Abd al-Aziz
Bouteflika's "civil harmony" initiative achieved only partial success
in bringing an end to the political violence that has ravaged the country for
most of the last decade. Although the violence was on a lesser scale than in
earlier years, brutal and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and clashes between
government forces and armed groups continued to claim an estimated 200 lives
per month. There were very few reports of perpetrators being caught and brought
to justice. The generally improved public security situation, especially in
major cities, was reflected in fewer reported incidents of arbitrary arrests,
"disappearances," and torture, but the lack of progress in resolving
thousands of cases of "disappeared" persons remained a blight on the
government's human rights record. The government failed also to institute reforms
to prevent a possible resurgence of systematic human rights violations by the
security forces.
The Civil Harmony Law, adopted in July 1999 and endorsed overwhelmingly in a
national referendum the following September, set a deadline of January 13, 2000,
for members and supporters of armed groups to surrender to the authorities.
The law offered immunity from prosecution for persons who had not themselves
committed killings or bombings or other serious crimes, and significantly reduced
sentences to persons who acknowledged responsibility "for causing death
or permanent injury of a person or for rape, or for using explosives in public
places or in places frequented by the public." In principle, individuals
wishing to take advantage of the law were required to surrender their arms and
make a full disclosure of their actions to the authorities. According to officials,
the law's probation or reduced sentence provisions became applicable once the
information in such disclosures had been verified by local and national security
offices.
The issue of whether or not to accept the terms of the Civil Harmony Law reportedly
created considerable dissension within the armed groups, in particular the Islamic
Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut, AIS), which had, in practice,
observed a cease-fire with the army since October 1997. Some reportedly held
out for terms that included a political role for the Islamic Salvation Front
(Front Islamique du Salut, FIS), banned since 1992. On November 22, 1999, Abdelkader
Hachani, the top-ranking FIS official not in detention, was assassinated in
Algiers. In December 1999, the authorities announced the arrest of his alleged
murderer, but as of October 2000 no information concerning any investigation
into the killing had been made public.
On January 10, three days prior to the expiry of the Civil Harmony Law's six-month
grace period, President Bouteflika issued a decree granting a "pardon with
the force of amnesty" (grâce amnistiante) to "persons belonging
to organizations which voluntarily and spontaneously decide to put an end to
acts of violence, which put themselves entirely at the disposal of the state
and whose names appear in the annex to [this] decree"-namely, the AIS.
This decree exempted all persons covered from having to make any declaration
of the acts that they had committed and from imprisonment or other sanction.
It also exempted them from the ten-year deprivation of civil and political rights,
such as the right to vote or stand for office, that had been applied to persons
"repenting" under the terms of the Civil Harmony Law. It was, in effect,
a blanket amnesty for all crimes no matter how heinous. The next day, January
11, AIS commander Madani Mezrag formally announced the group's dissolution.
Two days later, the Islamic League for Preaching and Holy War (Ligue Islamique
de la Daâwa et du Djihad, LIDD), which hadbroken from the Armed Islamic
Group (Groupe Islamique Armé, GIA) and, with the AIS, observed the cease-fire
with the army, also dissolved itself under the terms of the pardon.
GIA elements led by Antar Zouabri and Hassan Hattab's Salafist Group for Preaching
and Combat denounced President Bouteflika's overtures and continued to mount
attacks on civilians as well as security posts and military patrols.
The government claimed widespread public support for the Civil Harmony Law,
citing the September 1999 referendum, yet the law made no provision for transparency,
or for involving the victims of crimes or the general public. Many Algerians,
most vocally groups representing families of victims of attacks by armed groups,
contended that investigations of "repentis"-those accepting amnesty
under the law-were cursory and that many were cleared before the veracity and
thoroughness of their confessions could be established. They also charged that
the January 10 pardon betrayed the spirit of the Civil Harmony Law by amnestying
all crimes, however grave, enabling perpetrators of killings and rape to return
to the communities they had formerly terrorized.
Reflecting this lack of official transparency, accurate information about the
law's implementation and the numbers of persons who benefitted from it was difficult
to obtain and often contradictory. Algerian and French press reports suggested
that some 1,500 fighters had turned themselves in under the law, and estimated
that the January 10 amnesty covered at most between two and three thousand AIS
adherents. The Algiers daily El Watan, citing "sources close to the security
services," wrote on July 13 that those remaining with the armed groups
numbered more than nine hundred, operating in small units away from the main
populated areas. Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni, in a January 20 press conference,
asserted that "eighty percent of the terrorists" had surrendered their
arms. However, when pressed as to how these estimates were calculated, he stated
"I can't give you the numbers for the simple reason that we are presently
at the stage of identification and census." Ministry of Justice officials
told Human Rights Watch in May that the total number of beneficiaries of the
Civil Harmony Law and the January 10 pardon was about 5,600, of whom some 330
were serving reduced sentences for crimes of violence. Murad Zoughir, the public
prosecutor for the wilaya (province) of Algiers, told Human Rights Watch that
the probation committee he headed had dealt with approximately one hundred "repentis,"
of whom about thirty had been sentenced to jail terms, forty exonerated, fifteen
placed on probation, and fifteen of whom remained under investigation. The failure
of the government to provide precise information about those benefitting from
the Civil Harmony Law or the full pardon, the offenses to which they confessed
or with which they were charged, and the disposition of their cases fueled considerable
suspicion that perpetrators of grave abuses were being cleared and given immunity
with little scrutiny or accountability.
There was virtually no progress in efforts to resolve some 4,000 documented
cases of alleged "disappearances" in previous years at the hands of
security officials. Throughout the year Algerian human rights lawyers and organizations
of relatives continued to receive and document further cases. In an interview
in Middle East Insight, a Washington, D.C.-based bi-monthly, President Bouteflika
said, "As to disappeared individuals, Algerian justice will spare no effort,
conducted in the framework of the law, to seek solutions to cases fully documented
with verified evidence." In response to repeated requests by Human Rights
Watch in May, however, as well as requests by other international organizations
and families of the "disappeared," government officials declined to
provide names or information in cases they claimed to have resolved.
Such limited information as was made available by different ministries and official
sources was inconsistent, and the government made no apparent effort to reconcile
the discrepancies evident in the different accounts. Interior Minister Zerhouni,
at his January 20 press conference, said that of 4,600 complaints of "disappearances"
known to his ministry, "among them 2,600 or 2,700 have been cleared up.
It includes persons who have gone back to the maquis (lit. "the bush"),
and others who have been killed by their comrades, some who've been incarcerated,
and still some who were found in the camps of the AIS." Minister of Justice
Ahmed Ouyahia told the government daily El Moudjahid on May 21 that his ministry
had opened files on 3,019 cases of missing persons and that "a large number
of the so-called disappeared were in fact in the ranks of terrorist groups,"
while two hundred were "alive and well either in prison or among the beneficiaries
of the Civil Harmony Law."
Ministry of Justice officials told Human Rights Watch that of these 3,019 cases,
833 were persons being sought by the security forces, ninety-three had been
killed in clashes with security forces, eighty-two were in detention, nine had
been killed in clashes among armed groups, forty-nine had been released from
detention and "may have joined the terrorists," and seventy-four were
at their homes. Human Rights Watch requested the names of individuals in any
of the categories mentioned, to determine to what extent they corresponded to
those compiled by lawyers and human rights groups. The officials declined to
provide them, however, on the grounds that they were all still "under investigation."
Kamel Rezzag-Bara, head of the quasi-official National Human Rights Observatory
(Observatoire National des Droits de l'Homme, ONDH), told Human Rights Watch
in May that the ONDH had 4,146 "disappeared" files open, 70 percent
of which dated from the 1993-1995 period, and none of which were more recent
than 1998. He declined to provide a list of names of missing persons, insisting
that to do so would be "not useful," but provided oral summaries of
several cases in which individuals reported as being "disappeared"
had allegedly been killed in clashes with security forces or had turned up at
home.
Ministry of Interior officials, reflecting the lack of seriousness with which
they have addressed the issue of the "disappeared," told Human Rights
Watch in May that the problem of three thousand "disappearances" and
missing persons out of a population today totaling thirty million did not compare
adversely with Algeria's independence war, which had left some fifty thousand
individuals out of a population then of around nine million unaccounted for.
Women, as well as men and children, continued to be killed by armed groups (see
WRD section). The Algerian press, reflecting official estimates, reported that
2,600 women had been sexually assaulted or raped during the conflict, mostly
in the 1995 to 1998 period, but some women's rights activists estimated the
number at some 5,000. Government officials, when meeting Human Rights Watch
in May, pointed to the high proportion of women engaged in professions, such
as medicine and the judiciary, as an indication of sexual equality, but they
were unable to indicate progress in dealing with the discriminatory Family Code
of 1984, which institutionalized the unequal status of women in matters of personal
status, marriage, divorce, property, and inheritance. President Bouteflika,
at a March 2000 conference organized by several women's rights groups, asserted
that changes regarding women's rights had to take into account a society's religious
beliefs and traditions.
Several individuals were detained and held incommunicado by security forces,
at least one of whom remained unaccounted for in late October 2000. Seventy-three-year-old
El Hadj M'lik was arrested at his home in central Algiers on the evening of
April 13, several hours after security officials had visited his house seeking
his son. His family reported that by mid-September they had had no contact with
him nor received any clarification from the authorities concerning his whereabouts.
Ali Mebroukine, a law professor at the National School of Administration in
Algiers and former advisor to President Liamine Zeroual, was arrested in Algiers
on May 27 on his return from Paris. According to Algeria-Interface, a Paris-based
information website, he was seen once by his wife in mid-June when he was brought
along by police who searched their home and seized documents. His wife, Insaf,
was later taken to a secret location and questioned, then released after being
instructed to "be quiet" about her husband. On June 28, the military
investigating magistrate overseeing the case confirmed to Mebroukine's lawyer
that he was being held in Blida military prison but did not divulge any charges
or other information about his detention.
Ministry of Justice officials assured Human Rights Watch in May that the government
treated allegations of human rights abuses by government officials seriously,
and stated that 348 persons associated with the security forces, including members
of "self-defense" militias (Groups for Legitimate Defense, GLD) organized
and armed by the interior ministry, had been prosecuted for human rights abuses
since 1992. Of these, they said, 179 were cases of physical abuse and fifteen
concerned arbitrary detention or torture. The officials declined, however, to
disclose names or other details, but noted that the numbers included several
police officers punished for their involvement in a well-publicized incident
in December 1999 in the town of Dellys. There, after a bomb explosion, the authorities
had indiscriminately rounded up some one hundred persons and beaten many of
them. Officials told Human Rights Watch that there had still been no prosecutions,
however, in the case of two mayors and GLD leaders in the Relizane area who
had been briefly detained in April 1998 for allegedly carrying out a series
of abductions and executions, although the case was still "under investigation."
The authorities appeared to make little effort to establish an effective process
to ensure that basic forensic work was carried out in order to help identify
homicide victims and suspects, and so to help establish whether those found
buried in unmarked graves included persons reported to have "disappeared"
in the custody of the security forces in previous years. During a visit to Canada
in April, President Bouteflika reportedly dismissed the question of undertaking
credible and independent inquiries into responsibility for "disappearances"
and massacres in Algeria as "intellectual coquetry."
The government maintained the state of emergency proclaimed in 1992, and on
several occasions acted to prevent public gatherings by human rights groups
as well as critics of its policies. On March 22, for example, police in Oran
forcibly dispersed a demonstration of relatives of the "disappeared"
and subsequently charged several women with participating in an unauthorized
gathering in a public place. On June 25, police clashed with demonstrators at
an unauthorized rally in Algiers held to mark the second anniversary of the
murder of Kabyle singer and rights activist Lounes Matoub.
Several human rights organizations told Human Rights Watch that government policies
curtailed their right to freedom of association. The National Association of
Families of "Disappeared" (ANFD) held weekly demonstrations outside
the offices of the ONDH to demand that the government provide information about
missing relatives, but it was not able to obtain official authorization to function.
The Association of Families of "Disappeared" in Constantine faced
a similar problem, and said that the authorities had interfered several times
with their regular demonstrations outside government offices. Ali Mrabet, a
founder of Sumoud (Steadfastness), which advocates investigation of killings
and kidnapings, said that the Ministry of Interior had ignored its three-year-old
application for registration, without which the group could not obtain permits
to hold meetings or open a bank account. Similarly, Rassemblement Action Jeunesse
(RAJ), a national youth association, produced documentation from recent years
showing numerous refusals by local authorities to their applications to hold
meetings, conferences, exhibitions, or film showings in Algiers and Tizi Ouzou.
RAJ Secretary General Hakim Addad told Human Rights Watch that the authorities
had continued to interdict RAJ or other organizations' gatherings, though no
longer in written form.
The governments commitment to freedom of association was called into question
by its response to efforts begun in December 1999 to register a new political
party, the Movement for Fidelity and Justice (WAFA), under the leadership of
former foreign minister and 1999 presidential candidate Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi.
WAFA was seen by some as representing a segment of the banned FIS. The political
parties law allowed the government sixty days to reject WAFA's application,
but it did not do this. However, the interior minister refused to publish notice
of the party's registration in the Official Gazette, a step that requires his
signature, and without which the party could not get permits for meetings and
conferences. The minister declared on May 10 that he "would not be the
one to sign the decision to return the banned party." The Algerian League
for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH) and the Algerian Human Rights League
(LADH) both called on the government in July to register WAFA in compliance
with the law, but ONDH head Rezzag-Bara asserted to Human Rights Watch that
WAFA did not need an official response to function.
FIS leader Abbasi Madani remained under house arrest and the party's number
two, Ali Belhadj, remained in prison but was allowed to receive family visits.
When questioned about their status by the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview
published on September 13, President Bouteflika replied, "The FIS was disbanded
by court order before I came to power. The new constitution doesn't provide
for FIS's existence at all. So don't talk to me about this subject because to
me FIS doesn't exist." He said that Belhadj "is now being kept in
better conditions than he has ever been," and that "If Ali Belhadj
disavows all those who use violence, then I will help him."
Algeria's privately-owned print media covered many politically sensitive issues
in a critical fashion, although some topics, such as the political role of the
military leadership, remained the off-limits. Press accounts of security operations
continued to rely almost exclusively on official sources, depicting raids and
clashes that resulted in the deaths of unnamed "terrorists" but seldom
their apprehension. No journalists were prosecuted for publication of "security-related
information," but Reporters without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières,
RSF) reported that several publishers were subject to libel suits, including
some brought by army officers or directors of state companies. The independent
weekly La Nation remained suspended, ostensibly for failing to pay outstanding
invoices to the Société d'Impression d'Alger (SIA), one of the
state printing houses that effectively monopolize newspaper printing. According
to RSF, which visited the country in June, the directors of several newspapers
suspended in 1992 had been unable to secure the official authorization required
by state-owned printing companies to resume publication. Broadcast media remained
a government monopoly. Journalists working for the Paris daily Libération
and Radio France International were unable to get visas to visit Algeria immediately
prior to President Bouteflika's state visit to Paris in June. (See below.)
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