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06/01/2000
An open letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Geneva
Dear Mrs. Robinson,
You have tried to intervene on Algeria, you were sympathetic when the Ireland-Algeria Solidarity Group approached you at the 1998 Human Rights Forum in Dublin so, as a member of that group, I turn to you in the hope that you can do something to prevent further tragedy in that country.
Most people think - because that is what the press says - that over 100 000 people have died in Algeria since 1992 as a result of the activities of "Moslem terrorists". There was a time when even I thought that.
Then, at the time of the massacres of the summer of 1997, the press revealed that the Algerian government bore a huge responsibility in the events. That is when we formed the IASG, to ask for an independent investigation on what was really going on in Algeria. We contacted various political figures in Ireland and it seems that most of them were well aware of the problem. Yet, after spending just one day in Algiers as a guest of the Algerian Government (9th December 1997), our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr. David Andrews reported to the EU Luxembourg Summit that the hands of the Algerian Government "were clean and anything they might do would be in the interest of protecting the welfare of the people." (Irish Times, 15th December 1997) You will think me very naïve, but I was stunned.
I started to read everything I could find on Algeria and discovered what you probably know because it is all there, in books, magazines, reviews. Algeria must be opened to the market economy, its resources must be privatised and that will be done at whatever cost: the loss of 460.000 jobs, the destruction of factories attacked by so-called "terrorists", the imprisonment of their directors on trumped-up charges, the rise of the "import-import" Mafia, the social dislocation, the fraudulent elections which the international community winces at but the result of which it effectively endorses. And the terror, the slaughter of the innocent.
I never used to read the business pages of newspapers. Now, I read them first. That is where Human Rights violations originate, and not just where Algeria is concerned.
I call upon you now because you wrote in the Irish Times (World Review '99) that we all bear a responsibility in violations of human rights, individually and collectively. You also talked about the need to prevent them rather than condemn them after the event.
President Bouteflika's law on Amnesty (Loi sur la Concorde Civile) expires on the 13th of January. After that, he has warned that the repression would be terrible.
Abdelkader Hachani, a moderate Islamist leader, had questioned this approach. He had called for those guilty of crimes - whatever side they belonged to - to be brought to justice. He felt that there could be no reconciliation otherwise. He has since been murdered.
President Bouteflika, who was elected in April in yet another dubious election, has only recently revealed the composition of his government. It was enough for most Algerians to look at the name of his Minister for Justice to know that nothing had changed. We are now all dreading the 13th of January.
Do the shareholders of BP-Amoco, Daewoo or Coca-Cola know the real price of their shares, their human cost? (The case of Coca-Cola setting up in Algeria, a country where water is rationed, is particularly sickening when you know that producing a can of coke wastes several times its volume of water.) How many lives is the free-market worth? What will happen after the 13th?
I do not know what can be done and the worse thing is that I feel that the people who could do something to prevent further bloodshed already know everything I could tell them and probably more but have decided that some human lives were expendable for the sake of...what? What can justify such inhumanity?
Please Mrs. Robinson, can you speak again on behalf of Algeria, now?
Yours sincerely,
Claudine Gaidoni