Débat autour de la réconciliation nationale

[Al-khiyal]

Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika's decree implementing the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation at the end of February was a blunt reminder that the culture of opacity, impunity and injustice remains deeply embedded in the minds of many Arab rulers.

Indeed, the full text of the new legislation was not revealed to the public before its approval on February 27 by the Algerian Cabinet. It was hastily endorsed while Parliament was not in session and as the beleaguered independent press faced mounting pressure, with at least 20 journalists sentenced to prison terms in the last two years.

The latest victim of this "systematic policy of repression of the rare remaining independent voices," as Nadir Benseba of the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists put it, was Hakim Lalam of the daily Le Soir. The confirmation on March 7 by a court of appeals in Algiers of a six-month prison sentence handed down to the journalist for defaming Bouteflika sheds more light on the alarming circumstances surrounding the approval and implementation of the peace and reconciliation charter.

According to a joint statement by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and the International Federation for Human Rights, the charter "will consecrate impunity for crimes under international law and other human rights abuses, and even muzzle open debate by criminalizing public discussion about the nation's decade-long conflict."

When Bouteflika came to power seven years ago, many hoped that the president, who did not stage a coup d'etat or inherit power from his father like most of his Arab counterparts, would turn the page on the civil conflict of the 1990s that claimed more than 200,000 lives. (The government recently acknowledged, for the first time, that its forces killed 17,000 Islamist rebels during the conflict.) Unfortunately, Bouteflika's decree on implementing the peace and reconciliation charter intensified his ongoing war of attrition against independent journalism and is proof that he has more in common with Arab autocrats than meets the eye.......

Amnesia is the price of Algerian peace and reconciliation

[Al-khiyal]

ALGIERS — In the 1990's, Algeria was the Iraq of the Arab world, ripping out its own heart in a bloodbath that pitted a rising Islamist movement against military death squads, killing more than 100,000 people. It was a model of hell on earth.

More recently the country has offered itself as a very different kind of model, one of reconciliation after civil war. American officials have said that as Iraqis fashion their own national reconciliation effort, Algeria is worthy of close study.

But interviews with dozens of people affected by Algeria's approach suggest that its amnesty program is less a model than a cautionary tale. Few are happy, and the fighting is not over. Dozens of people are dying monthly, according to journalists here who follow the killing.

"We've reached a dangerous point when the criminals are out of prison and the people who don't agree with it are arrested," said Cherifa Kheddar, whose brother and sister were killed by Islamic extremists in 1996.

The Algerian approach is this: a national reconciliation law, approved by referendum in September and promulgated in March, set thousands of convicted Islamist fighters free while ordering silence from their victims. The law shelters government death squads from prosecution.

It provides money to some Islamist fighters to help them start new lives and even seeks to expunge the word terrorist from the national discourse. The people who cut throats and those whose throats were cut are now referred to as "victims of the national tragedy."

[To date, according to a government report issued on June 27, 40,000 people — 2,200 former Islamist fighters and 37,800 others — have applied for amnesty or compensation under the program, Reuters reported.]

It was a faster, more sweeping solution than the cathartic "truth and reconciliation commissions" that have operated in South Africa and elsewhere, creating a public forum in which victims could tell their stories and others could confess their crimes in return for amnesty.

But here in Algeria, people like Ms. Kheddar are frustrated and angry that the killers will never be judged.

"Our position has always been that justice must work first and that those found guilty can be pardoned later on," Ms. Kheddar said. "But the national reconciliation gives impunity even to those people who have killed hundreds of times."

Former Islamic fighters are equally dissatisfied with the law.

Abdelhak Layada, the founder of the Armed Islamic Group, which attacked foreigners, took its terror campaign to Europe and was blamed for the worst of the period's atrocities, warned that without "true reconciliation," the tensions that led to the violence would build once again.

"The wounds won't really be healed without a real political settlement," Mr. Layada said in the sitting room of his concrete house in a region south of Algiers once called the "triangle of death" because of massacres there. The door to the house is pierced with bullets from an army assault in 1992 shortly after the formation of the Armed Islamic Group, known by its initials in French, G.I.A. Though condemned to death, he was released from prison in March as part of the reconciliation program.

Mr. Layada declines to talk in detail about his fighting days, hinting that he has secrets to tell but that his freedom is too fresh to risk. He said he regretted the killing of innocent civilians, including the beheading of seven Trappist monks who were abducted in a bid to win his freedom. He said he had no control over how the movement evolved after his imprisonment in 1993.

"When I was in the G.I.A., it was one organization," he said. "After I went to prison, there were many G.I.A.'s."

But he says the country still yearns for an Islamic state, despite enduring years of horrifying violence. "Let us organize our political party and we'll see how strong it is," he said, lounging in his sitting room, dressed in a pale green robe.

Mr. Layada, who has short black hair, a black goatee and wire-rimmed glasses with tortoise shell stems, warned that unless the state satisfied the people's desire for a government based on Islamic law, "it will push them to rise up."

He said the government was fooling itself and the people to pretend that the violence had ended. He referred to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which split from his organization, rejected the government's national reconciliation plan and has remained active with hundreds of followers. Its leaders, Hassan Hattab and Moktar ben Moktar, were once fighters under Mr. Layada's command.

"Ask the authorities if they can stop them," he said with a broad smile. "When you leave a small fire burning, it can spread."

Mr. Layada is not alone in his pessimistic assessment of the attempted reconciliation.

"They haven't solved the root of the problem," said Ali Benhadjar, who won a parliamentary seat in 1991 as an Islamist candidate and took up arms when a military-led government nullified election results to avert an Islamist victory.

"They are just giving people money and telling them to be quiet." Mr. Benhadjar said. This is not a solution."

Mr. Benhadjar led another splinter group, the League for Dawa and Jihad. He claims responsibility for killing the leader of the Armed Islamic Group, Djamel Zitouni, under whose rule that group's worst atrocities were committed, including the beheading of the monks.

"I sent my men to kill him and they did," Mr. Benhadjar said proudly, standing in his cramped herbal medicine shop in the mountain town of Médéa south of Algiers.

He argued that the reconciliation law was meant more for the government security services, who participated in many killings, than it was for Islamist fighters. The law prohibits people from pursuing claims against the state. "This reconciliation is serving the regime," he said.

He warned that unless the government allowed the Islamists to work for the Islamic state that they dream of, the violence would return.

"The law in the Western world was made by human beings, but Islamic law is coming from God," Mr. Benhadjar said, stroking his long russet beard. He said Algeria and other Arab states "have strayed from the law of Islam, and so sooner or later there will be a clash between these governments and the people."

But for much of the population traumatized by the violence, the law is a kind of betrayal of the innocent people who died.

"We don't have the right to talk about these things anymore," said a woman in a bookshop on Didouche Mourad Street in downtown Algiers, referring to a black-and-white photograph of her friend Joachim Grau, a Portuguese man who once owned the shop and was gunned down in 1994. "They want people to forget."

At Notre Dame d'Afrique, a Roman Catholic basilica outside town, the police recently forced nuns to remove portraits of the seven monks beheaded in the failed bid to free Mr. Layada, because the display breached the reconciliation law.

Ms. Kheddar, who watched Islamists drag her brother and sister off to brutal deaths, spends every Sunday with other survivors of the violence in front of the governmental palace, displaying photos of women who were killed and demanding justice.

She vows to keep the weekly vigil until there has been a full accounting of who did what to whom. Though she has been arrested once, she does not shy from repeating the horrors of that June evening a decade ago.

She was napping in her room when her sister cried out to come quickly. Their brother, Mohamed Rheda Kheddar, was at the front door surrounded by five young Islamic extremists pointing guns at his head.

The men ushered them into the sitting room, then berated the family for owning a television, berated her brother for smoking and berated the women for not covering their heads. They told the family that Algeria needed to be purged and purified, and took her brother into an adjoining apartment. They tortured him for more than an hour with the claw of a hammer before cutting his throat.

When they came for her sister, Ms. Kheddar managed to escape and get help from a neighboring police station. She said she believed that the men had planned to rape her sister, but shot her and fled when they discovered that Ms. Kheddar was gone.

Ms. Kheddar found her brother on the floor of his bathroom. She said he looked as if he were sleeping on a rug of bright red velour. It was only later that she realized that the family did not own a rug of red velour. In shock, Ms. Kheddar said, she had not understood that what she had seen was his drying blood.

Algerians are not reconciled by amnesty law

(Use ID mediajunkie16 password mediajunkie to access 2-page article)

[phylay]

ALGIERS — In the 1990's, Algeria was the Iraq of the Arab world, ripping out its own heart in a bloodbath that pitted a rising Islamist movement against military death squads, killing more than 100,000 people. It was a model of hell on earth.

The analogy is not correct! Only the fact that ppl died and die in both places is similar....

[Al-khiyal]

BLIDA, Algeria (Reuters) - Algeria, emerging from years of conflict, will not find lasting peace from an amnesty ending this month because Islamist killers won immunity without having to reveal what they did, a human rights activist said.

Cherifa Kheddar, who heads a charity campaigning for justice for the bereaved, added in a Reuters interview that Islamist insurgents freed or given immunity under the process had behaved like victors, making national reconciliation very difficult.

"Why must we accept it if we do not know why our loved ones were killed?" Kheddar, whose brother and sister were tortured to death by Islamist rebels in 1996, said on Saturday. "Hiding the truth is not a good strategy for establishing a durable peace."

"The victims left children and families, and one day or another the children will ask the authorities why the state did not ensure the security of these people, why didn't the authorities asked questions about the crime itself and why didn't the whole truth about what happened ever come out."

More than 2,000 Islamist ex-fighters have been freed under the amnesty in a test of the government's push to reconcile people in the north African oil-producing nation whose stability is seen as crucial for the security of the Mediterranean region.

The amnesty, which started on Feb 28, gave guerrillas still fighting six months to surrender and be pardoned provided they had not committed massacres, rapes and bombings of public places.

It also bars prosecutions of members of the security forces for any wrongdoing committed during the conflict that killed 150,000 to 200,000 people, mostly civilians, and bars public criticism of any participant in the conflict for their actions.

The conflict began when the authorities canceled 1992 elections which an Islamist party was poised to win.

Tens of thousands of Algerians answered a call for a holy war to overthrow the state. They attacked citizens and soldiers to sow fear. Some groups specialized in killing intellectuals. Some killed women and girls for not wearing the veil.

Several former rebel leaders have said since their release they would still like an Islamic state and at least one has suggested that violence will not end until one is established.

Kheddar said she had seen no sign of repentance.

"The victims of terrorism ... will never admit that a terrorist is seen as the equal of a victim, or the brother of a victim or the sister of a victim," she said.

"If during this amnesty the killers had shown any sign of repentance we would have been able to change our position, but as yet we have not yet met a terrorist who has shown this.

"Instead they presented themselves like victors in front of the victims. They have not repented. They have not asked forgiveness of the Algerian people or of their victims."

Kheddar has long proposed a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission, dismissing the argument of Algerian leaders that the country could not withstand the strains unleashed by a full accounting of the violence.

"Installing a truth commission would be very, very difficult at the moment but if there is political will ... it could work," she said. "Victims can sometimes be comforted by knowing why this person was targeted and killed and in what circumstances."

Only truth will stabilize Algeria - rights activist

[Al-khiyal]

BLIDA, Algeria —Fatmazora Mokrane cherishes a faded photograph of her son, a teenager with curly hair and a calm gaze. The last time she saw him was in 1995, when Islamic extremists kidnapped the 16-year-old on his way to work.

She believes he was murdered _ like her brother, who was shot dead in his apartment, another victim of the Islamic insurgency that tore Algeria apart after the secular government stopped 1992 parliamentary elections to thwart an expected victory by a hard-line religious party.

Mokrane is suffering another loss now. She feels the killers are escaping justice because of the government's efforts to turn the page on a brutal conflict that saw 150,000-200,000 people killed.

Authorities are offering amnesty for many of the remaining Islamic militants as part of the peace initiative. So far, 2,200 prisoners have been released, while 250 to 300 militants have turned in their weapons ahead of the August 31 deadline, the government says.

Families of those killed, as well as human rights groups, say the peace charter is a crude attempt to get Algerians to forget about the conflict while denying justice to its victims.

They would have preferred something like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which allowed victims and perpetrators of violence during the apartheid era to testify about killings and other abuses.

Some Algerians they could even have accepted pardons for killers, but only after the violence was accounted for in the courts.

"Of course we want peace, but not like this," said Mokrane, visiting the cramped offices of Djazairouna (Our Algeria), an association of victims' families based in Blida.

The group has more than 5,000 members, mostly women. The region around Blida, about 25 miles south of the capital, Algiers, saw some of the worst reprisals by Islamic militants.

"We want peace, but not with the terrorists being freed, avoiding arrest and trial, and with us denied the right to lodge complaints against them," said Mokrane, 56.

Her son, Berouichi Billel, was targeted with other family members because his father, a mechanic, was accused of cooperating with police. Along with his photograph, Mokrane carries an X-ray showing the bullet wounds of another son, Mohamed Farid, wounded in 1994 when he was 19.

After the army prevented an election victory by the now banned fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front, religious extremists terrorized the country for years.

"You had to be on their side," said Ahmed El-Fertas, who was shot in the hand and chest when his food shop near Blida was attacked in 1994. "Everyone who was not with them was a target."

Security forces have largely wiped out the rebels since the 1990s with successive amnesty offers and military crackdowns. But the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, considered the only remaining group of any strength, has rejected the amnesty and has been blamed for a surge in violence since the peace charter came into force at the end of February.

The peace plan allows for the pardon of most militants, if they surrender.

Those held responsible for mass murders, rapes and planting bombs in public places are excluded, but Human Rights Watch and other groups say that many crimes have never been investigated and that the government has a poor record for screening amnesty applicants.

The charter also provides compensation to families whose relatives disappeared when they were suspected of involvement with the militants. But it outlaws any public complaints against security forces, which have been blamed for thousands of disappearances.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika says the charter can restore national unity and help Algerians put the past behind them. It was overwhelmingly approved in a referendum last September.

On the day the plan was approved, members of Djazairouna buried voting cards and copies of the charter at the graves of their murdered relatives in protest.

Cherifa Kheddar, founder of the group, said she has felt betrayed by Bouteflika.

"He says we are all Algerian. Nonetheless, there is a difference between a criminal and a victim, even if we all have the same nationality," she said.

Kheddar, 46, founded the group after seven members of her family were slain by militants in 1996. The first to die was her uncle, who ran as a candidate against the Islamic party. A few months later, she hid while militants tortured and killed her brother and sister in the family home.

Another member of the group, Yamina Bensalem, said she has received little help from the state, even as those responsible for terrorism are pardoned.

She described how her husband was working as a gardener at a house when it was encircled by terrorists in 1997. He was killed along with another employee and the house's owner, a retired soldier.

The militants cut the men's throats, slit their stomachs and then trampled on the bodies, she said.

Placing photographs of her son and stepson on a table, Bensalem said: "My children can no longer say 'papa.' Will they be able to forgive?"

Government angers Algerian victims' families

[Al-khiyal]

Fatmazora Mokrane holds a photo of her son, Berouichi Billel, who was kidnapped by extremists in Algeria in 1995.

BLIDA, Algeria -- For nearly a decade, this city nestled at the foot of the Atlas Mountains anchored one corner of Algeria's "triangle of death," a killing field overrun by bomb throwers, throat-slitters and masked gunmen during an apocalyptic civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people.

Peace has gradually returned to Blida, an oasis of orchards and fields north of the Sahara. Stability has been restored as well to most other parts of Algeria where a military-controlled government fought Islamic radicals, although clashes are reported almost daily in remote areas.

Now, in an effort to bring a final end to violence that began in 1992, the Algerian government is pinning its hopes on an ambitious national reconciliation program, which grants official forgiveness to combatants if they set aside their weapons.

Under terms of the reconciliation, which expired Aug. 31 but might be extended, about 2,500 prisoners convicted or accused of terrorism have gone free. Also covered by the amnesty are members of the Algerian security services, blamed for the disappearance of 8,000 civilians and accused of systematic torture. The only people not eligible: rapists and those responsible for mass murder or planting bombs in public places.

Reconciliation and amnesty programs have been embraced by other nations plagued by enduring conflicts. After the end of apartheid in South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission pardoned human rights violators who confessed their crimes in public. In Morocco last year, a similar commission collected testimony on more than 22,000 documented cases of political repression that occurred under the reign of King Hassan II. The Moroccan and the Algerian programs both include provisions to compensate victims and their families.

More recently, some government officials in Iraq have raised the prospect of offering an amnesty in a bid to end the sectarian warfare that followed the U.S.-led invasion.

Although Algerian voters overwhelmingly approved the terms of their national reconciliation in a referendum last year, few people are predicting that it will heal the rifts and psychological wounds that run deep here.

In dozens of interviews, Algerians said they hoped the amnesty would stop the lingering violence. But many lamented that it would not provide any accountability or answers regarding the countless atrocities that occurred.

Fatima Yous, president of SOS Disappeared, a group that investigates missing persons believed to have been abducted by the government, called the reconciliation an attempt to bury the past. She said she still aches to know what happened to her 20-year-old grandson, who was detained by police in 1997 and has not been seen since.

"All we want is the truth," she said. "We are ready to forgive, but we want our families back and we want the truth. We are not going to sue the guy who killed him. But I do want to know if they killed him, why they killed him and where his bones are."

No one here will be able to forget what happened anytime soon.

Mass graves are still exhumed in sandy ditches and dry outdoor wells. Houses remain pockmarked by bullet holes. Razor wire and uniformed patrols are omnipresent.

But supporters of the amnesty warn that tougher measures - anything designed to seek justice or dig up the past - could easily backfire and drag the country back into civil war.

"What we survived was just horrible, terrible," said Mustapha Farouk Ksentini, a lawyer in Blida who serves as chairman of an official human rights commission that has advised the government on the reconciliation plan. "The country is tired. The national unity is very fragile."

"We know that this national reconciliation will forgive a lot of criminals, but it's the price we have to pay to turn the page," he added. "Algeria doesn't have the means to press ahead with trials. We made a choice and said the national interests of Algeria are more important than this."

The reconciliation is only the latest attempt by the Algerian government to bring stability to a country that has suffered greatly over the past half-century.

The second-largest country on the African continent, Algeria won independence from France in 1962, but only after a war that lasted eight years. Three subsequent decades of a military-led government and socialist policies failed to modernize the economy.

In 1992, after Islamic fundamentalists appeared on the verge of winning power in national elections, the military intervened and dissolved the government. That led to civil war, as Islamic radicals took up arms.

The conflict spiraled as rebel factions embraced terrorism and targeted civilians, annihilating entire villages as part of a strategy to weaken popular support for the government. Government security forces also showed little regard for human rights, relying on torture and other tough tactics to break the rebellion.

By 2000, the violence was starting to ebb. Voters in a referendum that year approved a "civil concord," Algeria's first attempt to end the conflict by offering amnesty to those fighting the government. While thousands of Islamic guerrillas accepted pardons, many continued to fight because the measure effectively disenfranchised Islamic political parties.

More disasters followed, both natural and political. In 2001, ethnic Berbers rioted for weeks to protest their treatment by the government. A few months later, several hundred people were killed by floods in Algiers. Another low point was reached in 2003, when more than 2,000 people died in a massive earthquake.

"We lost 15 years of our history," said Aboudjerra Soltani, chairman of Movement of Society for Peace, a party of Islamic fundamentalists that professes nonviolence and is part of the ruling government coalition. "Our economy crumbled. We lost a lot of confidence. It takes a lot of strength to recover from this."

Since then, however, signs of hope have emerged. A global rise in energy prices has lifted the economy and has helped Algeria, the world's second-leading exporter of natural gas, erase foreign debts and invest billions in public works projects.

In 2004, in an election that international observers judged as legitimate, Algerian voters gave a second term to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Soon after, he announced another amnesty program, which took effect in March.

According to government officials, about 300 Islamic fighters have accepted the new deal. They estimate that another 800 to 1,000 guerrillas remain at large, down from about 50,000 in the mid-1990s.

While the amnesty offers reconciliation to terrorists and others with blood on their hands, opponents say some provisions in the law are far from conciliatory.

For instance, the measure clamps down on public debate over what happened during the civil war, making it a crime to criticize government actions of that period "or to tarnish the image of Algeria internationally." It has been assailed for those reasons by rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Mostefa Bouchachi, a human rights lawyer in Algiers, said it was unrealistic to expect Algeria to prosecute large numbers of people. "It would result in another bloodbath. But at least we would like to know who did what, and why, and who is responsible. In the Algerian reconciliation, they just tell you to turn the page. We think it's a culturalization of impunity for both camps: the security forces and the Islamists."

Some military officials, however, have complaints of their own. After struggling for 15 years to win the civil war, they questioned whether it made sense to release 2,500 enemies of the state from prison.

Gen. Fodil Cherif Brahim, the army commander in charge of the region surrounding the capital, Algiers, until he retired in 2004, predicted that many former prisoners would return to the mountains or the desert and resume their fight.

"These people are fanatics to the extreme," he said. "They don't know anything about the real Islam. This is what they did: They committed horrible crimes. They put knives in the bellies of pregnant women."

"These people, you have to kill them," he added. "They will never give up."

Such sentiments are common in Blida, where few families escaped the violence of the war.

Zohra Khelafi, 51, said her husband was killed by Islamic radicals in a 1997 firebombing because he worked for the local government as a municipal guard. That same year, militants murdered two dozen other members of Khelafi's family, including a 3-year-old niece who was stuffed into a giant kettle and boiled alive.

"I want the government to punish them, to kill them, just like they did to us," she said. "Instead, the government has released them and they are back on the streets."

Algerian program offers amnesty, but not answers about past

[Al-khiyal]

Analysis from Ghazi Hidouci, former Minister of Economy of Algeria - originally published 28 June 2006:

The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was enacted in August 2005 and approved by referendum on September 29, 2005. The law stipulates the closure of cases of prosecution and the termination of sentences for people who committed acts of violence between 1992 and 2006, excluding those responsible for some specific acts. The law provides for compensation of victims but it bans the Islamic Salvation Front from political activity. Through this law, the government forsakes prosecuting security forces for acts perpetrated during the years of war and bans all forms of opposition to the Charter, raising ethical and legal questions. By choosing to resort to popular arbitration through a referendum, the government hoped to pre-empt public and parliamentary debates on the Charter, avoid a reform of the Constitution which protects freedom of thought. By this, government is exposing itself to criticism for violating the International Charter for Human Rights to which Algeria is a signatory. Beyond legal and ethical issues, this process driven from the top might be seen in the future as a missed opportunity for achieving a genuine “horizontal reconciliation”. Can peace and democracy be built on these bases?

Historical-political context

The youth uprising of October 1988, and the spontaneous strikes which followed, triggered riots in most of Algeria’s main cities. With the death toll rising to more than five hundred, mainly in the capital, a state of emergency was declared and the army intervened, for the first time since 1965.

The demands of the youth and the strikers focused mainly on opening the political regime and on solving economic problems caused by the heavy foreign debt burden and resulting economic structural adjustment which severely impacted the underprivileged classes. Chadli Benjedid, then President of the Republic and leader of the single party, the historic FLN (National Liberation Front) sympathized with the reform movements that were shaking the socialist world and Latin America at that time, and started a vast reform operation. The reforms were radical and systematic in the light of the times. At the political level, the most important reforms were recognition of the multi-party system, freedom of expression, independence of the judiciary and subordination of the army to the legislative power. At the economic level, the single most important change was recognition of a market economy. . A new constitution was adopted soon after a referendum, and a four-year transition period commenced after which free legislative and then presidential elections should occur.

Although the transition was stopped after two years, significant democratic and economic progress was achieved in spite of the difficulties imposed from outside, such as the refusal to renegotiate the debt without conditionalities and pressures to rule out Islamic movements from the political field. The legislative elections were interrupted in January 1992 after the army intervened, dismissing the President and freezing the Constitution. The reasons put forward were the necessity to save the Republic from the danger of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), whose victory was assured after the first round, and the fear of a Salafist-style theocratic regime. The intervention of the army launched a long period of destabilization marked by an economic semi-paralysis and the heightening of social inequalities.

The ensuing system of terrorism/repression produced an internal conflict with many aspects. The horror came to a climax in 1996 and 1997 with the proliferation of collective massacres of innocents of all ages, which remain unexplained to this day. The current President of the Republic, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, estimated in 2004 that some 200,000 people were dead and thousands of others were missing. These long years left the society deeply traumatized, with scars that take a long time to heal, leaving deep marks on two generations of Algerians. The terms “rahma” (clemency), “reconciliation” and “national tragedy” were later used to translate, if not exorcize, this reality.

The instruments and the mechanisms to overcome the crisis

In August 2005, more than thirteen years after the elections were stopped, the “Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation” was promulgated to put an end to Islamist resistance movements (maquis). The text was approved by a national referendum on September 29, 2005, without a parliamentary debate, although one was expressly planned. Implementation of the Charter started on February 28, 2006 with the promulgation of one edict and three decrees of application. There is a notable difference between the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation and the edict promulgated six months after: while the first did not explicitly mention amnesty for the security force members, the second legislated on the matter. Although it took just six months to put the finishing touches to the formal mechanism, it had taken President Bouteflika five years of patient explanations, laborious diplomacy and consummate speaking skills, in addition to an unequivocal reelection in 2004, to overcome opposition to the Charter.

In reality, attempts to find a solution between the government and the maquis go back a very long time. In 1996, after President Liamine Zeroual ruled out a political agreement proposal put forward by the majority of the then active opposition movements, including the FLN and the FIS, he released from prison some political Islamist leaders, started negotiations between the army and the maquis, and announced the “rahma” (the “civil concord”). He promised to drop legal proceedings and to discreetly reintegrate the terrorists who would lay down their arms. This initiative did not go far because of serious differences at the top level of the government regarding the content, the terms and the advantages gained from the operation. Many maquisards (members of the resistance)— although not enough to constitute a determining phenomenon — responded to the appeal and dissociated themselves from their political leaders who gained nothing. A shocking new wave of terrorism was launched however it quickly ran out of steam.

In October 1997, an agreement, that was kept secret for a long time and whose specific content and terms are still unknown, was signed between the military command and the largest and most well-known armed factions (such as the Islamic Salvation Army, AIS). When President Bouteflika took office on July 13, 1999, this agreement became the “law related to the restoration of the civil concord”. It led to the large-scale release of armed groups (including the famous Islamic Armed Groups, GIA). Some leaders flaunted themselves in public and the authorities made no effort to give any legal justification for their return to civil life. A significant weight of public opinion, the press in general, and the secular political movements, distanced themselves from the government and led a campaign against this law arguing that it constituted an. arbitrary impunity procedure for the abuses and crimes committed and a voluntary silence regarding the conditions in which terrorism and repression developed and ceased.

The result of the agreement can be summarized in the following five points:

* The files of the legal proceedings were closed and the sentences of the people who committed or who were accomplices in one or several violent acts between January 1992 and March 2006 (six months after the law came into force with the referendum of September 29, 2005) were dropped. Excluded from this provision were those whose implication in collective massacres, rapes and use of explosives in public places was proven

* Compensation for the victims of terrorism and the missing.

* All members of the FIS were forbidden to engage in any kind of political activity.

* Any forms of opposition to the Charter was forbidden (whether through the media or associations, be it individual or collective). Any Algerian who spoke or wrote, in Algeria or abroad, about the responsibilities of individuals and structures during 1992-2006 would be sentenced to prison. The historical or intellectual writings and the political expression regarding these facts by Algerians in Algeria and abroad would be considered an offense to be penalized.

* Any legal proceedings against the forces of law and order, whatever their origin (army, police, militia)for all acts committed during the said period, were dropped.

The ministry of justice immediately announced the release of 2,000 people held prisoners for terrorist acts. Two thousand other prisoners were granted pardon. The referendum allowed the President of the Republic to take the measures he considered useful in case the application faced unexpected difficulties, which gave more freedom to adapt the procedure to the constraints of the moment and to better target the actions on the political level.....