Events of 1993

Human Rights Developments

Mounting state repression and the increased targeting of civilians by well-armed opposition groups contributed to the abysmal state of human rights during 1993, the second year of emergency rule in Algeria.

The government took no concrete measures to revive the electoral process it had suspended in January 1992 after a first-round victory by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS). Nor did it act credibly to reverse the surge in abuses for which it had been responsible since the canceled elections.

The most disturbing development of 1993 was the spread of general political violence. According to a tally of official news reports, during the first nine months of 1993 over one hundred members of the security forces and over one hundred civilians were killed in assassinations attributed by the government to Islamist groups, while nearly 500 Islamists were killed. The civilian victims came from all walks of life, and included prominent writers, professors, and public figures.

In the absence of claims of responsibility, and given the difficulty of conducting independent research in Algeria, the authorship of specific acts was often difficult to attribute. But it was clear that armed Islamist groups were responsible for many, if not most, of the killings of both civilians and security force members that had been attributed to them by the authorities.

The principles of customary international humanitarian law which bind all parties to a conflict, include an absolute prohibition on killing or ill-treating persons once they are in custody or hors de combat, and a requirement to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. These principles were repeatedly violated in Algeria.

During 1993, the government intensified its battle against the Islamic resistance, not only on the military but also on the judicial front. New "special courts," created by a 1992 decree, convicted many hundreds of defendants in what were officially described as "terrorism" cases. Their procedures fell short of international standards for a fair trial. The special courts pronounced nearly all of the more than 300 death penalties handed down between January and October, 1993. (Most of the death penalties were pronounced in absentia; persons convicted in absentia are entitled to new trials if they surrender or are captured.) Twenty-six death sentences, all in connection with "terrorist" offenses, were carried out during this period.

The current phase of turmoil in Algeria began with the cancelation of elections in January 1992 and the replacement of the president by a military-dominated executive council, the High State Council (Haut Conseil d'État, or HCE). In February 1992, the HCE declared a state of emergency and banned the FIS, the party that had won the first round of elections. The government then detained, by its own count, some 9,000 suspected FIS members and sympathizers and dismissed hundreds of party members from the local government posts to which they had been elected in 1990.

Meanwhile, an underground Islamist movement, whose structure and links to the overt politicalleadership of the FIS remained nebulous, took up arms against the regime. Most of its operations consisted of hit-and-run ambushes targeting police and gendarmes, and acts of sabotage against state property. These attacks began to occur on an almost-daily basis in 1992 and intensified in 1993.

In December 1992, the HCE imposed an indefinite night-time curfew on the capital and six adjacent provinces, later extended to three more provinces. Elite troops were dispatched to begin flushing out suspected Islamist hideouts. Extended gun battles often resulted in casualties on both sides.

In February 1993, the state of emergency was renewed indefinitely and the new special courts began hearing cases. The HCE had established these courts of exception by Legislative Decree 92-03 of September 30, 1992, using the executive and legislative powers it had arrogated to itself. The special courts, which had potential jurisdiction over any case involving "subversion" and "terrorism," quickly replaced desert detention camps as the government's preferred means of dealing with the thousands of Islamists being arrested. The decree establishing the courts made clear that their purpose was to try a large volume of cases expeditiously and mete out harsh punishments to those they convicted. The decree doubled most punishments that Algeria's penal code provided for comparable offenses, and provided life sentences for what were previously ten- to-twenty year sentences, and the death penalty for what were life sentences.

Decree 92-03 prolonged from two to twelve days the permissible length of incommunicado detention in "subversion" and "terrorism" cases. It lowered the age of legal responsibility in such cases from eighteen to sixteen. It also defined "subversion" in an excessively broad fashion, and provided prison sentences for those who expressed sympathy, or distributed publications that express sympathy, for "subversive" acts.

Due process rights of defendants before special courts were restricted in a number of ways. Opportunities for appeal were more limited than in ordinary Algerian courts. The identity of judges was kept secret, under penalty of imprisonment; there was therefore no accountability or assurance that conflicts of interest would come to light. The courts were required to render a verdict within one month of receiving the case from the investigating magistrate. Such a deadline, while arguably guaranteeing a defendant's right to a prompt trial, ran counter to the higher duty of a court to determine the truth. Concern over the time limits was heightened by the fact that special courts often tried fifteen or more defendants at one time. In addition, Decree 92-03 violated the principle of non-retroactivity by subjecting defendants whose alleged offenses predated the creation of the special courts to the less protective procedures of those courts.

In April, the government issued an amendment to the decree that prompted a brief boycott of the special courts by most of the local bar associations around the country. The amendment stated that a lawyer could plead before a special court only after receiving the court's authorization to do so. It also threatened lawyers with suspension from practicing law for up to one year if a special court judge determined that they had been disruptive in court.

The most highly publicized trial of the year was that of fifty-five defendants accused of participating in an August 1992 bomb explosion at the Algiers airport that killed nine persons and wounded more than one hundred. The May trial, which was open to the press, brought to public attention some of the key human rights issues facing Algeria: several defendants testified that they had been held well beyond the twelve-day legal limit on incommunicado detention. They also asserted that they had been tortured into making false confessions. But the court did not probe these allegations, and sentenced thirty-eight of the defendants to death, twenty-six of them in absentia. Seven were executed in August.

The aura of unfairness in the "airport trial" dated back to October 1992, when confessions of two of the alleged ringleaders were broadcast by the government on the same day it announced having identified them. Viewers noticed bruises on the head of one of the suspects. When that suspect said at the trial that his confession had been extracted through torture, the prosecutor dismissed the bruises as the product of a suicide attempt the defendant allegedly made upon discovering that he was being filmed. Another defendant claimed the police had "destroyed his genital apparatus" during thirty-three days oftorture. The two were among those put to death.

Middle East Watch was not granted permission by authorities to conduct a mission to Algeria during 1993. But it continued to receive reports from human rights lawyers, doctors, and others suggesting that the pattern of torture documented during its 1992 mission continued in 1993. There were reports of severe beatings and of interrogators choking defendants with wet rags placed tightly over their faces, as well as reports of the use of electric shock and other instruments of torture.

A government spokesman rejected a report published in March by Amnesty International alleging widespread torture, claiming the government was resolutely opposed to the practice. The government-created National Human Rights Monitoring Body (Observatoire national des droits de l'Homme, or ONDH) told Middle East Watch in September 1993 that there had been cases of police who had been charged or disciplined for abusing detainees, but could provide no details.

Prolonged administrative detention continued, although on a smaller scale than in 1992. The state of emergency gave authorities the power to detain indefinitely, without charge, any person whose "activity is shown to endanger the public order, public security, or the proper functioning of public services."

It was not possible to ascertain the precise number of detainees nor the conditions in the detention camps during 1993. The ONDH told Middle East Watch in early September that there were approximately 700 detainees being held in two military-run detention camps, Oued Namous in central Algeria and Ain Mguel in the south. The ONDH also stated that there were no new cases of administrative detention during 1993 and that those being held had been detained since 1992. It was not possible to confirm this information. The government stopped releasing figures at frequent intervals about the detention camps; nor did it allow independent organizations or journalists to visit them.

As part of the battle against the Islamist opposition, the government bullied the once lively press into self-censorship, particularly where information and comments relating to the internal security situation were concerned. Both local media and foreign news agencies were pressured to rely almost exclusively on official dispatches for coverage of the rampant political violence. Meanwhile, the murder between May and October of seven journalists, in attacks attributed by the government to Islamists, undoubtedly deepened the chill on free expression. No one claimed responsibility for their murders.

El-Watan, a leading independent daily, was suspended for two weeks, and six of its staff were jailed for one week, after it ran an exclusive report in January on the slaying of five gendarmes. The authorities charged that El-Watan had jeopardized a criminal investigation, and announced that all reporting on security incidents would henceforth require official approval. Journalists who attempted to check unconfirmed reports risked getting into trouble for "disseminating false news." In December 1992, a reporter with Algiers Radio Three was dismissed for phoning the Reuter news agency to check a report on the assassination of a member of a government commission. In March 1993, the Reuter bureau chief was himself held for eighteen hours after filing a report that the government said was untrue about the assassination of an official.

Algiers-based foreign correspondents told Middle East Watch that their phone lines were tapped and that they exercised self-censorship in order to be permitted to continue working. The Algiers-based correspondent for Radio France Internationale was forced to leave the country in January because authorities refused to renew her work permit. Journalists applying to enter the country often faced delays in obtaining visas, or simply received no reply to their applications.

Although the Algerian dailies continued to criticize government policies and expose social ills, they were hauled into court on several occasions for violations of the repressive press code and other laws limiting expression. Although no journalist was sentenced to prison during 1993, a few were subjected to court-ordered temporary bans on writing or on traveling abroad. In July, the government used its emergency powers to suspend indefinitely the independent daily El-Djezaïr el-Youm. Although the government did not provide a reason, observers pointed to an advertisement the paper had run from a religious organization that warned against further executions of Islamists. As of late October, El-Djezaïrel-Youm remained suspended, as did the weekly as-Sah Afa, suspended in 1992.

The victims of the crackdown on the press were not limited to those who published news deemed favorable to the Islamists. Hachemi Cherif, leader of the leftist Ettahadi party – and the object of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in April – received a two-month suspended sentence for condemning in harsh terms the brief arrest of the editor of the leftist Alger Républicain for writing that the courts were being too lenient with "terrorist" defendants. The same sentence was imposed on a journalist and an editor at El-Watan for publishing Hachemi's remarks.

The El-Watan editor, Omar Belhouchet, exemplified the extent to which journalists were caught between government harassment on the one side and the terror of armed groups on the other. Three weeks before being sentenced, Belhouchet narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by unidentified assailants.

Many other prominent members of the intelligentsia were murdered in attacks attributed by the government to the Islamists. These included a professor of psychiatry, a sociologist, and two physicians. One of the physicians, Djilali Belkhenchir, was a leading member of the Algerian Committee Against Torture and of a national children's rights association. Former minister of higher education Djilali Liabes and former prime minister Kasdi Merbah (who served from 1988 to 1989) were also murdered. Many, but not all, of the victims had been outspoken advocates of a secular Algeria, or else critics of the country's Islamist movement.

Three of the fatalities were members of the National Consultative Council (NCC), an advisory body created by the regime in 1992 as a substitute for the parliament that had been prevented from taking office. Underground Islamist publications had denounced as illegitimate both the NCC and the government-appointed replacements for ousted local officials who were FIS-affiliated. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), during 1992 and the first half of 1993 at least twenty of these appointees to local offices were assassinated.

There were many obstacles to assigning responsibility for the violence in Algeria. While no serious observers doubted that Islamist groups were responsible for some of the political violence, many Algerians, including those harboring no sympathy for the Islamist cause, suspected that there were other forces carrying out some of the killings, using the climate of violence and mayhem as a cover to settle political and personal scores, or to protect financial interests. For example, many Algerians believe that the persons behind the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in June 1992 were foes of his reformist project rather than Islamists.

FIS leaders did, however, give their clear blessing to the armed struggle, even though the party did not claim responsibility for specific attacks. In an interview published on February 26, 1993 in the Paris-based daily Libération, exiled FIS leader Rabah Kebir said: "The violence stems from the dictatorship, which has left us no alternative to reciprocal violence." Asked about the first killings of foreigners in Algeria by armed groups in September and October, Kebir told Radio France Internationale, "The FIS has no policy of killing foreigners, but there is a popular movement that is difficult to control."

With the party banned, all of the FIS's leaders were either in jail, underground, or in exile. Its chief, Abbasi Madani, and deputy chief, Ali Belhadj, were serving long prison sentences on charges stemming from a strike and major disturbances in May and June 1991. The FIS leadership may have had few or no direct links to specific acts of violence committed by Islamist cells. Similarly, underground publications or statements that threatened or praised particular acts of violence may have emanated from activists who acted independently of the FIS leadership. But while the FIS denied responsibility for some assassinations and claimed responsibility for none, it never condemned and repudiated the killing of civilians in unequivocal terms. One prominent FIS representative in exile, Anouar Haddam, drew a distinction in an October 18 interview with Agence France-Presse between the FIS as "a political party that does not claim responsibility for any action," and the mujahidin. Haddam justified the targeting of certain civilians, saying "[T]he Algerian people have chosen as targets only those individuals upon whom the military-security system in Algeria relies. We know them one by one, and they are not innocentpeople." Haddam made similar statements to Middle East Watch in September. That month, Haddam was named to a newly created FIS steering committee in exile, headed by Rabah Kebir.

In June, Haddam was quoted by AFP as calling the fatal stabbing of psychiatry professor Mahfoud Boucebci "a sentence and not a crime. It is a sentence carried out by the mujahidin." In October, he said to the AFP, "Who are these so-called intellectuals? Among them are members of the National Consultative Council, which has usurped the place of the people's elected representatives, persons who wrote murderous editorials, and those who, through psychiatry, advised torturers on how to obtain confessions." Middle East Watch unconditionally deplores the deliberate killing of civilians, whether by governments or armed opposition groups.

Having assumed power by annulling elections, the HCE put new voting off into the distant future. In June, the HCE pledged to turn over power at the end of 1993 to as yet unspecified institutions that would govern the country during a transitional period, lasting between two and three years; this would be followed by parliamentary and presidential elections. It later appointed a commission to set up a "national conference" to advise the HCE on the transitional period. But as of October – three months before the HCE was to cede power – the national conference had not begun, and the nature of the proposed transitional institutions had not been disclosed.

The HCE seized power on the grounds that it was rescuing Algeria's democratic future. While subsequent political violence vastly complicated the environment for the holding of fair elections, it did not excuse the failure of the HCE to take any meaningful steps toward restoring to Algerians their right to determine how they are governed.

The Right to Monitor

There were no formal obstacles to human rights monitoring in Algeria during 1993. However, human rights work was impeded by a fear of reprisals that kept many Islamists, their sympathizers, and ordinary citizens from providing testimony about government abuses. Those willing to speak often insisted on discreet meetings and on remaining anonymous. Many believed that their phones and mail were monitored by the government.

In 1993, the violence attributed to Islamist groups against civilians, several of whom had openly criticized Islamist intolerance, no doubt intimidated many Algerians from expressing such views. One of those felled in an attack attributed to Islamists was Djilali Belkhenchir, a pediatrician who was vice-president of the Algerian Committee against Torture. Belkhenchir, who had also been active in an organization that urged the government to cancel the parliamentary elections after the FIS had won the first round, was gunned down in the Algiers hospital where he worked on October 10. No one claimed responsibility for the killing.

Algeria had several independent women's and civil rights organizations that operated with minimal or no state interference. Among the human rights groups, the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (Ligue Algérienne pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme) was the only one inside Algeria that was outspokenly critical of government abuses. Its criticisms were covered by the local independent press, as are those of foreign human rights groups. However, as noted above, journalists were impeded by government pressures and restrictions from doing much critical reporting of their own on human rights abuses.

Near the start of the state of emergency in 1992, the government created a National Human Rights Monitoring Body (ONDH), with a mandate to "sensitiz[e] public opinion to the question of human rights and undertak[e] actions when abuses of these rights are reported or brought to its attention." In its first two years, the ONDH failed to emerge as a force for human rights that stood apart from the government. While it took principled positions against capital punishment and the administrative detention camps, it did not actively collect or publish data about the extent of abuses. For example, even though it was the only human rights body to be allowed into the detention camps during 1993, the information it had gathered remained private. Similarly, the ONDH could have enhanced its credibility by actively investigating and reporting on the extent of abuses of detainees under interrogation. But ONDH presidentKemal Rezzag-Bara told Middle East Watch that his organization could act only if complainants approached it, and then only if they were willing to follow through on their complaints.

The Algerian government took a mixed approach to international human rights and humanitarian organizations. Amnesty International was permitted to visit, even after issuing a highly critical report in March. However, the International Committee of the Red Cross was unable to resume its program of visiting detention camps, suspended in early 1992 because of government conditions on the terms of visits. A request from the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights to observe trials of Islamists before the special courts, and repeated requests by Middle East Watch to conduct a mission, went unanswered. Meanwhile, the official press agency ran a story in May falsely accusing a Middle East Watch researcher of links to a network run by the Jewish charity B'nai B'rith, said to be arming and financing Islamists in Algeria.

The Role of the International Community

The U.S.

Algeria took a back seat to other U.S. concerns in the region during 1993. There were few public statements or initiatives by U.S. officials concerning human rights and democracy in Algeria, few high-level meetings between officials of the two countries, and little change in the modest aid program that the U.S. provides.

When a junta canceled elections and imposed a ruling council in January 1992, the Bush administration paused only momentarily before tilting toward the new regime, judging it preferable to a FIS-dominated parliament. Regrettably, its tilt was coupled with virtual silence toward the human rights abuses that the regime was perpetrating in the name of combatting Islamist terrorism.

If there was no major shift in policy toward Algeria between the Bush and Clinton administrations, there was at least a greater willingness on the part of the new administration to criticize the Algiers regime for failing to offer any response to its genuine security problem other than heightened repression. The Clinton administration's first major policy statement on Algeria contained blunt language on human rights. In testimony prepared for a May 12 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Edward P. Djerejian said:

Since the suspension of parliamentary elections, little progress has been made in restoring the democratic process and correcting the disturbing deterioration in the human rights situation.... Frankly, so far we have seen little in the way of action or specificity as to how the government plans to implement real political and economic reform.... [W]e do not believe that Algeria's problems can be resolved mainly through resort to security methods.... In our contacts with the Algerian Government, we urge a measured approach to security, one which focuses on those guilty of violence but avoids wide-scale repression or renewed incommunicado detention.

Djerejian went on to express concern about press restrictions and allegations of torture.

U.S. officials made no further public comments about human rights in Algeria when Foreign Minister Redha Malek met with Secretary of State Christopher one week later. Nor were there any significant statements concerning Algeria in the months that followed.

Assistant Secretary Djerejian's laudable statement before Congress on May 12 needed to be followed by further steps to prod the regime in the direction of respect for human rights and democratic reform. As Algeria received little direct U.S. aid, Washington had little financial leverage. However, the U.S. maintained a number of programs whose continuation could have been reconsidered in light of Algeria's human rights record.

The U.S. was given Algeria $150,000 a year in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program. The amount was tiny and restricted by the State Department to programs that, according to Djerejian's testimony, were "primarily designed to enhance democratization and respect for human rights in both the civilian and military sectors." The U.S. could have therefore sent a strong, albeitlargely symbolic, message by suspending the program in protest at Algeria's deteriorating human rights record and its failure to move toward restoring democratic government. That is what the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, in its official report accompanying the Foreign Assistance Act for the fiscal year 1994 budget, urged the administration to consider doing.

Far more important to Algeria were the U.S. government credits it received for the purchase of U.S. farm products, and the loans and loan guarantees given to U.S. corporations doing business in Algeria. For fiscal year 1994, Algeria was allocated $550 million in loan guarantees by the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), making it the CCC's second-largest client. This program also helped make the U.S. the third-largest exporter to Algeria, after France and Italy. In addition, the Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) reported a total exposure in Algeria, as of September 30, 1993 of $2.2 billion in loan guarantees. The Eximbank's exposure was higher only in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.

While human rights restrictions on Eximbank activities are weak, the CCC is required to adhere to provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act that bar assistance to any government that engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, "unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country." The Clinton administration should have considered ways to link the size of these programs to the government's progress in moving toward democracy and curbing human rights abuses.

The State Department could also have sharpened its reporting on Algeria in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. While the 1992 chapter acknowledged that the situation "deteriorated severely," and properly blamed the government for having "frustrated an electoral process that for the first time could have resulted in a democratic change of government," it failed to convey the systematic nature of the government's campaign to eradicate the main opposition force, the FIS.

The Report stated that torture declined in 1992 and occurred only in isolated cases. It provided no evidence for this assertion, which contradicted the findings of human rights organizations. The Report did not mention that detainees were commonly held incommunicado beyond the legal time limit, the phase of detention when most abuse occurs. The chapter also under-reported the extent of the crackdown on the FIS as a party. It ignored the removal of anti-government preachers, the effective dissolution in December 1992 of the pro-FIS union, the Syndicat Islamique du Travail, and the closure of Islamist charitable and cultural organizations following then-Prime Minister Belaïd Abdesslam's announcement of a crackdown on organizations that serve as "satellites" of the FIS.

France

With closer ties to Algeria than any other country in the West, France remained by far its largest creditor, with roughly $7 billion in outstanding loans. In 1993, France provided slightly more than $1 billion in new credit, most of it balance-of-payments assistance on favorable terms and commodity credits guaranteed by COFACE, the state export credit agency.

French policy toward Algeria during 1993 was driven in large part by concern that an Islamist takeover would swell the flow of immigrants to France and destabilize the rest of North Africa. French-Algerian relations are complicated by the legacy of France's colonial rule in Algeria and its eight-year war to prevent the country's independence; public evocation of human rights concerns by France prompts a backlash in Algerian official circles, complete with evocations of past atrocities.

The conservative government headed by Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, installed in March, fortified French support for the Algiers regime. In June, Foreign Minister Alain Juppé offered "help in the struggle of the Algerian government against terrorism and religious fanaticism" without expressing any reservations about how the battle was being conducted. That month, Paris obliged Algerian authorities by banning a pro-FIS magazine published in France and forcing a number of Algerian Islamists to leave the country. Other than condemnations of political violence by opposition groups and cautious statements in favor of an expanded political dialogue in Algeria, the government was publicly silent during 1993 on Algeria's worsening human rights practices.

This policy followed the direction taken after some wavering by President François Mitterrand and the ousted Socialist government in France. In early 1993 there were a series of high-level visits between Paris and Algiers, and agreements were signed for new French assistance. Then-Foreign Minister Roland Dumas termed as "courageous" Algiers's "policies of restoring the authority of the state and economic reform." President Mitterrand, who had infuriated Algiers back in January 1992 by criticizing the interruption of the electoral process, changed tack and issued a statement condemning "extremism."

The Work of Middle East Watch

Middle East Watch monitored abuses by both the government and armed opposition groups, in keeping with the policy of Human Rights Watch of reporting on human rights violations by all sides to a conflict. Those efforts, however, were complicated by the failure of the government to authorize a Middle East Watch mission during 1993. Such authorization was deemed necessary by Middle East Watch in light of the extensive surveillance inside the country by the security forces.

As in other countries where access was effectively denied, Middle East Watch continued to gather information on human rights in Algeria by other means, including contacts by phone and correspondence, and through persons who had recently left Algeria. A report on governmental abuses and on Islamist-inspired political violence was scheduled for release in late 1993.

In May, Middle East Watch issued a newsletter urging the release of imprisoned lawyer Brahim Taouti, who had been active in defending Islamist clients. He was given a three-year sentence on the basis of a penal code article whose vague and overly broad prohibition on distributing material "harmful to the national interest" is inconsistent with the right to free expression.

Middle East Watch also wrote letters to the authorities condemning the killing of civilians by unknown assailants and urging thorough investigations. In June, Middle East Watch sent a letter of concern to the German minister of justice after Germany complied with an Algerian request via Interpol to arrest FIS activists Rabah Kebir and Ossama Madani. Middle East Watch opposed their extradition on the grounds that the two men had been sentenced to death in absentia by an Algerian court whose ability to insure a fair trial was very much in doubt. Reportedly unpersuaded by the evidence against the two men provided by the Algerian authorities, a German court released them in September.

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