United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 1998 - Algeria, 1 January 1998, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6a8bc2.html [accessed 17 September 2023]
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Algeria hosted more than 100,000 refugees at the end of 1997, including at least 80,000 from Western Sahara, 10,000 from Mali, 10,000 from Niger, and about 4,000 Palestinians. Thousands of Algerians were internally displaced by the country's bloody conflict. Reliable estimates of their number were unavailable, however. Political Violence Widespread violence has wracked Algeria since 1992, when the military forced Algeria's then-president to resign, canceled elections that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win, and banned FIS and jailed many of its leaders. The Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), an armed group affiliated with FIS, then launched an armed campaign against the government. Since that time, government security forces and various armed groups have fought a brutal conflict that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and has forced large numbers of Algerians into exile, primarily in Europe. Many have migrated to France via family unification procedures. The number of persons internally displaced by the conflict is unclear. A variety of Islamist rebels attacked government officials, the government military, journalists, foreigners, trade unionists, and other persons they perceived to be anti-Islamist. The Algerian military and secular groups responded in the mid-1990s by arming up to 200,000 civilians in remote villages, according to some observers. Algerian voters elected Liamine Zeroual, a former army general, to a five-year presidential term in 1995. The multi-party presidential election, however, excluded FIS and was boycotted by some opposition parties. The election nonetheless provided a degree of legitimacy to Zeroual and further marginalized the FIS, according to some observers. Widespread violence in the mid-1990s centered on the so-called triangle of death, south of the capital, Algiers. Observers attributed many civilian massacres in the region to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), a radical offshoot of the Islamist movement. Some Algerians criticized the Algerian military for not protecting civilians from such attacks; others questioned whether the military was complicit in some civilian massacres. Observers have attributed some massacres of civilians in recent years to the AIS-GIA rivalry. Other attacks and massacres, observers say, have been related to grudge-settling, land-grabs, and other motives not directly part of the political dispute. Developments in 1997 Violence in Algeria during 1997 killed more than 6,000 people, according to some reports. Massacres of civilians were often brutal, and were accompanied by the rape and/or abduction of women and girls. Attackers increasingly killed large groups of civilians in 1997, reportedly including a hundred or more in Has Rais, near Algiers, in August. The increased violence against civilians occurred during a year in which Algeria held both parliamentary and provincial/municipal elections, in June and October, respectively. Elections and other trappings of a civil society failed to mask Algeria's crisis, however. The widespread violence prompted UNHCR in September to warn governments against returning rejected Algerian asylum seekers. "We recognize that not all asylum seekers from Algeria have legitimate claims to asylum," a UNHCR official said. "However, we consider that a significant number of those currently fleeing Algeria are in genuine need of international protection." To distance itself from the massacres of civilians, the AIS declared a cease-fire in October. Large-scale violence against civilians continued, however. New attacks in western Algeria's Relizane Province on December 31the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadanreportedly killed hundreds, suggesting that Ramadan would again be a particularly bloody period. Internal Displacement The scale of displacement in Algeria has been difficult to discern, in part because the government has discouraged international fact-finding missions. The nature of the violence also has prevented international assistance and protection agencies, including ICRC, from working extensively inside Algeria since 1992. Most reports of displacement in Algeria were drawn from Algerian press accounts. One such account in 1996 asserted that 10,000 Algerians had been internally displaced by violence. Other sources have asserted that hundreds of thousands of Algerians have left their homes, either migrating to Europe or blending into cities such as Algiers, where housing shortages already exist. The Algerian press reported that hundreds or thousands of civilians fled their remote villages for the relative safety of larger towns in 1997. The area just south of Algiers was partially depopulated because of fear of attacks, according to Human Rights Watch. "[M]assacres often resulted in the displacement of large numbers of survivors," the U.S. Department of State reported in 1997. No comprehensive reports of displacement were available, however. Refugees from Western Sahara Ethnic Sahrawi refugees in Algeria were still unable to repatriate to their homeland, Western Sahara, in 1997. Significant progress in resolving the political status of Western Sahara during the year, however, rekindled hopes that Sahrawi refugees would be able to repatriate, possibly as early as 1998. Algeria's internal conflict did not affect the south, where Sahrawi refugees lived. Sahrawis began fleeing to Algeria in the mid-1970s because of a war for control over Western Sahara. Since at least 1984, UNHCR has reported the presence of some 165,000 Sahrawi refugees in Algeria. Their actual number was unclear, however. Many Sahrawi refugees lived in four camps in Algeria's harsh desert area of Tindouf, in the southwest. Some 80,000 "vulnerable" refugees received UNHCR and WFP assistance, provided through the Algerian Red Crescent. European NGOs and the Algerian government also assisted Sahrawis in the Tindouf area. UNHCR reported that lack of water was a problem in the Tindouf camps in 1997, and late in the year reached agreement with an NGO to improve water supply to the camps. Morocco, which controls most of Western Sahara and claims sovereignty over it, has long asserted that the Polisario, the Sahrawi front seeking independence for Western Sahara, has detained some 30,000 Sahrawis against their will in the Algerian camps. The Polisario denied the charge. Refugees from Mali, Niger An estimated 10,000 refugees from Mali and 10,000 from Niger were living in Algeria at the end of 1997. Most were ethnic Tuaregs who fled political violence in their own countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although Algerian authorities have not regarded most Tuaregs as refugees per se, Algeria has protected them against refoulement, according to UNHCR. The government also funded the construction of four camps, which opened in 1995, in the southernmost part of Algeria, in the heart of the Sahara Desert. Some 3,000 Malian refugees lived in two camps in the Adrar and Tamanrasset Districts at year's end, while about 2,500 refugees from Niger lived in two camps in Illizi and Tamanrasset Districts. Residence in the camps was voluntary, according to UNHCR. Refugees living in the government-run camps received ration cards and assistance distributed by the Algerian Red Crescent, UNHCR's implementing partner. Due in part to the Tuaregs' largely nomadic existence, uncertainty has lingered about the exact number of Malian and Nigerien refugees in Algeria. "[I]t is difficult to determine the exact number of refugees living outside the camps," UNHCR noted. About 2,000 refugees from Mali repatriated under UNHCR auspices in 1997. Nearly all camp-dwelling refugees from Niger have agreed to repatriate once return sites in Niger have been rehabilitated, UNHCR reported.
