Amnesty calls for investigation into `disappearance' of 3,000 since 1993

The human rights group Amnesty International yesterday appealed for a full, impartial and independent investigation into the "disappearance" of 3,000 Algerian citizens since 1993.

Their families' appeals to the Algerian President, Ministers of Justice and the Interior and the official National Human Rights Observatory are almost never answered, and the mothers and wives of the missing have resorted to bribing hospital morgue personnel and grave-diggers in the hope of finding a trace of their loved ones.

Two documents published by Amnesty, Disappearances: the Wall of Silence Begins to Crumble, and a detailed set of case-studies of the abduction of 28 individuals portray the disintegration of due process of law in Algeria since democratic elections were cancelled in 1992.

Relatives of the missing rely on rumours and reports from freed prisoners. A former cellmate of Abdelmalek Rachedi, a 28-year-old pastry chef arrested at a roadblock in 1996, brought Mr Rachedi's shoes back to his family.

Amnesty said the absence of investigations or of any concrete action indicated that such practices had been condoned, if not encouraged, at the highest level.

The "disappeared" whose cases have been documented by Amnesty include a farmer, a carpenter, two journalists, two doctors, three secretaries and an Air Algerie pilot. In the town of Rassel-Oued, south-east of Algiers, 15 inhabitants between the ages of 19 and 72, including teachers and the imam of the local mosque, were taken away by members of the security forces in one night.

There has been no news of Saida Kherroubi, Amina Benslimane and sisters Naima and Nadjoua Boughaba, four young women whose disappearance was reported by The Irish Times in October 1997.

The government's arming of the Garde Communale and "self-defence groups" has contributed to arbitrary arrests and disappearances, Amnesty says. The family of Abdelkrim and Benatia Derouiche, brothers who were kidnapped in August 1996, recall that a member of the communal guards owed money to Abdelkrim and threatened him if he refused to provide free food from his shop.

The UN Human Rights Commission, which is headed by Mrs Mary Robinson, had repeatedly failed to take any form of effective action on the human rights crisis in Algeria, Amnesty says.

Amnesty has been denied access to the country since 1996. Two other international human rights groups have not been allowed to return to Algeria since 1997, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has been shut out of Algerian prisons since 1992.

Based in part on the testimony of former Moroccan prisoners of war who were released in 1996 after 18 years of secret detention, Amnesty believes that many of Algeria's 3,000 missing may still be alive. But there have been no independent investigations into the identity of hundreds of bodies discovered in mass graves, and Amnesty fears some may be those of the disappeared.