Amnesty International has been barred from the north African state since 2005, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
ON APRIL 9th, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika (72) will be re-elected to a third five-year term.
Bouteflika spent much of his first term travelling the world making speeches. During his second term, he was hospitalised for months at a time in Paris’s Val de Grâce hospital with a mysterious ailment rumoured to be stomach cancer.
Algeria’s oil and gas wealth has not benefited its population. Transparency International lists Algeria as one of the most corrupt countries on Earth, far ahead of neighbours Tunisia and Morocco. Unemployment continues to rise.
Once the breadbasket of France, the country depends entirely on food imports. Thousands of harragas (boat people) continue to flee across the Mediterranean. Opposition politician Said Sadi calls Bouteflika “the Mugabe of north Africa”.
Algeria has lived under a state of emergency since the military aborted elections that Islamists were poised to win 17 years ago. The emergency law is used to justify the imprisonment of journalists and the banning of demonstrations.
The circumstances of Bouteflika’s re-election campaign speak volumes about his failure to fulfil the promises he made when he came to office in 1999, at the close of a decade that saw some 200,000 Algerians die in a civil war between security forces and Islamists.
When Bouteflika travelled to Tizi Ouzou, capital of the Kabylie region, at the weekend, armed police officers were posted at 100m intervals for the length of the 105km road between Algiers and Tizi. Helicopters and armoured vehicles were deployed in strength.
Thirty-three people, most of them security personnel, were killed in attacks attributed to al- Qaeda in the Maghreb last month.
Bouteflika’s reign has seen the advent of the suicide bomber. Repeated offers of pardons, first for Islamist guerrillas, then for security forces, were the solution proposed by Bouteflika. He is still offering pardons. “We have no hatred or bitterness against you and you can rejoin the national community at any time,” he said, addressing himself to al-Qaeda extremists a few days ago.
Amnesty International singles out this continuing policy of pardon for criticism in a report entitled A Legacy of Impunity: A Threat to Algeria’s Future, released yesterday.
Rather than address the legacy of the civil war in the 1990s, Amnesty says, “the Algerian authorities have endorsed and institutionalised impunity and effectively deprived victims of their right to obtain truth, justice and full and effective reparation in the name of ‘national peace and reconciliation’”.
Thousands of Algerians disappeared without trace during the war. Amnesty recounts in detail the experience of Louisa Saker, whose husband Salah, a member of the Islamic Salvation Front, was taken from their home in Constantine in May 1994.
The case is unique in that Louisa Saker obtained official confirmation that her husband was transferred by the judicial police to military intelligence.
Yet four years later, the Algerian government human rights observatory told her he had been “abducted by an unidentified armed group”.
Despite appeals by the UN Human Rights Committee, Algerian authorities did not reveal what happened to Salah Saker. A year ago, Louisa Saker was convicted of participating in an earlier “unauthorised, unarmed march” to protest at the fate of the disappeared. After that demonstration, she had been arrested, beaten and forced by police to sign a promise not to demonstrate again. She has appealed her conviction, which is pending in the supreme court.
Fifteen years after her husband’s arrest, Louisa Saker has no idea what happened to him.
Nor has the rule of the intelligence services ended. Amnesty has not been allowed to visit Algeria since 2005, but it continues to receive reports of secret detention, torture and unfair trials “in a climate of virtually total impunity”.
As Algerian writer Boualem Sansal writes in Le Monde newspaper, the Algerian people are “public enemy number one for the terrifying electoral machine of the already-elected presidential candidate”. Said Sadi, a psychiatrist and leader of the secular opposition party RCD, is boycotting the April 9th election, which he describes as “a tragicomedy in three acts”.
The first act was the vote by the rubberstamp Algerian parliament on November 12th to change the constitution to allow Bouteflika to stand an unlimited number of times – virtually making him president for life. The second act was the announcement of Bouteflika’s candidacy on February 12th, and the third, Sadi says, will be the “fraud foretold” of April 9th, which is expected to deliver a score “of Brezhnevian proportions” and inflated turnout figures. Real participation has dwindled with each successive sham election.