REPORT

MOHAMED HARKAT

My name is Emile George Howard JOFFÉ and I have been asked to comment on the background to the situation facing Mohamed Harkat and on the possible consequences of his enforced return to Algeria. I have never met Mr Harkat and cannot therefore comment on his personal claims except insofar as they have been confirmed by the public record or other reliable sources. I should like to emphasise that my comments below are made for the sole purpose of aiding the Court and that I believe the fact related in them to be true. I consider that I am competent to make these comments as I have studied Algerian and North African affairs since 1973, as well as the wider affairs of the Middle East, and have written extensively on them.

Until the end of February 2000, I was the Director-of-Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and I am now attached to London and Cambridge universities. I am the director of the Centre for North African Studies at the Centre of International Studies in the University of Cambridge. I am an affiliated lecturer at the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University where I also teach a postgraduate course on the contemporary Middle East and North Africa. I am the visiting professor in the Geography Department at King’s College in London University, as well as having held a visiting fellowship at the Centre for International Studies in the London School of Economics and Political Science up to October 2001. I am also an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute of Strategic Studies. I have specialised in North African affairs for the past twenty years, taking a particular interest in Algeria since 1986.

I was, inter alia, a founder member of the editorial board of the journal, the Journal of Algerian Studies, which was published by Frank Cass & Co. I am also founder and co-editor of the Journal of North African Studies with Professor John Entelis, who is at Fordham University in New York, and was, until March 2001, co-editor of Mediterranean Politics with Professor Richard Gillespie, a journal which I helped to found. I have published widely on matters connected with Algeria in the media and in academic journals, as well as commenting regularly on them on radio and television in Britain and abroad. Amongst the publications most relevant to this issue are the following:-

“Terrorism and Fundamentalism in the Middle East”, in Thomas C. & Saravanamuttu P. (eds)(1989), Conflict and consensus in South/North security, CUP (Cambridge)

“International law, conflict and stability in the Gulf and the Mediterranean”, in Thomas C. & Saravanamuttu P. (eds)(1989), The state and instability in the South, Macmillan (London)

“Iran, the southern Mediterranean and Europe: terrorism and hostages”, in Ehteshami A. & Varasteh M. (Eds)(1991), Iran and the international community, Routledge (London)

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“North African responses to the Gulf crisis” in Anon (1991), North Africa: economic structure and analysis, EIU Regional Reference Series, The Economist Intelligence Unit (London)

“The Maghrib” in Sluglett P. & Farouk-Sluglett M. (eds)(1991)(revised 1995), The Middle East: the Arab world and its neighbours, Times Books (London)

“The Western Arab world”, in Nonneman G. (Ed)(1992), The Middle East and Europe: an integrated communities approach, Federal Trust for Education and Research (London)

“Reactions in North Africa to the conflict in the Gulf”, in Gow J. (Ed)(1993), Iraq, the Gulf conflict and the world community, Brasseys (London)

“Democracy in the Maghrib”, in Jawad H. (ed)(1994), The Middle East and the New World Order, MacMillans (London) and St Martin’s Press (New York)

“The European Union and the Maghrib”, in Gillespie R. (ed)(1994), Mediterranean Politics Yearbook, Pinter Press (London)

“Algeria: the failure of dialogue”, in Chapman S. (ed)(1995), The Middle East and North Africa 1995, Europa Publications (London)

“Low-level violence and terrorism”, in Aliboni R., Joffé G. and Niblock T. (eds)(1996), Security challenges in the Mediterranean region, Cass (London)

“Algeria’s foreign policy and the New World Order: the tragic loss of a revolutionary ideal”, The Journal of Algerian Studies, 1, 1 (1996)

“Islam in the Maghrib and Maghribi Islam”, in Rosander E.E. & Westerlund D. (eds) (1996), Islam in Africa and African Islam, Hurst & Co (London)

“Algeria: army and government”, Islamic World Report, Summer 1997.

(with Luis Martinez and Abdelkader Abderrahim) (2000), Crisis in Algeria; not over yet, International Crisis Group (Brussels)

The Algerian economy, (2001) International Crisis Group (Brussels)

“The role of violence within the Algerian economy”, Journal of North African Studies, 7, 1 (Spring 2002)

In view of the decision of Justice Dawson and my knowledge of events in Algeria I understand that Mr Harkat grew up in Algeria and was involved with the Front Islamique du Salut (Harakat Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh - FIS) after it was founded in 1989. The legislative elections, held in December 1991, were cancelled because of a potential FIS victory, and a new regime was put into power with army backing. Mr Harkat had fled Algeria in 1990 because of arrests of FIS activists that began in 1990, whilst he was in his first year at university. He feared that he might have been arrested too. He went to Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage – a common route taken by

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those wishing to leave the country at the time. Whilst there, he took employment with the Muslim World League, a well-known Islamic charity, travelled to Pakistan and managed a warehouse in an Afghan refugee camp for the organisation.

In mid-1994, he was unable to renew his residence documentation, so left Pakistan and, travelling on a false Saudi passport via Malaysia and London, arrived in Canada where he claimed asylum. Whilst there, he came into contact with individuals linked to the al-Qa‘ida movement and attracted the attention of the Canadian security authorities – although whether he made these contacts knowingly or not is not clear. Similarly, the judge found that he also travelled to Afghanistan, to al-Qa‘ida training camps, although he denies this to be the case and, I understand, the court has not found the evidence he provided to be convincing. He has had a security certificate issued against him and has been imprisoned as a potential security risk. The court found the security certificate to be reasonable, and now Mr Harkat faces the possibility of deportation to Algeria.

I have been asked to comment on the dangers that he might face, were he to be deported to Algeria. To understand this, it is necessary to know something of the convoluted and difficult history that Algeria has faced since independence in 1962, since this will explain the innate hostility shown by the Algerian authorities towards somebody in his position. It is also necessary to understand the attitude of the Algerian authorities to persons who have been in Afghanistan. That is outlined below and I shall then turn to consider a series of specific issues that might adversely affect Mr Harakat.

I should add that I do not know Mr Harkat and have no knowledge of his personal situation beyond the information publicly available. Nor, in the comments that follow, do I wish top seek to evaluate his credibility; that is a matter for the court. I shall, however, inevitably touch on issues of plausibility, as that will be germane to the conclusions I wish to draw. I recognise that my duty is to inform the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness as objectively as possible of the situation in Algeria as relates to Mr Harkat, not to plead implicitly or explicitly on Mr Harkat’s behalf

The background to the Algerian crisis

Algeria gained independence from France in 1962 after a colonial occupation that had lasted for 130 years and as the result of a brutal war that began in 1954. The war itself broke out at the end of a long period of nationalist agitation that had begun at the end of the First World War but that had been ruthlessly suppressed at the insistence of the leaders of the 1 million-strong European settler population in the country that had been introduced there during the nineteenth century, leading to the marginalization, victimization and exploitation of the indigenous population until they were no more than “a sort of human dust” in the words of a nineteenth century governor-general, Jules Cambon1. Unlike its other North African colonies – Morocco and Tunisia – Algeria had been treated since 1871 as an integral part of France, although its Muslim population continued to be subjects of the French state, not citizens, with little control over their own destinies.

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Independence

The irredentist attitudes of the colon settlers, the pieds noirs as they were dubbed, meant that any struggle for independence would be extremely violent, as proved to be the case. Figures for total losses vary wildly, with Algerian sources claiming that up to 1 million died during the eight-year-long war, whilst French sources suggest that the true figures were closer to 238,000 Algerians and 20,400 French citizens2. The war had been conducted with great ferocity, particularly on the Algerian side where, in effect, two wars had taken place – one against France and the other within the various resistance movements to achieve political hegemony. The latter was quickly resolved by the ruthlessness of the FLN – the Front de Libération Nationale or Jabhat al-Tahrir al-Watan – which asserted its control over the armed struggle.

Interestingly enough, in military terms the French army won the armed struggle but the social, political and diplomatic costs were so great that, in the end the government of General de Gaulle decided to grant Algeria independence. However, immediately after it was granted in July 1962, the Algerian army, which had been successfully excluded from the struggle in Algeria and had been confined to border camps in Tunisia and Morocco, together with one of the nine paramount leaders of the FLN, the chefs historiques de la Révolution Algérienne, Ahmed Ben Bella, seized power. The FLN now became a single political party, subordinated to the power of the new state which rested on the charisma of the president and the power of the army. Although Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in June 1965, his successor, the army commander, Houari Boumediènne, maintained precisely the same political system. After Boumediènne’s death in December 1978, the most senior army officer, Chadli Ben Djedid, took over the presidency.

In other words, Algeria had become a military state, in which the occult, unaccountable power of the army command was the key to control. One consequence of this was a mushrooming culture of privilege and corruption within the army-based and technocratic elite. In economic terms, the state was constructed as a centralized, planned economy in which the state sector controlled 60 per cent of productive activity and depended increasingly on oil and gas revenues which generated 98 per cent of its external revenues. Given its rapidly-growing population, Algeria became a high capital-absorbing, oil-based rentier state, like Iraq and Iran. The population, however, remained poor, being persuaded to renounce present benefit for the sake of future gain as the lineaments of a modern state were constructed through industrialization. Yet, despite all the attempts made to accelerate modernization, Algeria continued to be dependent on oil revenues and thus subject to the vagaries of the world oil market, as new generations matured and rejected the passive acceptance of delayed reward that had characterized the generation that had fought the war. These two tendencies were to collide in October 1988, the moment when the crisis of the last decade was born.

2 ibid; 538

1 Horne A (1977), A savage war of peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Penguine (London); 37

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Background to crisis

It is important to bear in mind the causes and pattern of events following the riots that broke out in October 1988. They were induced, in part, by a collapse in world oil prices in 1986 which severely affected Algeria’s export revenues. Since most consumer goods, including between two-thirds and three-quarters of the food supply, were imported, the population as a whole suffered a severe decline in living standards when the government decided to compensate for the shortfall in export revenues by reducing imports. Algerians had, in effect, been living in a situation of austerity ever since the war of independence and the government assumed that they would tolerate yet another round of austerity measures. However, while the first generation of independent Algerians were prepared to tolerate present austerity for the promise of future prosperity, their successors in a country where the population was increasingly youthful (currently, 60 per cent of the population is under the age of 25) were increasingly reluctant to do so. They were also increasingly reluctant to accept the severe public morality imposed by Islamic tradition and revolutionary austerity, so that interest in Western fashion, social liberalization and global youth culture became increasingly strong aspects of a political rejection of the Algerian revolution by youth.

Continued poor housing and growing unemployment separated the poorest from those privileged through membership of the single political party and those who benefited from service to the state (which controlled over 60 per cent of the economy) or within the private sector. These general circumstances were supplemented by specific political problems. The Chadli Bendjedid regime, which had succeeded the Boumediène regime in 1979, had attempted to encourage economic liberalization in order to overcome consumer resentment and galvanize the stagnant economy without granting concomitant political liberalization. The result had been an ever more tense social and political scene, particularly after serious rioting in April 1980 when demands for cultural representation by the country’s significant Berber minority had developed into country-wide protests over issues of freedom of expression and political liberalization. Young people often embraced the Berber issue as a paradigm for their own sense of alienation, and during the 1980s Berber music became a powerful voice of popular political dissent. By the end of the decade, it had been supplemented by rai – a modernized version of traditional popular music originating in western Algeria. This group of alienated youth, linked to the wider demotic culture created by the increasing globalization of the modern world, stood alongside the Francophone elite in opposition (particularly over the Berber issue) to another group spanning the generations of those – increasingly disadvantaged – Algerians educated solely in Arabic. Arab speakers also tended to be far more conservative and thus to support traditional attitudes towards public morality and the growing influence of a clandestine Islamist movement in Algeria. They also rejected the inherent separatism of the Berberist movement, calling for a united Arabo-Islamic Algeria instead.

In reality the government’s policies and activities had merely created an ever more divided society. In the public domain, French continued to be the language of commerce, administration and high culture, with the result that Arabophone Algerians felt increasingly marginalized. The government manipulated this cultural confrontation and, as a consequence, between 1980 and 1986 there was a series of

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confrontations between pro-Berberist and pro-Arabist supporters, particularly in the universities where the Islamist movement that was developing in Algeria was putting down increasingly strong roots. At the same time, potential social and political problems were intensified since the modernist, educated Francophone elite was also marginalized by a regime which endlessly sought to capitalize on the symbols of the revolution twenty years earlier and, by its own repressiveness, devalued the very symbols it sought to exploit as evidence of its own legitimacy as a government. Riots in Constantine in 1986 expressed frustration at the worsening economic crisis, but also provided the first major platform for the country’s nascent Islamist movement which had emerged in the early 1980s after repression during the previous decade. Yet it had been one of the earliest strands of resistance to French colonialism in Algeria and thus enjoyed considerable popular support.

The new politics and the rise of political Islam

The country-wide riots of October 1988, which represented a massive rejection of government, were apparently instigated by clandestine elements of the extreme left within the ruling FLN party. The riots were linked to the illegal but unofficially tolerated Parti de l’Avant-Garde Socialiste (PAGS), which organized strikes in major factories in the Algiers area. The masses of unemployed and under-employed youth in Algiers joined the demonstrations which then degenerated into riots, and a virtual insurrection then spread throughout the country. The Islamists appeared only in the latter stages of the unrest but, because of vigorous military repression, came to symbolize the sacrifices of the population as a whole and thereby gained massive popular respect. In addition, the Chadli Bendjedid regime, seeking a new mode of maintaining itself in power, decided to begin a more thoroughgoing restructuring of the economy and to revise Algeria’s political structures. A multiparty constitution was introduced in 1989. At that point political parties were allowed to emerge – by the end of 1990 there were over forty of them – and restrictions on freedom of expression were lifted. The presidency then sought to control a multiparty political system by ensuring that no one party would be powerful enough to obtain a hegemonic control over the political scene and, with this end in mind, encouraged the new Islamist movement against the FLN.

At the same time, another profound change was made in Algeria’s constitutional structure. Ever since independence, the Algerian army, created during the war and based in Morocco and Tunisia because of French measures to keep it out of Algeria itself, had been the essential guarantor both of the country’s revolutionary legacy and of the particular regime in power. In short, the army continued as the power behind the scenes within the regime and the senior army command acted decisively both in political and in military roles up to 1988. However, as a result of the 1988 riots, the presidency was able to persuade the army command to withdraw from political life. As part of the new quasi-democratic system it wished to create under its own aegis, the presidency itself would provide the guarantees of continuity and control which had originally been the army’s prerogative. The presidency was also able to exploit political divisions inside Algeria, which emerged in the wake of the liberalization introduced after the 1988 riots, to try to assure its own dominant role in the developing political process. A key element in this was to be Algeria’s long-standing Islamist movement which was divided into three major factions.

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The current situation in Algeria must therefore be seen in the context of the way in which this movement has developed since 1988. During the brief interregnum between the collapse of the old one-party system in 1988 and the army-backed coup of 1992, Algeria, at a popular level at least, experienced a genuine liberalization. Political diversity flourished, the press was virtually unrestricted and public life blossomed with most of the old restrictions on public morality being eliminated. At the same time, public opposition to such diversity also mounted, particularly among older groups and those who sympathized with the nascent Islamic political movements. Before the 1988 riots, the Islamist movement – the movement of Muslims who seek a specific political relevance for Islam as an alternative ideology of political organization of the state – had existed in effective clandestinity as described below, although it was occasionally exploited by the government of President Bendjedid to counter other political currents that the regime found disturbing.

One of the best examples of this manipulation was the way in which the Islamist movement had been used to undermine the Berberist movement which began in April 1980 and rapidly became the vehicle of liberal protest at government refusal to allow political liberalization. Alongside this political role, however, there had also developed a growing intolerance of social behaviour which differed from that generally approved by Islamist activists. Thus, in areas where the clandestine Islamist movement was strong, such as Hussain Dey or Kouba in Algiers and in small towns such as Laghouat, individuals who did not adjust to the social norm were victimized. After the riots the movement was eventually legalized and, despite official attempts to manipulate it to control other political parties – specifically the former single political party, the FLN – it acquired a powerful independent voice in the new multiparty political system. Its social role was also significantly reinforced, particularly after municipal elections in June 1990, when the movement won control of a majority of municipalities. Indeed, in many respects, public morality was the major plank in the policy of the most important of the new opposition movements, the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut–Jabha Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh). On this aspect of policy all Islamists could agree. Eventually, after the elections of December 1991 were aborted by an army-backed coup in January 1992, the FIS was banned in March 1992 and membership became a punishable offence.

The decade of crisis

In fact, the crisis in Algeria, which started with October 1988 riots, followed by three years of confused political and economic reforms in a new, formally democratic environment, was irredeemably worsened by the interruption of the legislative electoral process in December 1991, followed by another army-backed coup in January 1992. The army’s fears had been that the FIS, by then Algeria’s major Islamist political party, would win the elections outright and convert Algeria into an Islamic state3. Within a year, the Islamist movement had moved into clandestinity and open hostilities between the army-backed regime and clandestine armed groups had begun. One of the clandestine groups, the Mouvement Islamique Armée, later to become the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS – Jaysh Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh), specifically directed its attacks against the security forces; the other, the Groupes

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Islamiques Armés (GIA – Jama‘at Islamiyya Muslaha) turned on the population, announcing in 1994 that it would attack foreigners, security personnel and civil servants, and Francophone intellectuals. Subsequently it widened its scope of targets to cover all those who did not actively support its objectives.

In the years that followed, up to 1999, an officially-admitted 100,000 persons died – the true figure is probably closer to 150,000, as the president admitted in March 20054

– and up to 20,000 persons “disappeared”5 whilst in custody. Although the death rate, which had run at around 1,000 persons a month, fell in the wake of the election of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April 1999 and a partial amnesty was declared between June 1999 and January 20006, it shortly thereafter began to rise again, although it was also temporarily suppressed in December 2001 by a sustained security force campaign – which could not be indefinitely sustained, particularly as it showed meagre results. It was only in the summer of 2004 that the security forces were able to definitively control the violence, virtually eliminating the GIA, although a new group, now heavily implicated in extortion rackets and smuggling, continues to be active in Central and Eastern Algeria. This had split off from the GIA in December 1997, rejecting that movement’s indiscriminate tactics and claiming, instead, to wish to confront only the armed forces of the Algerian state. This was the Groupe Salafiyyiste pour la Predication et le Combat (GSPC – Jama‘a al-Salafiyya li’d-Daw’a wa’l-Jihad). The result is that Algeria continues to be governed under a state of emergency, by a regime that depends on the armed forces for its survival.

In recent months, the GSPC has entrenched itself in its strongholds around Skikda and Collo in the east of the country and in Western Kabylia in the centre, with another branch in the central Sahara where it is believed to have been be responsible for the spectacular kidnapping of 31 tourists in February and March 2003. They were eventually released in June 2003 after the payment of a ransom and the GSPC has now melded into smuggling networks there. It activities have, however, attracted American attention and, as a result, American special forces have moved into the Sahelian states of Mali, Chad and Niger because of fears that the GSPC is really a branch of al-Qa‘ida. This is to completely misinterpret the situation but has ensured that Algeria now has a role similar to that of Pakistan in American strategic planning – precisely what the Algerian government wants!

Quite apart from organised violence of this kind which may at last be on the wane, the last few years have seen the outbreak of spontaneous violence all over the country which is not directly connected with political Islam. This reflected the appalling conditions in which most Algerians live, over 10 per cent of the 30-million strong population is in shanty-towns and the country’s housing stock, at 4 million units, is 2 million short of demand and very dilapidated. Algeria has one of the highest rates of occupancy in the world, at 7.5 persons per housing unit. The recent earthquake in the Kabylia-Algiers region, in which 2218 persons died and over 10,000 were injured in mid-May 2003, underlined the problems for it was the most recently built structures that collapsed, underlining the massive corruption that exists in the construction sector.

This spontaneous violence has been mirrored, over the past four years by organised violence in Kabylia where the local population is demanding administrative autonomy after a shooting incident on April 16, 2001. Demonstrations have been organised by

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informal, tribally-based village councils – the archs – and, up to the start of Ramadan 2003, had been able to force out a series of concessions from the regime. After a year-long lull, the movement agreed to negotiate with the government on the basis of its own declaration of principles, which include the removal of appointed officials after municipal elections were boycotted in October 2002 and the inclusion of Berber languages, Tamazight, alongside Arabic as the official languages of Algeria. Negotiations continue although the arch movement has no split into factions prepared to negotiate with government and those that suspect the government’s motives and intent.

Even though the Algerian authorities claim to have tamed violence, the evidence is that this is not fully correct, even though news reporting of violence is carefully controlled by the government as the state of emergency has been renewed for the thirteenth successive year. Although Algeria has been able to reinforce its diplomatic image as a result of the events of September 11, 2001 by pointing out that international terrorism is a reflection of the difficulties its own government has faced since 1992, the expected material support, especially from new allies, such as the United States, in addition to long-standing supporters, such as France, has been slow in coming. Indeed, regime and army anxieties on this issue are now substantial and official fingers are beginning to be pointed at the United States for not supplying promised military equipment. Algeria has gone out of its way to support the war on terrorism, claiming that the clandestine movements and the FIS itself were merely symptoms of the global malaise that has allowed al-Qa‘ida to flourish. It believes that it has persuaded European states of its analysis and has collaborated closely with the American government. Now it expects a pay-off in terms of military equipment and training to modernise its armed forces.

The role of the army and the security forces

The sad fact is that the majority of the civilian losses in this conflict have been caused by security force action7. The 180,000-strong armed forces themselves are backed up by a 25,000-strong gendarmerie which comes under military authority and a mass of paramilitary militias, the Gardes Communales and the Gardes légitimes de défense, also known as the “patriotes” which include some 200,000 men under the control of local authorities8. The intelligence function is provided primarily by the ubiquitous securité militaire service (more correctly now known as Direction des Renseignements de Securité - DRS), formally under the control of the interior ministry but in reality under the control of General Mohamed ‘Tawfiq’ Mediène, which is completely unaccountable for its actions and has always been so. The regime, too, is dominated by the army, with three generals – Mohamed Lamari (the chief of staff who retired in mid-2004 but remains powerful and influential), Mohamed Mediène and Mohamed Touati (presidential military adviser and the so-called “intellectual” of the military) – controlling the civilian government, with the support of the grandees of the regime, retired generals Khalid Nezzar (former defence minister and responsible for the 1992 coup)9 and Larbi Belkhair (former interior minister and suspected of responsibility of the assassination of President Boudiaf in 1992)10.

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The importance and arbitrary power of the military and the security services cannot, therefore, be under-estimated. The quintumvirate mentioned above have made and broken presidents ever since 1991 (Chadli Bendjedid (1979-1992), Mohamed Boudiaf (1992), Liamine Zerouel (1994-1998) and Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1999 until the present) and have, at will, redrawn Algeria’s constitutional system. Until recently, they had been contemplating a further reconstruction of the political scene, involving a suspension of all political activity for three years and then a managed restructuring of the political parties within a secular governmental system. Now, however, they claim that they do not want to be involved in the day-to-day management of the past and have withdrawn to the barracks since April 2004, when President Bouteflika received his second presidential mandate. Nobody really believes that they have abandoned the political scene for good but there may be less direct meddling in political decisions. The reality of power, however, will remain with the army command. This absolute power is at its most acute within the security services11 who are notorious for the habitual, continuous and severe abuse of human rights that they practice.

Attitudes towards political Islam

It is also clear that the authorities maintain an acute and unchangeable hostility towards the various Islamist movements in Algeria. The FIS, of course, continues to be banned and has virtually disappeared as an organised party since March 1992 when the ban came into force, although it still has a skeletal organisation structure and massive informal support. Its proposed replacement, the Wafa party, was banned, even though it met every requirement of the electoral law, at the start of 2001 and was led by a highly respected former minister of education and foreign affairs, Ahmad Talib Ibrahimi12.

Only one movement based on political Islamic principles, the Harakat al-Mujtama‘a is-Silmi (HMS – the Movement for a Peaceful Society, originally known by the acronym HAMAS), has been continuously allowed to operate as a legal political party and then only because it supports regime objectives and now forms part of the three-party pro-government Alliance Présidentielle, alongside the FLN and the Rassemblement Nationale Démocratique (RND), a regime political vehicle created in 1997 when it appeared that the FLN might become a genuine opposition party. Yet, on occasion, its members have also been arrested and severely ill-treated by the security forces and its leader, Mahmoud Nahnah, one of the founders of the Algerian Islamist movement in the 1980s, was also victimised before his death in 2003. In 1995, for example, he was allowed to stand in the presidential elections of that year but he was excluded from the 1999 presidential elections, although the criteria for a candidacy to be accepted had been the same in both cases. Furthermore, his exclusion was also based on information that was untrue, relating to his role in the independence struggle for Algeria. He faced a major threat to his position since, in November 2001, he admitted supplying up to thirty groups of Algerian volunteers to the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since it is illegal for political parties and leaders to entertain relations with foreign governments, Mr Nahnah faced the threat of crippling legal action although, in the event, nothing was done, probably because the publicity in itself was felt to have adequately discredited him.

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His party suffered heavily in the legislative elections on May 30, 2002 in which his support base massively decayed, to be overtaken by another Islamist party, the Islah. In these elections, incidentally, the Kabylia did not vote, in protest at what its population considers the government-imposed violence there – a similar boycott was imposed by the archs on the local elections on October 10, 2002. The result has been that the two major secular opposition parties, the FFS and the RCD, are now excluded from national politics since they supported the legislative boycott. The RCD also supported the municipal boycott, although the FFS did not and has formal representation at municipal and provincial level, as a result.

The other formerly legal Islamist movement, the Hizb an-Nahda, was broken up in April 1999 during the presidential elections which brought Abdelaziz Bouteflika to power as president13. The Hizb an-Nahda was a moderate Islamist movement, founded in Constantine in 1980 by Abdallah Djaballah14. It was inspired by the ideology of the Egyptian Ikhwan Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood), although, unlike the HMS, it was not linked to this movement. Although it enjoyed good relations with the FIS after 1988, it continued to be a separate party and embraced political pluralism. In the wake of the army-backed coup in 1992, it was allowed to continue an autonomous legal existence but was subject to continual pressure to support the regime. This became particularly strong after January 1995, when it was one of the co-signatories to the Sant’ Egidio Platform (see below) and thus declared itself to be opposed to the Zeroual presidency’s plans for a new constitution.

Eventually, in the run-up to the presidential elections in April 1999, it split as a result of a government-backed initiative within the party’s central committee and now no longer exists as a viable political force. Its militants are often viewed by the regime as FIS sympathisers and treated accordingly. Mr Djaballah created a new Islamist party, the Mouvement pour la Réforme Nationale (MRN), also known as al-Islah, but faced great difficulties in view of official hostility although, in a personal vote for Mr Djaballah during the legislative elections in May 2002, his party was returned to the parliament as the largest Islamist movement there. It now acts as a permanent Islamist opposition to the government inside the Assembly but faces imminent collapse because of a row between the party leader and his closest advisors.

The Algerian Islamist movement

The conventional view is that the virtual civil war of the past twelve years has been the consequence of the threat to established government posed by a political movement based on the exclusivist principles of political Islam which succeeded in winning a substantial majority of the vote in democratic elections. As a result of its fears about the implications of such a victory, not least because the movement, the FIS, had threatened to reform the Algerian constitution along sectarian lines, the army stepped in as the guarantor of the constitution and aborted the democratic process. The state then faced a virtual Islamist insurrection which it has only recently controlled.

There is an alternative narrative, in which the incompetence and corruption of the established political and military elite – effectively a nomklatura, which because of its occult access to economic benefit which it sustains through political repression is also

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effectively a mafia and, because of its wide links to the French army in which many of its senior officers served, is also popularly considered to be the hizb fransa (Party of France) – generated a populist response which chose the most available and appropriate cultural and ideological paradigm, that of Islam, to express its outrage and then faced official and violent repression as a result. The virtual civil war that followed was predominantly a populist response to such repression which has now degenerated into a stalemate in which any opportunity of genuinely democratic government has been lost by the intransigence of the ruling elite and the alienation of the mass of the population. As a result, Algeria faces a prolonged period of repressive government shrouding itself in a democratic veil – the “façade democracy” of which many Algerians complain – in which human rights abuses continue unabated, as does populist violence. However, insofar as the Islamic paradigm is seen – largely incorrectly – as the core of the problem rather than as a symptom of it, the nature of the Algerian Islamist movement is essential to an understanding of this complex conundrum15.

Political Islam in Algeria has a long and honourable history. It developed as a consequence of the wider Islamic response to European colonialism and technological superiority that had to be confronted in the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman empire decayed. By the 1860s, this response had become codified into the Salafiyya movement, promoted by Jamal al-Afghani, which argued that Muslims should look into the traditions of early Islam, typified by the Rashidun caliphate, to find the inspiration through which to meet the intellectual and technological challenge of the West. His ideas, which were inherently a modernist response to the shock of European intervention in the Islamic world, were immensely influential and were popularised throughout the Arab world by individuals such as Mohammed Abduh in Egypt and Chekib Arslan in Lebanon. In Algeria, they inspired the first wave of the use of Islam as a rallying point in trying to rebuild a sense of political and moral autonomy within the context of French settler colonialism there, in the wake of the visit by Mohammed Abduh to Algeria in 1903.

The early days

The Algerian islah (reform) movement began in the 1920s under Shaykh Abdulhamid Bin Badis who had been inspired by Mohammed Abduh and, in 1930, it was codified in a political association, the Association des oulemas algériens, committed to reforming Islamic practice in Algeria in order to assert a sense of Algerian identity based on being an Islamic society within the context of the wider Muslim community, in contradistinction to the secular assimilationism of intellectuals such as Ferhat Abbas who was quite prepared to accept integration of Algeria into France, provided that Algerian personal and religious status could be preserved. The nascent Islamist movement in Algeria, therefore, was also an expression of Algerian particularity. In this respect it differed from the very similar Islamic reform movement created in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Ikhwan Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) which also drew its doctrines from the earlier Salafiyya movement but now set them within a specific political context16.

A further reason for its creation was the missionary activity in Algeria, encouraged by Cardinal Lavigerie and the “White Fathers” – a Trappist order – that was particularly

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active during the 1920s and 1930s and was seen by Muslims as an attack on Islam itself17. Furthermore, most converts were made in Kabylia, amongst the Berber population there, as part of France’s policies of dividing Berber and Arab populations in Algeria. The Trappists have continued a presence in Algeria in the wake of independence in 1962 but do not now proselytise. They now engage in providing social services, particularly in their monastery in Tibherine – which is where the 1996 massacre of seven of their number took place18. Under the independence agreement, the 1960 Evian Accords, Christianity and Christian sites are protected in Algeria and the best tangible evidence of the Christian presence in the country is provided by the church of Notre Dame de l’Afrique, just outside Algiers where many of the Berber converts are commemorated. This coincidence of Berbers with conversion to Christianity has added to a popular conviction in the Arabophone parts of Algeria – picked by the extremist religious groups – that Berbers are not true Muslims19

The movement sought to re-Islamise Algerian society through social work and reviving religious practice, rather than through active political commitment – which would have been impossible in the colonial context. However, although Bin Badis died in 1940 and was succeeded in the association by Shaykh Bashir al-Ibrahimi, the father of Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi (see above), the Algerian reform movement soon became caught up in more overtly political activity as Algerian nationalism came ever more openly into conflict with the French colonial authorities. After the Sétif massacres in 1945, which marked the beginning of the overt struggle against French colonialism, secular nationalist movements filled the political arena and the Islamic movement was marginalized, but it continued to enjoy a wider dimension of support throughout Algeria as the natural vehicle for the expression of Algerian collective Muslim identity. Thus, although marginal in political terms, its significance for nationalist ideology was paramount and the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) that became the vehicle of the war against France explicitly claimed to be an Islamic movement as well as a movement for national liberation.

After independence

In the wake of the war for independence, which ended in 1962, socialist ideas dominated inside Algeria’s new collective political life. However, the role of Islam was never far behind and the new ruling elite, particularly after the 1965 coup, which brought the army commander, Houari Boumediènne, to power, made space for a formal Islamic role within the state. Education was often placed in the charge of ministers known for their piety and commitment to Islamic values and the role of Islam in the new Algerian identity – as an Arabo-Muslim state – was supported. At the same time, the slightest hint of Islamic political interest was stamped on and a formal political role for Islamic thinkers was marginalized. An Islamic association was, nevertheless, permitted and the Al-Qiyam organisation was established in the early 1960s by Malek Bennabi, a charismatic journalist and intellectual, and Mohammed Khider, one of the nine chefs historiques of the Algerian revolution. It was subsequently suppressed by the Boumediènne regime which brooked no rivals for power, even implicit ones, but which adopted much of its social agenda20.

The Islamic movement, however, became a rival within the decade because of two factors. One was the push by the Boumediènne regime for the Arabisation of

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Algerian collective administrative and intellectual life. One of the consequences of French colonialism had been to make French, rather than Arabic, into the administrative and intellectual language for the country and, as part of the process of nation-building, there was a conscious programme to reverse this. The Arabisation programme, however, required a large number of teachers that Algeria did not possess, so Egyptians were brought in instead. They brought with them the Ikhwan Muslimin, so that the first appearance of the Muslim Brotherhood as a coherent organisation in Algeria dates from this time, under the name of the Jama‘at al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (The Association of Muslim Brothers).

The movement had to make itself felt against the indigenous Algerian Islamic movements that had very similar agendas to its own and that harked back to the original Association created by Bin Badis in 1930, also from the principles of the Salafiyyist movement. Indeed, Algerians themselves never really distinguished between the Brotherhood and movements such as those that now developed from the old Al-Qiyam which had finally been banned in 1970. The new movements, known in Algeria collectively as the Ahl ad-Dawa‘a (The People of the Call), now emerged in opposition to the powerfully centralised state that the Boumediènne regime had created and, up to the end of the 1970s, quietly amassed their support base within the population, particularly amongst the urban poor and lower middle classes.

Secondly, as popular discontent mounted with the Algerian experiment in political and economic development towards the end of the 1970s, the Islamist movement received ever-greater support, in part augmented by the relative leniency shown to it by successive governments. At the same time, its popularity was increased by the Arabization programme undertaken in the late 1970s and early 1980s to counter the persistence of French as the major language and culture for Algeria. However, those who were Arabophone in terms of education and training found themselves disadvantaged in terms of employment and isolated in terms of culture because of the continued dominance of French as a commercial language and because of the role France continued to enjoy in Algeria’s wider cultural context. They were therefore drawn towards the authenticity of an Islamic alternative – something which was encouraged by the fact that many of the teachers employed in the Arabization programme were Egyptian and linked to the Ikhwan Muslimin, as mentioned above.

By 1984, the movement had its own leaders – Shaykh Nahnah, subsequently the leader of HMS-Hamas, and Shaykh Sahnoun, alongside Shaykh Soltani, who died in that year. Although his death, at his home in Hussein Dey on the outskirts of Algiers, where he was held under house-arrest, had been kept out of the news, within a few hours the surrounding streets were flooded with 25,000 mourners, indicating the depth of support that already existed in the capital for the Islamist movement. It also had its own ideologues. Shaykh Soltani had published a widely read attack on the Boumediènne regime, and Malek Bennabi was also widely read as Algeria’s own theoretician of the Islamist movement throughout the region. And the movement had its martyrs, which further increased its social prominence. In the wake of the Berberist riots of April 1980, clashes between Berberophone and Arabophone students in Algeria’s universities, which effectively set Francophone secularists against Arabophone Islamists, had resulted in deaths and arrests, particularly in 1981 and 1982. The government responded to these incidents with considerable brutality, sentencing those involved to long prison terms.

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At the same time, the authorities also continued to try to placate Islamist supporters, appointing officials who were sympathetic to the underground movement and its values to senior positions in government, especially in ministries connected with religious issues, and encouraging the widespread construction of mosques. Since, in Algerian law, mosques came under state control only when their construction was completed, many Islamic activists left new mosque buildings deliberately uncompleted so that they could be used as centres for education and propaganda outside official monitoring and control. By the end of the 1980s, a majority of mosques were uncontrolled, a situation which persisted up to 1992, when the new post-coup regime brought in regulations that ended this anomaly. In addition, the authorities tried to adjust Algerian legislation to match Islamist concepts of public morality and social order. Thus, in 1984, the Chadli Bendjedid regime introduced new family legislation which undermined the independent status of women and reinforced their normative inferior role in accordance with more conservative interpretations of shar‘ia religious law.

During the 1980s and particularly between 1984 and 1988, government ambivalence towards the Islamist movement allowed the movement to garner more popular support, particularly in poor urban areas where the level of youth unemployment was as high as 30 per cent of the youth labour force (and 70 per cent of the Algerian population were below the age of thirty). In 1986, as mentioned above, in a precursor of the 1988 riots, trouble broke out in Constantine. Islamists did not initiate the disturbances, which had begun among students protesting at living conditions; but, by their end, Islamists were prominent in controlling and directing the rioters and they emphasized the need for the public segregation of men and women, particularly in the context of student residences where conditions had been at the root of the disturbances.

At the same time, the more extreme members of the Islamist movements began to question the legitimacy of the Algerian state on the grounds that the FLN had originally capitalized on Algeria’s Islamic heritage to justify its call to arms against French colonialism. Yet this legacy and source of legitimacy had been abandoned, once Algeria became independent, so that the FLN had no right to claim a revolutionary legitimacy that properly belonged to their vision of the Islamic movement, in their eyes. They also had the experience of the struggle in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, which had been led by extremist Islamist groups with American and Saudi support. In the mid-1980s, therefore, a clandestine group, led by Mustapha Bouyali – a former FLN militant during the war for independence and subsequently a gendarme – emerged in the Blida-Boufarik area and launched attacks on the security apparatus of the Algerian state. Although the group was eliminated in 1987 and Mustapha Bouyali himself was killed, whilst his supporters went to prison, they were released in 1989 and some became, not only members of the FIS (see below) but also founder-members of the armed clandestine Islamist resistance after the army-backed coup in 1991-92.

By 1988, therefore, although the Islamists were as surprised as the government when the riots that brought Algeria’s single-party state to an end exploded, they were ready to garner the fruits. Some leaders, such as Shaykh Sahnoun and, initially, Shaykh Nahnah, were determined to avoid direct political involvement. They formed the

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Rabita al-Islah wa’l-Irshad (The Movement for Reform and Guidance) as a national association designed to influence the political process without taking direct part in it. Others, however, led by Abbassi Madani, who had been an FLN activist during the war for independence, were determined to seize the opportunity. One of the results was the creation of the FIS in 1989. It was the subsequent success of the FIS that persuaded Shaykh Nahnah to reform the Islah wa’l-Irshad into a formal political party, first known as Hamas and subsequently as the HMI, after the electoral law was changed in 1997 to exclude political parties that referred, inter alia, to religion or language in their platforms or names. Shaykh Sahnoun refused to join him in the formal political arena.

The Front Islamique du Salut

As mentioned above, the FIS was not the only Islamist political party. It was, however, something more than an Islamist party, although it was certainly concerned with political action. Unlike the other Islamist movements, it sought to create a movement that brought together as many members as possible, whatever their specific political platforms, and which, furthermore, challenged the claim of the FLN to embody the legitimate inheritance of the Algerian revolution. As was often said in Algeria, ‘Le FIS est le fils de l’FLN’–‘The FIS is the son of the FLN’. As part of this catholic appeal, it attracted adherents of three major Islamist currents to its banner: the Salafiyyists who had been the backbone of the original Islamic movement; the Djazara’a group, sympathizers with the ideas of Malek Bennabi who sought a specifically Algerian Islamist solution21, unlike the universalism of the Salafiyyists; and the Afghanistes, Algerians who had fought with the Mujahidin in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet Union, as well as a much larger number who sympathized with the Mujahidin and their neo-Salafiyyist ideas. In this respect, the FIS was quite different from an-Nahda or Hamas.

Since each of these groups had a different agenda, it is not surprising that the FIS found it very difficult to evolve a specifically Islamist political programme. No detailed economic programme was ever suggested; much of the platform as put forward for the 1990 municipal and 1991 legislative elections was concerned with public order and public morality – a theme which brought together a wide measure of public support. Otherwise it was devoted to a sustained attack on the corrupt values and practices of the old FLN regime and of the consequences of secularism and French influences in Algeria. It should also be borne in mind that much of the growth in FIS support occurred during the crisis over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and, although the movement had relied on the Gulf states for part of its original financial support, the movement quickly divined the popularity of pro-Iraqi sentiment amongst the population and exploited it. Despite the legal creation of the FIS on 1 March 1989, its party platform contravened the new electoral law that expressly banned political movements based on language, region or religion. Nevertheless, its wide political base ensured that it rapidly became a mass movement, claiming for itself the revolutionary legitimacy that had, until then, been the prerogative of the FLN and the Algerian army. In municipal elections in June 1990 it won a crushing victory, gaining control of 856 of Algeria’s 1,541 municipal councils and 31 of 48 provincial assemblies. It gained 55 per cent of the vote,

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completely humiliating the FLN, which gained only 32 per cent of the vote and won control of 487 municipal councils and 14 provincial assemblies.

This success was to be repeated, albeit less convincingly, eighteen months later when much-delayed legislative elections were held. The FIS won 188 of the available 232 seats in the National Assembly outright in the first stage of a two-stage election, and was expected to win eventual control of the Assembly, but its share of the votes cast had dropped significantly and its share of the overall available votes had fallen to only 25 per cent of the total. Nonetheless, it was clear that the FIS would be able to form a government and, much to the anxiety of the regime, it threatened, too, to call for an

3 For a detailed history of the FIS, see Willis M. (1996), The Islamist challenge in Algeria, IB Tauris (London)

4 Indeed, in a speech on April 7, the president admitted that the true figure should be 200,000! (El Watan 10.04.20050

5 The CIPU report for Algeria (2000) suggests that the correct figure is 20,000 but the Ligue Algérienne pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme, which is organised by the highly-respected human rights lawyer, Yahya Abdennour, argues that the true figure is double this total. The confirmed figure, notified to the Algerian authorities is 7,200 cases, of which 4,000 are in the Algiers area alone. Details of 4,734 cases are held by the Commission National pour la Promotion et la Protections des Droits de l’Homme, the official body for protecting human rights in Algeria. Despite considerable pressure, the Algerian government has been unable to comment on most of these cases, although it does claim to have identified 1,000 dossiers and to have resolved 324 cases.

6 The amnesty lasted from June 13, 1999 until January 13, 2000. All of the AIS submitted and the Algerian authorities claimed that up to 5,500 persons submitted in total. Other resources, however, argue that the true figure was closer to 1,500-to-2,000. In October 2002, the Algerian army claimed that 6,000 persons had submitted under a previous amnesty law and only 386 persons under the civil concord legislation, although the Algerian president did grant a separate amnesty to the AIS on January 11, 2000 and subsequently released up to 5,000 political prisoners (El Watan 30.10.2002). The army also claimed that up to 27,000 persons had joined the terrorist movements and that 15,000 of them had been killed during the decade-long struggle between 1992 and 2002, together with 30,200 civilians – giving a figure for total losses of 50,200 – just half that of the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. It is certainly the case that many “repentis” have subsequently returned to the maquis (Le Matin, 30. 01.2002; 20.06.2002). In fact, the Law of Civil Concord was less generous than legislation passed in 1995 which it replaced, in that it only provided a limited time for amnesty, whereas the previous legislation had been unlimited in its effect. The law was also rejected by many Islamists because it required a submission to the authorities – in other words an implicit admission of guilt – rather than a proper amnesty. This was the main reason why it was relatively ineffective.

7 For comments on the nature of the security response to Islamic violence over the past decade, see: Abboud H. (2002), La mafia des généraux, Lattès (Paris), Yous N. (2000), Qui a tué à Bentalha?, Editions La Découverte (Paris) and Bedjaoui Y, Aroua A. and Ait-Larbi M. (1999)(eds), An inquiry into the Algerian massacres, Hoggar Books (Geneva)

8 The “Patriote” militias were created in the mid-1990s as a paramilitary adjunct to the security forces and placed under defence ministry control. Alongside them two other paramilitary units were created, under interior ministry control. These were the Groupes Légitimes de Défense, a village militia force, recruited locally and under local authority control and the Gardes Communales, formed from trained security officials, often former policemen. The latter two units numbered around 80,000 men, out of a total paramilitary force of 200,000 – compared with the professional army which totalled around 140,000. Other additional paramilitary units, alongside the 16,000-strong gendarmerie, included the Brigades Mobiles de la Police Judiciaire (BMPJ). In 1998 there were 5,500 such groups and 52 private security forces as well (Rapport de la Délégation du Parlement Européen, May 2001). As such, they have also become on occasion the shock troops of local notables exploiting their new-found power for personal advantage and benefit. Thus, in 1998, two mayors in Relizane province – both

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Islamic state in Algeria. And it would have more than the necessary two-thirds majority in the Assembly necessary to legislate changes to the constitution to achieve this. This situation immediately brought it into head-on collision with the fundamental tenets on which the Algerian state had been based and revived fears among the country’s military leadership that Algeria’s revolutionary ideals, and their vested interests in the status quo, would be threatened. As described above, the army had been an integral part of the Algerian regime up to 1988 – indeed, it had, in effect, been the regime! In the wake of the riots and in view of Chadli Bendjedid’s promise to reconstruct the Algerian state under a strong presidency within a multiparty political system in 1989, in which the army would have to role of guaranteeing the integrity of the state22 the army had officially

members of the National Popular Assembly as well – were arrested for murder and extortion, in which the personal militias they commanded were implicated. They were quickly released on the orders of the Algerian presidency. In another case, the head of the local group in Kabylia, Smail Mira, publicly executed a schoolboy who had been participating in a peaceful demonstration over the death of a famous Berber singer, Matoub Lounes – and he has never been charged with any offence for this action. These militias still number 200,000 men and are supposed to guard actual villages and settlements in a defensive capacity only, although they are widely used for other, more private purposes that merely add to the violence and also play a major role in the army’s clearing operations. They are supplemented by private militia forces, often organised by former army officers and enjoying close relationships with army and security units.

9General Khaled Nezzar was defence minister in the last Chadli Bendjedid government and responsible for the dismissing of the president in January 1992 as he masterminded the coup and was one of the triumvirate (alongside General Larbi Belkhair and General Ahmed Guennaizia) that set up the post-coup regime. General Belkhair was interior minister and, after the assassination of President Mohamed Boudiaf in June 1992, was forced into retirement, although he exerts massive behind-the-scenes power and is very close to Khaled Nezzar. General Mohamed Lamari (not to be confused with General Smain Lamari) is the army commander and, as such, wields much of the real power in Algeria; he is a protégé of Larbi Belkhair although he has recently shaken off this relationship and is currently engaged in a major disagreement with his former protector. General Smain Lamari is in charge of military security and is very close to his direct superior, General Mohamed Mediène, the eminence grise of the regime, given his control over the Securité Militaire which has been implicated in manipulation of the clandestine Islamist movements and in land-grabbing operations on the back of the spate of massacres in January 1998 around Algiers and Blida. General Mohamed Touati is generally seen as the intellectual of the regime and is currently military adviser to the president (where former general Larbi Belkhair also acts as a presidential aide – in order to control the president’s activities! This group is the core of the power-elite, although they also struggle amongst themselves in the infamous lutte des clans. There are other circles of power radiating away from this core and there are also competitors for power, although the army command constantly seeks to eliminate them. Access to the core group comes through the taman system – the Berber system of representation of individual, sectional and lineage interests within the central village or tribal council, the arch. This core should be distinguished from the informal coalitions of the past, such as the Oujda Group or the groups that emerge through common origin, in its cynicism over the purposes of power, for it is totally wedded to the exploitation of material advantage and extension of political control. Earlier groups, whilst informal and unaccountable in nature, did seek to contribute towards Algerian national life. A good, if partial analysis of this is provided in Abboud H. (2002), La mafia des généraux, Lattès (Paris) who argues that there are eleven members of the core group, all linked to the infamous “Promotion Lacoste” the French army’s attempt to introduce Algerians in the French officer corps in the 1950s to avoid their defection to the FLN – a move that did not succeed!

10 Indeed, he was directly accused of such involvement in a newspaper article (Le Matin of January 15, 2002) and is now threatening to sue the newspaper in question. In fact, the start of 2002 has seen a major campaign to discredit the press by the Algerian ministry of defence, with complaints being made to the judicial authorities against both Le Matin and El-Watan which is normally considered to be sympathetic to the army!

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withdrawn from politics but retained the right of intervention if it believed the constitutional position to be threatened. This it was to do on two occasions. The first was in June 1991, during FIS demonstrations against a new electoral law which essentially gerrymandered electoral boundaries to the FIS’s disadvantage against the FLN. Then the army unilaterally arrested the movement’s leaders, Abbassi Madani (now living abroad in Qatar after his release) and Ali Bel Hadj (still in Algeria after serving his twelve year sentence in military prison in Blida and now suffering from severe constraints on his liberty).

The FIS tried to respond to these changed political circumstances; with one faction of the movement wishing to find an accommodation with the regime to avoid further repression, even if that meant the loss of its political programme. The other faction

11 In addition to the ubiquitous military security system, now known as the Direction de renseignements de securité (DRS), which is absolutely unaccountable to any recognised authority and is the real “heart of darkness” of the regime, there is also the general military security service under General Smain Lamari, who is no relation to the army commander. There is also the civil security directorate, which handles the police service (the gendarmerie are part of the ministry of defence, although, for operational purposes, they also come under the interior ministry) which is commanded by Ahmed Tounsi. The DRS is formally linked, too, to the interior ministry but is in effect completely independent, as it was when it was first created during the war of independence as a monitoring vehicle for the FLN and the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN – Jaysh al-Tahrir-al-Watani, which, after independence, was renamed the Armée Nationale Populaire, Jaysh al-Watani al-Sha‘abi).

12 His father, Shaykh Bashir al-Ibrahimi, had been the second head of the Association des Ulémas Algériens, founded in 1930 and the mainstream from which most other Islamic political movements subsequently developed.

13 Mr Bouteflika was the preferred candidate of the generals and had been Algerian foreign minister for fourteen years, between 1965 and 1979. Although the outgoing president, Liamine Zerouel, had promised that the elections for his successor would be “free and fair”, they were marked by massive fraud organised by the army and the regime. As a result, six of the seven presidential candidates stood down the night before the election and only 23 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote. Ms Bouteflika obtained less than half the vote and has thus been elected by less than 10 per cent of the electorate – hardly evidence of popular legitimacy! The real irony is, however, he was also asked to stand by the army in 1994 and refused because the terms would not be right. He remained, instead, in the Gulf where he had been running a very successful consultancy, despite an embarrassing brush with the Algerian authorities after the end of his foreign ministership when he was forced to disgorge AD20 million of public funds he was alleged to have retained.

14 See the analysis by Wills M (1998), “Algeria’s other Islamists: Abdallah Djaballah and the Ennahda movement,” Journal of North African Studies, 3, 3 (Autumn 1998).

15 See Volpi F. (2003), Islam and democracy: the failure of dialogue in Algeria, Pluto Press (London)

16 See Joffe E.G.H. (1996), “The Islamist threat to Egypt” in Chapman S. (1996)(ed), The Middle East and North Africa 1996, Europa Publications (London).

17 In fact, despite a century of proselytism, there had only been around 1,000 converts in Algeria itself, even though French citizenship (Algeria from the 1890s onwards was considered a département of France, unlike Tunisia and Morocco which were protectorates – the equivalent of League of Nations mandates but in reality colonies) was available on conversion because of the application of French personal status laws which did not recognise “Muslim” as a religious status. Algerian Jews, under the Decrèt Cremiux, were entitled to automatic French citizenship. Berque J. (1967), French North Africa between two world wars, Faber and Faber (London); 221; originally published as Berque J. (1962), Le Maghreb entre deux guerres PUF (Paris).

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was determined to maintain its political role as guaranteed under the constitution and fight the promised legislative elections on that basis. At an important party conference in Batna towards the end of the year, the compromisers were trounced and the party elected Abdelkader Hachani, a former prominent Djezar‘a member, as its leader. The compromisers eventually accepted positions in government in the aftermath of the coup. Yet, even then, fears about the regime’s intentions over the legislative elections persisted and it was only two weeks before the actual vote that the FIS decided that it would actually fight the elections. Its fears were to prove to be fully justified as the army was determined not to accept any outcome that gave the FIS a prominent political role in the future.

Thus, in the aftermath of the first round of the electoral process in December 1991, it simply aborted the electoral process, turned out the president and appointed its own collective presidency. The army also turned against the FIS, determined to eradicate it from political and social life. By the beginning of March 1992, the FIS had been declared illegal and, by the middle of the year, there were isolated outbreaks of violence. Up to 12,000 FIS militants were arrested and interned in prison camps in the Sahara in appalling conditions for varying periods of up to two years. Within the year, clandestine violence had become widespread and extended to urban areas, with the Islamist opposition controlling considerable areas of the country. Violence, in any case, was eventually to become the currency of real political debate in Algeria, both for the governing regime and for the clandestine opposition derived from the FIS. This situation continued up to the end of the 1990s and, despite attempts by the Bouteflika regime to find a basis for national reconciliation after the presidential elections in April 1999 and again now, continues to be the case up to the present day, even if its intensity has been much reduced.

18 Interestingly enough, there is growing evidence that the ultimate responsibility for this event lay with the military security services of the regime, the DRS. As is discussed later in this document, Ahmad Zitouni, the third leader of the GIA, is heavily suspected of being a security service plant and of having undertaken actions that effectively discredit the Islamist movement overall, such as the murder of the monks at Tibherine. The evidence for this is indirect but there are a growing number of such strands so that the impression of regime involvement is becoming overwhelming. In this connection, the major sources are the recent statements, in January 2003, by an Algerian now in Thai custody after having been abandoned by the French security services who had used him as an information source, the television documentary on Canal Plus in November 2002 and the very detailed analysis put forward in the study: Bedjaoui Y, Aroua A. and Ait-Larbi M. (1999)(eds), An inquiry into the Algerian massacres, Hoggar Books (Geneva)

19 The textual justification for this is drawn from the fourteenth century ‘alim, Ibn Tayymiya, who argued that the Mongols could not be considered true Muslims because, although they had converted to Islam, they did not observe the full corpus of Islamic Shar‘ia law. In other words, to be a Muslim, one had to accept the complete corpus of belief.

20 See Roberts H. (1988), “Radical Islam and the dilemma of Algerian nationalism: the embattled Arians of Algiers”, in Third World Quarterly,

21 The Djazar‘ists, whose most important leader was Shaykh Sahnoun and most of whose members were part of the Algerian intellectual and professional elite, argued fundamentally that Algerian society would have to mend its own faults before effective Islamic politics would be possible. It therefore initially opposed the proposal for a specifically political movement. Its membership formed the core of the Rabita and Shaykh Sahnoun, for example, never joined the FIS although many Rabita members did once the FIS was formed. They included Abdelkader Hachani, a petroleum engineer from Skikda, who had originally been involved in Abdullah Djaballah’s movement.

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The clandestine opposition

The real danger to public order in Algeria, however, developed after the army-backed coup in January 1992, particularly when clandestine Islamist resistance emerged in 1993. The civilian population soon faced a particular danger, not from the FIS or its successors, the Mouvement Islamique Armé (MIA – Harakat Islamiyya Muslaha) and the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS – Jaysh Islamiyya li’l-Inqadh) which sought to force the new regime to restore the electoral initiative disrupted by the coup, but from the GIA (Jama‘at Islamiyyah Musalahah – Groupes Islamiques Armés). Both movements, however, insofar as they espoused violence, looked back to an earlier paradigm, the Bouyali movement in the 1980s, which had been created by a former FLN activist and mujahhid from the war for independence, Mustafa Bouyali. As pointed out above, Mustafa Bouyali considered that the FLN had betrayed its trust and that an authentic Islamic solution was the only way forward for Algeria. He, therefore, organised a group in the maquis and mountains around Blida, to offer a challenge of violence against the state. Although he was killed in 1987 and his followers were imprisoned, his reputation was to inspire those who, in 1992, believed that violence was the only way forward. Indeed, some of his lieutenants were to lead the new groups, particularly the GIA.

The development of the armed groups

The GIA itself was commanded by a series of leaders who became steadily more extreme in their views and policies and were progressively eliminated by the army, whilst, at the same time, suspicions steadily grew within the Islamist movements that it had been profoundly infiltrated by the military security system, the DRS. Its origins are located in the army-backed coup in 1991 and the subsequent repression of the Islamist movement. Locating the outbreak of violence is difficult; some authors point towards the an incident in February 1992 when six policemen were killed in the casbah of Algiers, others argue that it was an incident in Guemmar when a border post station was attacked in November 1991, where a non-commissioned officer was killed and arms were stolen. Thirty persons were killed in a subsequent army operation to track down those responsible. Whatever the actual incident, the first sign of an organised Islamist opposition was the spontaneous development of isolated armed cells throughout the country. The nucleus of the new movement appeared, however, in the Algiers region when Mansour Miliani, a former Bouyali activist, took over a group of Afghanistes in January 1992.

Miliani had originally been close to Ahmed Chebouti, another Bouyali activist who, like him, had been arrested when Bouyali was killed and who had also been released from prison by President Bendjedid after the October 1988 riots. Ahmed Chebouti rejected the extremist vision of the Afghanistes, supporting the FIS objective of restoring the electoral process. He eventually became a founder member and leader of the MIA which subsequently, became the AIS. Although Miliani himself was arrested in July 1992, after actions including an attack on the Amirauté in the heart of Algiers the previous February, the group survived because it linked up with a second group of activist youth who sympathised with its views and objectives. This group,

21

created by Mohamed Allal, who was killed in September 1992, effectively took over the leadership of the combined group, now known as the Groupe Islamique Armé and led by Abdelhak Lyada who had originated from Allal’s group.

By this time already, the breach with the MIA, led by Ahmed Chebouti, was complete, after the failure of an attempt at unifying the clandestine Islamist opposition in September 1992. Instead, the group went its own way, rejecting any suggestion of fusion with the MIA except on its own terms. The MIA, however, continued to broaden its contacts and, in March 1993, it formed links with other independent organisations, including Said Mekhloufi’s Mouvement pour un Etat Islamique (MEI). The GIA itself continued a violent ant-FIS and MIA campaign and began a series of high-profile attacks, coupled with threats against the security services, government servants, school teachers, Francophone intellectuals and foreigners. In 1993 it publicly warned these groups that they were at risk and began a campaign of violence.

Abdelhak Lyada was arrested in July 1993, to be followed, after a confused power-struggle, by Djaafar al-Afghani and, in February 1994, by Cherif Gousmi. Despite the rapid turnover in its leadership, the group continued to be distinguished by the violence and profile of its attacks and this attracted much support, particularly from the autonomous urban-based groups that began to emerge, linked to the trabando networks, the informal smuggling networks that had soaked up much of the unemployment in the past and which had become profoundly criminalised. Its hostility towards the FIS constantly increased, with strident attacks on FIS and MIA leaders and threats against them. By May 1994, the GIA was at the height of its power and attracted support from yet other autonomous groups and from the more activist FIS members who sought more effective ways of confronting the regime. This brought under its wing the MEI, the FIDA (Front Islamique du Djihad Armé) and former FIS leaders such as Mohamed Said and Abderrazak Rejam. The MIA, in response to this development, reformed itself under Mansour Mezrag into the AIS, recognising the GIA, now the Groupes Islamiques Armés, as its major threat.

However, with the death of Cherif Gousmi in September 1994, the new-found unity fell apart as a result of the growing extremism of the GIA itself. The movement itself became even more intolerant of dissent and increasingly targeted the FIS itself, claiming responsibility for the murder of Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a highly respected founder-member of the FIS, in Paris. Between September 1995 and November 1995, the new head of the GIA, Djamal Zitouni, eliminated putative rivals, including most of the FIS leaders who had rallied to him. By now, there were intense suspicions that the GIA was heavily infiltrated by the DRS and that most of its high-profile operations were directed by the regime to discredit the Islamist movement overall. Indeed, in the past two years there have been several accounts from participants in the regime’s anti-terrorist operations, suggesting that the GIA had been “turned” and was effectively now a counter-terrorist operation, integrated into the military strategy of the regime23.

The result was that many of the groups that had allied themselves with the GIA in 1994 now broke away in disgust at its internecine violence and the increasing extremism of its rhetoric and actions. The breakaway groups, many of whom sought links with the AIS instead, included the MEI, the Mouvement Islamique pour la Dawa et le Djihad (MIDD), under Mustapha Kertali, and the Ligue Islamique pour la Dawa

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et le Djihad (LIDD), under Ali Benhejar. The latter two groups only coalesced later from individuals whom had split off from the GIA in disgust – the MIDD in July 1996 and the LIDD in February 1997. These groups joined the AIS and, when in October 1997, the AIS declared a unilateral ceasefire with the army, they followed suite and took advantage of the civil concord law in January 2000 to end the armed struggle against the regime. Zitouni himself was killed in July 1996 – either by GIA dissidents or by the DRS, and was succeeded by Antar Zouabri24 until he was killed in mid-February 2002. Under Zouabri, the extremism and violence of the GIA became completely indiscriminate, leader to the horrific massacres of 1997 and 1998 – although, once again, great care must be exercised over these incidents as it is quite clear that the greatest beneficiary from them was the Algerian state. There is considerable indirect evidence of state involvement and some direct evidence as well, which is discussed below. First, however, it is necessary to consider what was the intellectual and doctrinal justification for these practices.

The justification

In essence, the group has carried on the tradition of the extremist groups that go back to “Afghaniste” and extreme neo-Salafiyyist traditions of one branch of the Islamist opposition created in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The original GIA had argued that the Algerian state was irredeemably tyrannical (taghut) and corrupt (hughra) and had to be replaced by force through its destruction, an attitude that was easily distorted to authorise the programme of indiscriminate killing. Before this happened, however, in an attempt to disrupt and weaken the state, the GIA leadership warned in 1994, as mentioned above, that it would target civil servants and security force personnel, together with foreigners and francophone intellectuals, particularly journalists. Over 70 journalists have died since1994, together with almost as many foreigners, while over four hundred schools have been burned to the ground, with many of their teachers killed. The total cost to the Algerian state of this damage, quite apart from the loss of life, is estimated at around $20 billion. The numbers of civil servants who died are not known, but the many false road blocks, manned by GIA militants – often within urban areas because police control was so weak – provided an ideal opportunity for “exemplary punishment” of those whose identity cards revealed them to belong to one of the forbidden categories. Military personnel and persons working for the Algerian armed forces – even if not undertaking military service – were preferred targets. Foreigners, too, were selected targets, largely because they were kufar, infidels, and disturbed the uniformity of Islamic practice that the GIA sought. The few converts to Christianity in the country were particular targets because of Islamic views over apostasy25. This was worsened by the fact that many converts were also Berber and Berbers have been considered by some Islamists as persons who cannot be true Muslims because of their use of Tamazight or French as their means of communication, rather than Arabic.

The GIA also went on to argue that many Algerians themselves were corrupted by their own history and that it was legitimate to eliminate such corruption because they were apostate. The group’s activities degenerated into apparently mindless violence and a series of horrific massacres in 1997 and 1998, notable for a complete failure on the part of the authorities to intervene and for intense suspicions that there had been official complicity in some of these incidents – both to discredit the Islamist

23

opposition and for reasons of personal gain. This pattern of activity now seems to be repeating itself, for the latest massacres have no obvious purpose except to inculcate fear or form part of some arcane feud within the regime that is played out through the GIA which, as described below, is severely infiltrated by the security forces.

The original justification for this lay in the generalised ideology adopted by the extremist mujahidin in Afghanistan and is closely linked to the concept of jhad – usually understood to mean “holy war”. In fact, the word comes from the Arabic verb “to strive” and in its original meaning reflected the striving for inner purification. A subsidiary meaning also meant the struggle, first to extend the world of Islam – the dar al-Islam – and, secondly, to defend it. In its original meaning of striving, it is also linked to the concept of ijtihad, the tradition of innovative thought in Islam, within the context of Islamic doctrine, to expand and adapt Islamic practice and understanding to new contexts. The concept of jihad as defensive struggle was adopted by the neo-Salafi movement in Afghanistan as part of their construction of an ideology to justify violence.

It is in this respect that the neo-Salafi movement differs from its august predecessor, the Salafiyya. The Salafiyya sought to develop philosophical and intellectual principles from the corpus of early Islam, without the accretions of later practice and intellectual activity in order to relate to and exploit the modern world. The neo-Salafi use of jihad, however, has become a technique to exclude that world on the basis of the argument that its early Islamic precursor was itself the ideal that the contemporary world should seek to emulate. In the early years of the war in Afghanistan, this concept, which derives from the work of the Pakistani theologian, Mawlana Mawdudi, in the 1940s, was refined by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian graduate from the al-Azhar mosque-university in Cairo. He argued that jihad in circumstances such as those in Afghanistan where a non-Muslim state had disrupted the unity of the umma by direct intervention, was an individual duty upon Muslims that they could not avoid, whereas there was also a more far-ranging collective duty on Muslims to defend Islamic society from the attacks upon it from the outstand. The individual obligation was incumbent on all Muslims and could not be avoided; the collective duty could be taken over by any group that wished to do so and thus excuse the rest from having to take part.

In addition, since neo-Salafis only accept the doctrines of the Qur’an and the practices of the Islamic community that had actually experienced the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad – the rashidun period of the first four rightly-guided caliphs – their objective must be through jihad to reintroduce that world. This means that, although they tend to adhere to the interpretations of Islam of the Hanbali mandhab or school of Islamic law because it is the most strict of the four Sunni schools26, they do not formally accept any particular school at all and engage in ijtihad27 on the basis of the rashidun period alone. This use of ijtihad is unusual and results in the consequence that all neo-Salafi actions are buttressed by fatwas, religious decrees from recognised learned students of Islamic law that thereby legitimise and authenticate their actions.

The most important consequence of this here is the use made of Ibn Tayymiya’s arguments excluding Mongol leaders who converted to Islam from the Muslim community on the grounds of their unwillingness to accept the full doctrinal and legal corpus. In other words, those who do not totally adopt Islam cannot be considered to

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be Muslims – a view that is at variance with the orthodox mainstream whereby inclusion is based on the acceptance of the five “pillars” of Islam. For the neo-Salafis, however, this has led to the view that Muslims who do not accept their doctrines are apostate and therefore excluded from the community. Indeed, they can be treated as kufar, infidels, and because of their apostasy (taqfir or irtidad), they can be killed.

The GIA had accepted the most extreme of these interpretations and has adapted it to its own purposes. It not only considers the Algerian state arrogant (hughra) and tyrannical (taghut) but it considers that Muslims who refuse the collective duty of jihad against it to be apostate (irtidad). They may thus be killed – this is the justification for the appalling massacres of recent years. It has to be said that this approach is rejected by all clandestine groups in Algeria except those specifically included inside the GIA, for they absolutely reject the doctrinal argument, as they do Cherif Gousmi’s fatwa justifying the abduction of women and their subsequent sexual abuse as legitimate for persons engaged in jihad28. It also raises the question of the degree to which the GIA's use of the instrument of the fatwa is justified as GIA leaders could not legitimately claim the status of an ‘alim, the only person who may legitimately issue a fatwa. In fact, of course, the GIA’s extremism was intolerable even inside a neo-Salafi context and the final breakaway from the group, led by Hassan Hattab in December 1997 underlined this, for this group, as its name makes clear – the Groupe Islamiste de Predication et du Combat (GSPC – Jama‘a Salafiyya li’l-Daw‘a wa’l-Jihad) is certainly neo-Salafiyyist in inspiration yet rejected the GIA’s doctrinal justifications. In any case, as detailed below, the case arguing for the exploitation of the GIA for counter-terrorist purposes, is difficult to deny.

In addition, many other groups, ranging from maverick “Patriote” militias settling old scores or seeking personal benefit to simple criminal gangs also claim adherence to the GIA and justify themselves by appeal to an Islamist rhetoric to justify their purely criminal activities. There have even been suggestions that the worst of the massacres, such as that in Bentalha, were motivated by a desire to clear land to be privatised, in order to force up its price as cleared land for construction by figures within the regime. Other autonomous groups actively follow the agenda of the GIA although they have no direct linkage with its command structure, even if they coordinate their activities and communicate with it. This is particularly prevalent in suburbs and urban peripheries where civil security has always been weak and where a significant proportion of the population is unemployed or in the informal economy. Indeed, these informal economic networks have formed the basis for support networks for terrorist groups, providing material support and information, and for actual networks in urban areas which both carry out terrorist actions in urban areas and control local populations through violence and fear.

More than half of youth population below twenty-five years old is unemployed and overall unemployment rates run at an officially-admitted 30 per cent. Many unemployed people (known as hittistes after the Arab word for “wall”; thus, “those who prop up walls) are engaged in trabando (officially-tolerated smuggling) and criminal gangs claiming to be part of the GIA, as well as genuine local Islamist groups, have captured control of such activities and, as a result, impose their own order on local districts, particularly in the outer suburbs of major towns, through violence. This process is very cogently analysed in a study by Luis Martinez29. The

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phenomenon was and is particularly prevalent in the Blida plain area behind the capital, Algiers and in the ring of suburbs around the city, partly because the local population, particularly the rural peasantry, although among the poorest groups in Algeria, have a particularly intricate and feud-ridden social structure. Although such groups, which claim and are generally recognised to be part of the GIA, were the subject of intense security force attention after 1995 and were subdued after 1998, they now appear to have re-emerged in the wake of the Law of Civil Concorde (which provided for a partial amnesty between June 1999 and January 2000) and are extremely vindictive.

DRS infiltration

The situation is complicated by the fact that there is considerable evidence that the original GIA was infiltrated by the Algerian army’s military security service, under the command of General Mohamed “Tawfiq” Mediène. This is the most occult part of the army structure and the least accountable and has, virtually since its creation by Abdelhafidh Ben Tobbal during the war of independence between 1954 and 1962, exercised a dominant and sinister influence over the political process in Algeria. The result has been that, since the mid-1990s, many of the GIA’s activities have been indirectly controlled by the security services and have been used to discredit the movement overall. There has also been evidence of direct exploitation of these Islamist groups, often for personal advantage. This was particularly evident after 1994, when land privatisation proposals30, required by the IMF economic restructuring programme, resulted in violent land clearances especially on the edges of major towns where land values increased because of potential building demand. There is also growing evidence that the army was engaged in counter-intelligence operations that involved the killing of civilians, camouflaged as killings by Islamist groups as well as punishment killings of large numbers of civilians. The worst massacres occurred in 1997 and 1998 in the outer suburbs of Algiers – Beni Messous and Bentahla being perhaps the best-known – and around and within the town of Blida.

Many foreign governments, including the British government are aware of these unsavoury links and, as was revealed during the Regina versus Sofiane Kebilene, Farid Boukemiche and Sofiane Souidi case in February 2000, the army has been massively implicated in human rights abuses against the civilian population. Evidence of its activities has now been published in France, in a book written by a former Algerian army officer, Habib Souaidia, entitled La Sale Guerre and which was published in February 2001 by Editions La Découverte in Paris. This study confirms the arguments of the many independent witnesses, including the author of Qui a tué à Bentahla?, Nesroulah Yous in 2000, also published by Editions La Découverte, and the contributors to An inquiry into the Algerian massacres, published by Hoggar Press in Geneva in 1999, who have made similar claims over the years, as well as evidence provided by a group of former army officers based in Madrid who have repeatedly warned of the army’s culpability for such actions over the past five years, the Mouvement Algérien des Officiers Libres (MAOL). Further information has emerged from a book, by Hisham Aboud, a former Securité Militaire officer – La mafia des généraux, published by Editions J.C. Lattès in Paris in February 2002.

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The credibility of Mr Souaidia’s revelations was, ironically enough, enhanced by the furious press and media campaign, backed by the government and the army and launched in Algeria and France to discredit it, together with the consequent libel case between him and former General Khalid Nezzar. The case was heard in June 2002 and the tribunal had already made it clear that there would be no penalty against Mr Souaidia for libel as “these matters touch upon history”, in the words of the presiding judge. The formal sentence on September 27, 2002 made it clear that Habib Souaidia had won an effective victory. The accusations made against Khalid Nezzar, therefore, continue to stand unopposed, despite his own set of memoires, recently published and entitled Les mémoires du Général Khalid Nezzar. He had also been savaged by Hisham Aboud in his own publication earlier in the same year.

There have also been well-substantiated claims that 73 army officers, arrested for suspected sympathies with the Islamist movements, were secretly executed in early March 2001 to avoid any repetition of Habib Souaidia’s revelations31. This event was followed up by a well-concealed private visit to France by the then army chief-of-staff, Mohamed Lamari, to reassure French leaders that all was still in order and that the executions were simply a necessary precaution. The reality, of course, is that Algeria is still an intensely repressive state in which the rule-of-law does not exist but where power is exercised in a purely arbitrary fashion, thus endangering anybody who falls foul of the authorities. The counterpart to this has been, of course, that violence has re-emerged, both in rural areas and in towns.

The current situation

The evidence of the past two years suggests that the structure of violence is now well-entrenched in Algerian society. In addition to the various groups based in the countryside – in effect now the GSPC, and its most recent ally the Groupe Salafiyyiste de Predication (Jama‘a Salafiyyia li’l-Daw‘a – GSP), organised by Slimane Afghani in western Algeria – there are now complex urban networks as well. Many of these, particularly in the outskirts of towns, are based on the old trabando smuggling networks32. They have extensive local knowledge, have often penetrated the local administration and the police and also have good contacts with neighbouring networks – there is therefore a highly effective information network running through Algerian urban life, often with contacts to groups operating in the countryside and even to support networks abroad. Some of them run protection rackets; others virtually operate a parallel administration in the areas in which they operate, even though the security forces appear to be formally in control. These structures have immense potential for future violence and represent the underlying failure of the security regime introduced by the Algerian authorities over the past decade.

For the many people who supported the FIS or were members of it but who reject the violence of the armed groups and their belief that the Algerian regime is taghout (tyrannical) and hogra (arrogant; contemptuous) and must therefore be destroyed by force of arms, there has been no political outlet for many years. They have been able, it is true, to support either the HMS or an-Nahda and its counterpart, al-Islah but for many of them this is inappropriate – the HMS is seen as a pro-regime party, as is an-Nahda in the wake of the 1999 split, whilst al-Islah is predominantly an eastern Algerian creation. As mentioned above, there was an attempt two years ago to form a

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political movement that would have espoused many of the values and objectives of the FIS within the context of formal politics in Algeria. Created by a former foreign minister, Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, the son of the second leader of the AUA, the Wafa movement fulfilled all the criteria laid down for party registration in Algeria but has nevertheless been refused a licence by the ministry of the interior. Nor is this simply reserved for the Islamists; a similar secular movement, designed to be a genuine opposition party alongside such movements as the FFS – the Front Démocratique, founded by a former premier, Sid Ahmed Ghozali, was also refused registration.

In fact the hostility of the Algerian authorities to the FIS continues unabated despite the fact that its overt political infrastructure inside Algeria has long since disappeared. Today, the formal movement exists only as in exile in European capitals and cities where there are significant Algerian expatriate communities. It has no known links with any of the clandestine groups inside Algeria, although some of them have their own logistics networks in Europe. The external FIS has recently been radicalized, however, as the old moderate leadership under Rabah Kebir in Germany which has been suspected of wishing to compromise with the regime in order to rejoin the political order in the capital has been pushed aside by a group that wishes to espouse the armed struggle in Algeria itself. In September 2002, at a special party congress in Belgium, Rabah Kebir was replaced as leader by this faction who proposed Mourad Dhina in his place. He is a longstanding FIS member based in Geneva who is not prepared to compromise the FIS’s original objectives for the sake of personal status – an accusation frequently levelled against Rabah Kebir. Although he has been refused political asylum in Switzerland, he has been given permission to reside there and, even though the Algerian government made representations to the Swiss government in the wake of the congress for his immediate extradition – not the first time that it has raised this request – the Swiss authorities refused to agree. They have, however, instructed Dr Dhina not to engage in any political activity. The FIS-in-exile, therefore, may have been radicalized as a result of its bitterness over its continued exclusion from the Algerian political scene, but it cannot effectively articulate its policies or its attitudes.

It has, nonetheless, over the years played a major role in affecting the kinds of choices political activists inside the country have made. Its general influence over the MIA and the AIS was extremely important in deciding the movements’ attitudes towards the GIA. It continued to maintain close links with the major opposition parties inside Algeria, particularly the FLN until its secretary-general, Abdulhamid Mehri, was replaced by Abdesslam Benhamouda in 1994, and with the FFS under Hocine Ait-Ahmed. It was this linkage that enabled it to respond to the initiatives of the Sant’Egidio Community in Rome in November 1994 and January 1995. These initiatives generated the Rome Accords which outlined a political solution to the Algerian crisis in which all parties, including the Algerian regime, would have had a role to play. It also played a significant role in the unilateral ceasefire organised by the AIS with the Algerian army.

In fact, the political leadership of the FIS abroad, objected to the truce, not because it wished violence to continue but because it feared – correctly as matters turned out – that the regime, by engaging in a purely military arrangement, would not allow for it to be expanded into a political initiative which might have led to a viable compromise. This anxiety over the unwillingness of the regime to compromise with

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its political opponents reflects the hallmark of the crisis in Algeria. That is that the regime and, behind it the army, has been quite unwilling to consider any compromise that hinders its own hegemony over the political scene. It is this consideration that made the oft-quoted distinction between “conciliateurs” and “éradicateurs”” within the regime – between those who apparently sought compromise and dialogue with the Islamic opposition and those, supported by secular political parties, who rejected any idea of dialogue – a false one. In the final analysis, neither side was really prepared to compromise the regime’s hegemony of power for the sake of a negotiated political solution. This was, of course, the factor that also ensured that violence was the ultimate test of political power – and the reason why there is still no solution.

The leadership has had its own internal organisational problems, largely reflecting the contested position of Rabah Kebir as its official spokesman. He had been appointed to this position in 1993, after a FIS exile conference in Tirana but was supposed to act within a collegiate structure that was subordinate to the clandestine leadership still in Algeria – a situation which replicated the power-structure of the FLN during the war of independence. This he completely failed to do, acting unilaterally on many occasions, as for example when he met an American ambassador without party agreement, congratulated the Algerian president, Liamine Zeroual after his election or, later, independently of the party, supported the AIS’s unilateral truce. This came to a head in late 1994, when Kebir appointed the hay‘a, a committee of twelve persons to act as the legitimising body of the FIS in exile.

The personal tensions within this body led to two members leaving it on the grounds that Rabah Kebir was not prepared to operate in a collegiate fashion – Ahmad Zaoui and Anwar Haddam. In the wake of their departure, Rabah Kebir issued a statement to the effect that “…two members of the committee had left for ‘another organisation’” – a statement which was immediately interpreted at the time as meaning that they had joined the GIA. This was just the time when the GIA was gathering in other FIS leaders and clandestine groups, just before it began to systematically eliminate them the following year, including two major FIS figures, Mohamed Said and Abderrazak Rejam. Anwar Haddam, as a result, found himself detained in the United States on the grounds that he was now engaged in a terrorist organisation, whilst Ahmad Zaoui appears to have been seen by the Belgian authorities in the same light. It is interesting to note that, today, nine of Rabah Kebir’s supporters on the hay‘a have now left the committee and only three remain. They, together with Rabah Kebir himself, refused to consider attending the September 2002 congress at which his past behaviour led to his dismissal as the FIS official spokesman. The movement itself, however, no longer has a role to play inside Algeria.

Relations between them, however, have not been completely broken, for they both participated in a recent initiative to encourage President Bouteflika, who was vying for presidential re-election in April 2004, to fully apply his promises of national reconciliation by allowing the FIS to participate in the presidential elections and in formal political life. The initiative involved, in addition to Mr Kebir and Dr Dhina, representing the two wings of the exiled FIS, Abdelkader Boukhamkham, Ali Djedi, Kamel Guemazi and Omar Abdelkader, all of whom are well-known second-rank former FIS leaders inside Algeria itself. The two paramount leaders of the movement could not associate their names with the petition, which was issued via a leading

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Algerian newspaper, because they are not allowed to engage in formal political activities under the terms of their release from prison in June 2003. However, Abbassi Madani, who has been in voluntary exile Malaysia and Qatar, did hint at an initiative to bring conflict to an end in Algeria in August 2004 on al-Jazeera Television in Qatar. There has, of course, been no official response in Algeria to his initiative. One of the reasons for this, as described above, is that the regime knows that there is a very substantial body of opinion, the so-called “éradicateurs” that rejects any idea of a political accommodation with the Islamic movements, wherever they may be, despite the president’s hopes of “national reconciliation” in the wake of his re-election to power in April 2004.

Human rights observance, police brutality and the legal system in Algeria

The objective reality of human rights in Algeria is best captured by the Department of State’s latest report, published on February 28, 2005, which covers the events of 2004. Whilst claiming that there has been “important progress” in that fewer reports of abuses by the security forces had surfaced during the year, the report sums up the situation as follows:

The Government's human rights record remained poor overall and worsened in the area of press freedoms; however, there were significant improvements in some areas. There continued to be problems with excessive use of force by the security forces as well as failure to account for past disappearances. New allegations of incidents and severity of torture continued. Citing the country's ongoing struggle against armed terrorist groups, civilian and military police arbitrarily detained and arrested persons and incommunicado detention continued. The Government routinely denied defendants fair and expeditious trials. Despite judicial reforms, prolonged pretrial detention and lengthy trial delays were problems. Denial of defendants' rights to due process, illegal searches, and infringements on privacy right also remained problems. The Government did not always punish abuses, and official impunity remained a problem. The Government continued to restrict freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, and movement during the year. The use of defamation laws and government harassment of the press significantly increased, leading to the imprisonment of several journalists for terms ranging from 2 to 24 months, the closure or suspension of two newspapers, and more self-censorship by the press. The Government also continued some restrictions on freedom of religion. Domestic violence against women, the Family Code's limits on women's civil rights, and societal discrimination against women remained serious problems. Child abuse was a problem. Despite the Government's recognition of Tamazight as a national language, restrictions on Amazigh (Berber) ethnic, cultural, and linguistic rights continued to provoke occasional demonstrations. Child labor was a problem in some sectors. The Government continued to restrict workers' rights by not officially recognizing some unions.

This general description is remarkably similar to the picture painted a year earlier by the 2004 annual report, published on February 25, 2004 and covering the events of 2003 – a fact that suggests that, in reality, there has been very little change over the

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past year. This would be consonant with the fact that very few reforms of the judiciary or the police have been carried out in 2004, so that abuses of the system continue to be unpunished. As the 2004 report states:

The Government's human rights record remained poor and worsened in a few areas; however, important progress was made in some areas. Aspects of the State of Emergency continued to restrict citizens' right to change their government. There were fewer reports of security force abuses. However, there continued to be problems with excessive use of force and the failure to account for past disappearances. Short-term disappearances of prisoners deemed "threats to national security" reportedly increased. The incidence and severity of torture declined markedly; however, new allegations continued. Security forces carried out extra-judicial killings and civilian and military police arbitrarily detained persons. Arbitrary arrests and incommunicado detention continued; most of these cases were committed in the context of the Government's continuing battle with terrorism. The Government routinely denied defendants fair and expeditious trials, and interference with privacy rights remained a problem. Despite judicial reforms, prolonged pre-trial detention and lengthy trial delays were problems. Defendants' rights to due process, illegal searches, and infringements on citizens' privacy rights also remained problems. The Government imposed new restrictions on freedom of expression, and an increased willingness to implement them. The Government did not always punish abuses, and official impunity remains a problem. Defamation laws and government actions restricted the relative freedom of the print media; however, the media continued to openly and regularly criticize the Government, despite government reprisals. The Government continued to restrict, in varying degrees, freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and movement during the year. The Government also placed some restrictions on freedom of religion.

The behaviour of the security authorities is also dealt with in detail in the report. Detention in Algeria tends to be a testing experience to say the least. The security services customarily use physical abuse and torture as part of the interrogation procedure33, so that detainees are very likely to be ill-treated. There is also a predisposition to assume that persons returned from abroad on travel documents are linked to Islamists abroad and are thus a potential threat to national security, so that the security services often assume that they may have information about foreign Islamist networks that are engaged in supporting the violence inside Algeria. If a detainee is suspected of this, the ill-treatment is likely to be severe. The flavour of the treatment accorded to persons under detention is provided by the following quotation from the same human rights report issued on February 25, 2004 by the United States Department of State:

Both the Constitution and legislation prohibit such practices [torture]; however, according to local human rights groups and defence lawyers, police at times resorted to torture when interrogating persons. The Penal Code provides that state agents using torture to obtain confessions may face a prison sentence of up to 3 years. There continued to be reports of police torture and other abuse of detainees during the year. AI and local NGOs have stated that some persons died in custody from torture or were executed. The U.N. Special

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Rapporteur for Torture noted that he received information alleging a large number of persons continued to be tortured or ill-treated by security forces. AI stated that it had received "dozens" of reports of torture from former prisoners or those detained by security forces. The International Red Cross noted a decrease in incidents of torture and that the severity of such acts diminished, although it did not have access to military prisons. Local human rights lawyers have also stated that the incidence and severity of torture had diminished due to the overall decrease in terrorism nationwide, but not due to a change in practice within the security forces.

The Government severely criticized the AI report at the U.N., and it denied the veracity of reports of torture brought before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on the basis that formal complaints had not been filed. The Special Rapporteur reminded the Government that it has a responsibility to investigate all allegations of torture, even without a formal complaint. Many victims of torture hesitate to make public such allegations due to fear of government retaliation and a lack of physical evidence. Human rights attorneys maintain that torture still occurs in military prisons, more frequently on those arrested on "security grounds." Independent press reports, AI, and local human rights groups report that the preferred method of torture used by security forces includes beatings with fists, batons, belts, iron bars and rifle butts, whipping, cutting with sharp objects, soldering irons or cigarette butts applied to bare skin, attempted strangulation, and electric shock. In April, the independent press reported that the chiffon method of torture was a preferred method because it left no physical traces of assault. In September, AI reported an increased number of reports detailing the usage of the chiffon method.

In other words, detainees can expect to be tortured upon arrest, the severity of the torture depending on what information the Algerian security authorities consider the detainee might possess. He or she will not have any means of redress for, as the report points out:

According to the Constitution, defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. They have the right to confront their accusers and may appeal the conviction. Trials are public, and defendants have the right to legal counsel. However, the authorities did not always respect all legal provisions regarding defendants' rights, and continued to deny due process. Accused terrorists were tried in absentia on at least two occasions during the year. Some lawyers did not accept cases of defendants' accused of security-related offenses, due to fear of retribution from the security forces. Defense lawyers for members of the banned FIS suffered harassment, death threats, and arrest. An unknown number of persons who could be considered political prisoners were serving prison sentences because of their sympathies with Islamist groups and membership in the FIS.

In fact the legal system in Algeria is known to be profoundly flawed. The president called for a detailed report on the reform of the legal system in 2001 but shelved it because the reforms needed were so profound that he realised that they could not be carried through. Some reforms of its administration have just been approved by the legislative authorities, but no substantive reform has yet taken place. Furthermore,

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the presidency has made extensive use of the judicial system and its control over it – the president personally appoints all judges and the judiciary is therefore open to political influence – for political purposes during the past year. The FLN, Algeria’s original single political party and still the embodiment of the revolutionary legacy in Algeria’s political life, did not espouse the presidential bid for re-election in September 2003. As a result, the courts were used to, first, overthrow the party’s new statutes passed in March 2003 and then to reverse its decision to support the party’s secretary-general, Ali Benflis, as its presidential candidate in December 2003. This was done by using the courts to freeze party’s assets, against all legal precedent. The courts are now being used to challenge the freedom of expression of the private press in Algeria and at least two directors of newspapers have been imprisoned in recent months. In other words, the courts are open to widespread political influence.

Nor are the security forces free of serious abuse. There seems to have been evidence of government punishment of offences committed by the security forces in the Department of State’s report on human rights observance in Algeria in 2003. The report goes on to cite the director-general of national security, Ali Tounsi, over the number of security force personnel dismissed over the past two years:

Security forces committed extra-judicial killings, mostly during clashes with armed terrorist groups. The Government maintained that security forces resorted to lethal force only in the context of armed clashes with terrorists. During the year, the press and the Algerian League for Human Rights (LADH) a local non-governmental organization (NGO) reported that security forces killed 31 civilians. The Government stated that, as a matter of policy, disciplinary action is taken against soldiers or policemen who are guilty of violating human rights, and that some disciplinary action was taken during the year. In September, Ali Tounsi, the head of security forces, announced that 2,269 gendarmes and 211 policemen had been dismissed over the last 2 years for abuse of authority (see Section 1.d.). However, the Government did not routinely release specific information regarding punishments of military and security force personnel.

These dismissals, however, are for the very general offence of “abuse of authority” and are not broken down into more specific categories. Indeed, further on in the document, we learn that there are serious discrepancies in the figures which are identified by the report. Thus:

Ministries of Justice and Interior told AI [Amnesty International] in April that at least 23 gendarmes had been prosecuted and sentenced in military tribunals for "abusive use of firearms." However, the CNCPPDH [Conseil National Consultatif pour la Promotion et la Protection des Droits de l’Homme, the official body for monitoring human rights abuses] told the AI delegation that only one gendarme had been sentenced. The Government has not provided an explanation for this discrepancy…In April, officials in the Ministry of Justice and the President of CNCPPDH gave AI conflicting reports of the number of gendarmes tried for human rights abuses related to the 2001 Kabylie Black Spring. The number of gendarmes reportedly facing charges ranged from 1 to 24. A military tribunal sentenced the gendarme responsible for killing

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Guermah Massinissa, an event which sparked the 2001 Kabylie riots, to 2 years for involuntary homicide.

In fact, only the gendarme accused of killing Guermah Massinassa in Kabylia in April 2001was actually tried and sentenced for the “involuntary discharge of a weapon”, not for “involuntary homicide”, hence the light sentence that he received. In other words, there is no objective evidence that the government curbs security force abuses or, if it does, it is remarkably ineffective. It should also be noted that none of these statements refers to the behaviour of the Algerian army! Similarly, in 2001, it was judicial execution in that year. Even Algeria’s official observer of human rights, Farouk Ksentini, the head of the Conseil National pour la Promotion et la Protection des Droits de l’Homme (CNPPDH), admits that the judicial and penal situation is disastrous.

Serious concerns were voiced by him in early December 2002 about detention on remand, for example. In an interview on World Human Rights Day, he warned that the judiciary was “merely a machine for sentencing” because of its obsessive anxiety to use preventative detention as a mechanism of remand and investigation. There has been a considerable discussion of the use of preventative detention in recent months because of contractions between the constitution and the penal code over its legitimacy. Mr Ksentini also decried the behaviour of the police in Algeria where, he admitted, “violence” – he will not use the word “torture” – is widespread and integral to police culture – and, he stated, “completely inadmissible”. One reason for such behaviour arises, he believes, from the police practice of relying on confession evidence, rather than upon careful deduction and proof. His comments were echoed in a report by Maitre Mahmoud Khelili on torture in Algeria. He cited a dozen commissariats around Algiers and in its outer suburbs which are known to be specialised torture centres. Despite this evidence, however, the authorities have never taken action to clear matters up.

The issue was summed up in El Watan, on December 12, 2002, in the following words: “Dans les commissariats et les brigades, véritables antichambres de l’enfer carcéral, les pratiques de mauvaises traitments oscillent entre bavure et torture systématique, selon les militants des droits de l’homme.” (“In large and small police stations, which are really no more than antechambers to the hell that is prison, ill-treatment oscillates between beatings and systematic torture, according to human rights activists.”) And standards in prisons are poor – the “enfer carcéral” to which the quotation referred – although civilian prisons are open to international inspection (military prisons are not). Evidence to confirm this view emerged at the end of the same week when it was announced that Serkedji prison in central Algiers was to be closed and El Harrach prison was to become a remand prison. Two new prisons are to be built to the east and west of the capital. The press claims that the main reason for prison over-crowding is the excessive use of remand in custody by the Algerian court system

All these aspects of arbitrary repression in Algeria are confirmed in the latest Amnesty International Annual Report, which covers 2003 and which was published at the start of June 2004. In its preamble about Algeria, after pointing out that hundreds of security forces personnel and hundreds of alleged terrorists were killed in the ongoing security operations in the country, the report remarks:

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Torture continued to be widespread, particularly during secret and unacknowledged detention, and was systematic in nearly all cases involving alleged links to what the government described as "terrorist" activities. Human rights defenders continued to be subjected to restrictions by the authorities and journalists were targeted after exposing high-level corruption. Despite increased debate on human rights issues, impunity persisted as a key obstacle in addressing the legacy of past human rights abuses, including thousands of cases of torture, "disappearances" and killings committed by security forces, state-armed militias and armed groups since 1992. The state of emergency imposed in 1992 remained in place.

The report goes on to argue that:

No full, independent and impartial investigations were carried out into crimes against humanity committed since 1992, including thousands of cases of extrajudicial execution, deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture and ill-treatment and "disappearances". In the overwhelming majority of cases, no concrete measures were known to have been taken to bring to justice those responsible for human rights abuses committed by the security forces, state-armed militias or armed groups in 2003 or previous years.

In other words, little has changed from the situation of the past and there appears to be little likelihood that real change will occur in the near future. This appears to be confirmed by the latest State Department report on human rights in Algeria, published on February 28, 2005. It states that:

Both the Constitution and legislation prohibit such practices [torture]; however, according to local human rights groups, defense lawyers, and media reports, security forces continued to use torture when interrogating persons. Although torture had been denounced in the Penal Code, new legislation enacted in September criminalizes torture, and government agents may face prison sentences for up to 3 years for committing such acts. However, during the year, there were no reports of police or security forces receiving punishment for torturing suspects. Impunity remained a problem.

For somebody brought up in this environment, fear of the authorities and the security forces is almost second-nature. They provide no guarantee of personal security, just the opposite, and can represent a real threat to personal security. This was doubly the case in the late 1990s, when terrorist violence was at its height and there was a real danger that the security forces might have found it very difficult to maintain the upper hand. The period 1995 to 1996 was the most active year of the confrontation between inchoate urban terrorism and the security forces, in which the police took the main brunt of the struggle. It must have been a traumatic experience, not least because policemen’s families also became the target of terrorist violence during this period and many policemen continued to live within the community, unlike the gendarmerie and the army, who were housed in barracks and were thus better-protected. Factors such as these only intensified the security forces’ propensity for torture and ill-treatment of detainees.

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Issues of return

There are, in fact, serious issues to be considered as far as Mr Harkat’s safety is concerned, were he to be returned to Algeria. The Algerian authorities are still acutely concerned about the activities of Islamists at home and abroad and tend to treat them with considerable suspicion upon return; indeed, it treats all such persons returning in ways that are not conventional, such as through travel documents, in this way. At present, this is a particularly acute concern because, as described above, in September 2002 the FIS leadership abroad was replaced by a more radical faction. There is, therefore, now new suspicion of returned former FIS members and sympathizers. Mr Harkat will be seen as belonging to this category on account of the fact that he fled Algeria and has spent such a lengthy time abroad, particularly in Pakistan – the Algerian authorities monitored Algerians in the mujahidin and linked to Islamic charities – and because of his detention in Canada which, given the publicity his case has generated there, is certainly known to the Algerian embassy.

Indeed, Mr Harkat’s situation is even more acute due to his detention in Canada and the lengthy public legal proceedings that have ensued. The reasons for his original detention are certainly known to the Algerian authorities and the details will therefore have been recorded on his personal dossier in Algeria. The Algerian authorities will be aware of his expected return, if he is consequently deported, as it will be necessary to apply for travel documents for him because he has no valid passport, having come to Canada on a false Saudi passport. If Mr Harkat is successfully returned to Algeria on travel documents obtained for him at the Algerian embassy, the border authorities in Algeria will have been warned of his impending arrival because the delivery of such documents is only made upon approval from the security authorities in Algiers. It is normal for such persons to be interrogated upon arrival and, if there are grounds for any kind of suspicion, they can be detained in custody. This is the "garde à vue" (remand) procedure, usually in Algeria confirmed by a magistrate after twelve days, when it becomes a "mandat de depôt" (preventative detention). In practice, the initial remand period is often arbitrarily lengthened beyond the twelve days maximum without a magistrate being consulted, since the border authorities, being part of the security system, are effectively unaccountable to the legal authorities.

Quite apart from Mr Harkat's specific circumstances, it should be borne in mind that detention in Algeria, as mentioned above, tends to be a testing experience to say the least. The security services customarily use physical abuse and torture as part of the interrogation procedure34, so that he is very likely to be ill-treated. There is also a predisposition to assume that persons returned on travel documents are a potential threat to national security, so that the security services often assume that they may have information about Islamist networks abroad that are engaged in supporting the violence inside Algeria. Of course there are specific reasons in this case to believe Mr Harkat to have such information; namely his detention in Canada on suspicion of being involved with the al-Qa‘ida movement. If Mr Harkat is suspected of this, as will certainly be the case, the ill-treatment is likely to be severe.

This is known to other European governments to be the case. In fact, the process of return is fraught with uncertainties and danger in terms of the potential for ill-treatment, as the German government admits35. Although several governments do

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return Algerians now, all of them admit that they do not monitor what happens after return. It should also be borne in mind that at least two persons returned from France at the completion of their sentences in late 2001, for involvement in events in 1996 have either disappeared or been charged with new offences despite explicit Algerian government guarantees that this would not happen – an event that parallels the experiences of at least three persons who returned to Algeria to take advantage of the Law of Civil Concord in 199936.

The Chalabi case

The most notorious example of the unreliability of Algerian guarantees of this kind was furnished by the Chalabi case in late 2001. Mohamed Chalabi was returned in November 2001 and, despite formal guarantees given to the French authorities, was immediately arrested under 1993 emergency legislation and charged with offences that carry the death penalty. Naif Hamami had been returned a month before and simply disappeared, having been apparently arrested upon arrival at Algiers airport. He has never been heard of since, despite repeated French enquiries.

Mohammed Chalabi’s experiences highlight the dangers of return to Algeria. He was a long-term resident in France and was married to a French national with whom he had had four children. According to IFHRL-FIDH, he had apparently been involved in the smuggling and trabando networks that had developed between Algeria and France during the 1990s and had become a FIS supporter during a brief visit to Algiers in 1991 – his family comes from Ain Tayar in Algiers. He was arrested during a police sweep in an Islamic school in France in November 1994 and was subsequently tried for involvement in terrorist offences as the head of a terrorist support network in the Fleurie-Mérogis prison gym trial which started on September 1, 1998. He was one of 138 accused, of whom 52 were eventually acquitted of the vague charge “association de malfaiteurs en relation avec une enterprise terroriste” – a charge characterised by Jean-Louis Bruguière as being a “rake” designed to catch as many as possible, even if many of those accused eventually escaped conviction.

The trial itself was very severely criticised by international bodies for its scant regard for legal niceties. Mohammed Chalabi was designated a member of the GIA and the leader of the network in France that was alleged to have been organising an attempt to assassinate General Khalid Nezzar, the former defence minister, and the former premier, Belaid Abdesslam, an accusation that went back to an Algerian allegation laid against him in 1993, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia. The accusation was based on an allegation that he had transferred money to a certain Boukhatem. Mr Chalabi never denied that he had done this but pointed out that Mr Boukhatem was related to him by marriage and that the money was intended to pay for the construction of a house in Algiers, his home town. Nonetheless, he received an eight-year sentence in 1998 and was permanently banned from living in France after his release on October 31, 2001. He was released on November 9, 2001 and was immediately expelled to Algeria, having been continuously in prison since November 1994 and despite an attempt to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

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After his arrest upon return to Algiers, Mohammed Chalabi was first interrogated upon arrival between November 9 and November 17 by the Algerian police and the DSR. During this period, his lawyers were not allowed to see him and he was then arraigned on the original 1993 charges, for which he had been sentenced to death by a special court in absentia. The special courts have since been disbanded and the legislation under which he was sentenced has been incorporated into the Algerian penal code. In fact, the arraignment breached Algerian judicial procedures but was apparently necessary because the 1993 judicial procedures had also been deficient. Mr Chalabi’s lawyer, Mahmoud Khellili, was unable to consult the details of the accusation as they were missing from the dossier but noted that they involved implication in a plot to assassinate Khalid Nezzar and Belaid Abdesslam. He went on to point out that Mr Chalabi should have been released and then only re-arrested on new charges, not least because his co-defendants had been found not guilty on December 19,2000 by the Appeals Court in Algiers, when they were retried for the 1993 offences.

The hearing set for November 28, 2003 at his brief court appearance in Algiers in November 18, 2001 was postponed until May 20, 2002, when Mohammed Chalabi was acquitted on all the charges against him dating from 1993. The State Prosecutor had demanded the death sentence, according to the Quotidien d’Oran on May 21, 2002. Despite his acquittal, Mr Chalabi was not released because he now faced new terrorism charges, although the details of these have not been made public. Apart from a brief court appearance on remand on January 3, 2003, there has been no news of his fate. At that appearance he did confirm that, so far, he had not been ill-treated in prison – a comment, no doubt, on the high profile he enjoyed because of Algeria’s original breach of the undertakings it gave the French government about his treatment if he were returned. It is difficult to see what offences he could have committed that justified the new charges in view of the history of his experiences in France.

Shortly after his last court appearance, on January 3, 2003, according to the authoritative Pakistani daily newspaper, Dawn, the French government decided to delay the deportation of his brother, Brahim Chalabi, who had been convicted with him in the Fleurie-Mérogis trial in 1999. He had just completed a four year term in Chateauroux prison on terrorism-related charges as a member of the network led allegedly by his brother. The French interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, had planned to deport him on the completion of his sentence. His decision was, however, overturned by the justice minister, Dominique Perben, who had decided that no deportation could take place until the European Court of Human Rights had ruled on an application made by Brahim Chalabi’s lawyers on his behalf, despite claims that the network of which he had been a member had been financed by the al-Qa‘ida organisation – no doubt the basis of the new terrorist allegations against his brother, Mohammed Chalabi. The Court itself had petitioned the French government on January 3, 2003 not to deport him until this had occurred. There appears to have been no development in either case since!

Current practice

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In fact, the issue of returning failed asylum seekers to Algeria is still very sensitive, in view of the European Union’s intentions to negotiate a general return agreement with the Algerian government, which should have been completed at the start of 2002. France has had a formal agreement with the Algerian government for the return of asylum-seekers since 1994 and Germany has signed in 1997 but Algeria has not yet ratified such an agreement.37 Spain is also said to have such an agreement. The Canadian government, too, has contemplated removing 1,000 persons to Algeria, although it appears their actual removal has been delayed.38 This decision was apparently taken in the wake of a report from a member of the consular staff at the Canadian embassy in Paris who visited Algeria in 2001, although the latest advice from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which post-dates his report, appears to contradict his views. Mr Davies concluded that removals to Algeria could be undertaken and that several European countries have been regularly doing so. He specifically mentioned France, Spain (which also has a formal return agreement with the Algerian government), Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. He also points out, however, that none of these governments has actually monitored what happens to deportees, once they return, relying instead on word of mouth if things should go wrong. As the evidence above suggests, this is an unwise course of action, to say the least!

Currently, the Algerian government has been able to persuade European states and the United States that it has suffered from a domestic variant of what has been identified as a world-wide problem – that of international terrorism. Consequently, there are even less constraints on the behaviour of the receiving authorities because of their desire for information – 350 names have been handed to the United States of persons suspected of being involved with the al-Qa'ida movement, together with a further 1,000 names of persons allegedly involved in terrorism. The Algerian authorities are anxious to exploit official sympathy for its claims in Europe – which are quite spurious for violence in Algeria has exclusively domestic causes – and thus treat all suspected Islamists rigorously in order to extract information from them. This is a measure of the potential threat that Mr Harkat would face, if he is returned to Algeria, and is known to the Algerian security authorities as a person detained in Canada on a security certificate and then deported in connection with being linked to terrorist organisations.

It is worth noting that the practice of deporting persons to Algeria against diplomatic assurances that they would not be harmed has been specifically condemned recently by the new York-based human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch. In a report issued on April 15, 2005 and entitled “Still at risk: diplomatic assurances no safeguard against torture”, a specific comment on Algeria was made in relation to suspected British government proposals to deport persons originally indefinitely detained in Belmarsh prison, in circumstances very similar to those confronting Mr Harkat against diplomatic assurances of safe treatment:

In late February 2005, it was reported that Baroness Symons had travelled to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to negotiate agreements for the return of terrorist suspects from the U.K. to those countries.203 The U.K. government acknowledges that the men formerly held in indefinite detention would be at risk of torture if they were to be returned to their countries of origin.204 In addition to their individual risk, the men come from countries where torture is a serious endemic problem. In some countries—Egypt, for example—torture

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is systematic. In other countries—Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan—persons suspected of terrorist activity or labelled as such are specifically targeted for abusive treatment, including torture. All of the countries routinely violate their international human rights obligations.

[203] Nick Fielding, “Foreign Office in Talks to Deport Terror Suspects,” The Sunday Times (London), February 27, 2005, p. 8.[204] All the men are subject to deportation orders in the U.K., and would have already been deported if it were not for the U.K.’s obligations under article 3 of the ECHR.

This indicates that fears of severe ill-treatment, if Mr Harkat were to be deported to Algeria have considerable justification in terms of past experience. Quite simply such diplomatic assurances cannot be believed and do not satisfy the international obligations of states subscribing to human rights conventions. Indeed, the report in question is full of relevant material to Mr Harkat’s case in this respect.

The issue of al-Qa‘ida

Mr Harkat has been detained in part because he is suspected of being a “sleeper” in Canada for the al-Qa‘ida organization. Justice Dawson found there were reasonable grounds to believe Mr Harkat was a member of al-Qa‘ida (paragraph 143). I am in no position, of course, to comment on the accuracy of this, although I note that he has denied having been present in Afghanistan – he worked, after all, for a charitable organization helping refugees – and that evidence that he had been in Afghanistan was accepted by the court (paragraph 143 sub. 2). In one sense, however, the truth or falsehood of these allegations does not matter, for it is acknowledged by Mr Harkat that he was in Pakistan working for a Muslim charity.

The Algerian authorities, rather like the Canadian media39 and, indeed, the court in this case, seem to assume that such Muslim charities are merely covers for terrorist activities. In fact, although several such charities are now proscribed organizations by the United Nations because of such alleged links, they have rarely been proved to exist and organizations so-accused have undertaken lengthy legal battles to clear their names. In any, many such charities are internationally recognized to be genuine charities and have received much praise for their work amongst up to 5 million refugees. For the Algerian authorities, however, the terrorist link is the predominant concern.

Thus persons returned to Algeria and being known to have worked for such organizations, particularly if based in Pakistan, are presumed to be terrorist sympathizers and supporters and are immediately arrested, interrogated and tortured. As mentioned above, the Algerian authorities are, in any case, well-aware of those who went to Afghanistan for they were monitored whilst there and eventually forced to leave the country at Algerian government insistence. Such persons, if returned to Algeria, are certain to be intensively interrogated and are very likely to face ill-treatment during this process, even if undertakings have been obtained that this will not occur. It should also be noted that, even though presidential clemency has been extended on every occasion when a death sentence has been passed in Algeria since

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1993, the death sentence still forms part of the penal corpus and is issued by the courts.

There is an associated matter on which I feel that I should comment. Justice Dawson has found, at paragraph 143 (6), that Mr Harkat expressed his support for the GIA when this movement developed in Algeria, after the FIS was banned. This might be seen as an additional ground for assuming that he would sympathise or be involved in the al-Qa‘ida movement. In fact, this would not be an appropriate interpretation although it would be one favoured by the Algerian authorities and would further prejudice Mr Harkat upon his enforced return to Algiers. In 1992, when the GIA first emerged, many Algerians supported it simply because it argued that the Algerian state was repressive and corrupt and should therefore be overthrown. The democratic route had been tried and had been blocked by the army-backed coup so that its violent over-throw seemed the only option for few believed in the ASIS alternative – that military pressure would force the army-backed regime to restore the electoral process.

Such an attitude was particularly prevalent amongst Algerians in exile, largely because they enjoyed the freedom of expression that would have been denied them in Algeria. Thus such sympathies were far more a statement about the widespread disgust and anger felt by Algerians over the way in which the democratic, multiparty system in Algeria created after the events of October 1988 had been traduced by the Algerian army, seen as corrupt and the protector of illicit privilege as well as the guardian of the one-party repressive state than a statement about an endorsement of terrorism and the extraordinarily violent agenda espoused later on by the GIA.

Mr Harkat, after all, was remote from events in Algeria which he could not affect and was never in a position to do so, so that his sympathies with the original GIA would have reflected these more inchoate attitudes than active support and involvement in an increasingly violent struggle inside Algeria itself. It must be realized, however, that this is not an explanation that would be favoured by the Algerian authorities today. They would consider him directly implicated in the actions and activities of the GIA and they will treat him accordingly, if he is returned.

Collaboration between European, American and Algerian security services

Quite apart from the issues of the publicity that has surrounded Mr Harkat’s case, there is no doubt that the Algerian authorities will be aware of what has happened to him, for collaboration between security services in America and Europe on the one hand and Algeria on the other is a constant feature of the exchange of information that now takes place over security issues in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the outbreak of the “war on terror”. Indeed, cooperation between the French security services and the security services of all North African states has long been an intrinsic feature of Franco-Maghribi relations. Thus, in 1965, the Morocco political activist, Mehdi ben Barka, was arrested in France at the request of the then Moroccan minister of the Interior, General Mohammed Oufkir and subsequently disappeared, apparently being murdered by French intelligence agents. The French government, under General de Gaulle, was completely unaware of the incident and, once he became aware, threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Morocco40. In the end, a breach was avoided but the Moroccan deputy minister of the interior,

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Mohammed Dlimi was arrested and tried when he next visited France. There was also a suggestion of American secret service complicity in the affair.

As far as Algeria is concerned, the past decade has been full of such links. For instance, the Algerian military security service warned its French counterpart in 1995 of the impending murder of Imam Sahraoui in Paris by the GIA41. Some years earlier, the two services collaborated, under instruction from the then French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, in the introduction of French gendarmes into Algeria ostensibly to protect French nationals there against attack by the GIA, after a staged abduction of three French embassy members in Algiers in 199342.

22 Up till then, the army’s role had been to guarantee the Algerian revolution – a commitment that had allowed it to effectively usurp the governmental process, particularly under the Boumediènne presidency.

23 The best analysis of this is to be found in Izel B., Wafa J.S. and Isaac W. (1999), “What is the GIA?”, in Bedjaoui Y, Aroua A. and Ait-Larbi M. (1999)(eds), An inquiry into the Algerian massacres, Hoggar Books (Geneva).

24 According to army reports on February 8, 2002, Antar Zouabri and two companions were killed in a house in Boufares. Antar Zouabri was identified by his finger-prints, according to the reports. His replacement was Rachid Okapi, known as “Abu Tourab”, and his decease, apparently at the hands of his colleagues in late 2004, spelled a virtual end to the activities of the GIA.

25 Apostasy is considered a severe sin in Islam, with only the possibility of conversion under compulsion being allowed for, since this is assumed not to involve true conversion. Repentance is possible, however, but a second act of apostasy is irredeemable. The Qur’an does not lay down a specific punishment for apostasy, but Muslim legal tradition has decreed it to be death – although some schools of law provide for a three day period before execution for repentance. Neo-Salafi Islamists do not provide for such possibilities and apostasy in itself is treated as an irremediable sin, whilst Muslims who do not adhere to their strict interpretation of Islamic doctrine face the danger of being accused to be apostates. Sheriff F. (1985), A guide to the contents of the Qumran, Ithaca Press (London); 84, 95.

26 The others are the Hanafi, Malaki and Shafi schools. There is a fifth, the Jafa‘ari which is specific only to Shi’a Islam.

27 Ijtihad is the use of independent reasoning to respond to a particular situation but within the confines of recognised and accepted doctrine.

28 This fatwa seems to be a quite extraordinary adaptation inside Sunni Islam of the institution of sigeh (temporary marriage) in Shi’a Islam and has no canonical justification at all.

29 Luis Martinez (2000), The Algerian civil war: 1990-1998, Hurst & Co (London)

30 In fact, the proposals were never enacted into law and the issue is still a critical one in Algeria today. Agricultural land is now to be leased, not sold (El Witan 01.08.2002), despite pressures for its privatisation, particularly from the IMF.

31 Nord-Sud Export 420, May 11, 2001

32 See Joffe E.G.H. (2002), “The role of violence in the Algerian economy”, Journal of North African Studies, 7, 1 (Spring 2002)33

34 Serious concerns were voiced by Farouk Ksentini, the head of the Conseil National pour la Promotion et la Protection des Droits de l’Homme (CNPPDH) in early December 2002 about detention on remand. In an interview on World Human Rights Day, he warned that the judiciary was “merely a machine for sentencing” because of its obsessive anxiety to use preventative detention as a mechanism

42

There are known to be complex links between individuals in the two services, particularly between the DRS in Algeria and the DGSE in France that go back over many years43 and information is regularly exchanged between them, both at a personal, organisational and a governmental level. Police cooperation with the intelligence services is handled by Operation Visipirate in France. There are also direct links between Algerian institutions and the French authorities and at least twelve names of French officials and security service members are regularly mentioned as being attached to the Algerian army command and to the intelligence services in Algeria44. Extensive details of such links have just been published in a new book in France45.

of remand and investigation. There has been a considerable discussion of the use of preventative detention in recent weeks because of contractions between the constitution and the penal code over its legitimacy.

Mr Ksentini also decried the behaviour of the police in Algeria where, he admitted, “violence” – he will not use the word “torture” – is widespread and integral to police culture – and, he stated, “completely inadmissible”. One reason for such behaviour arises, he believes, from the police practice of relying on confession evidence, rather than upon careful deduction and proof. His comments were echoed in a report by Maitre Mahmoud Khelili on torture in Algeria. He cited a dozen commissariats around Algiers and in its outer suburbs which are known to be specialised torture centres. Despite this evidence, however, the authorities have never taken action to clear matters up.

The issue was summed up in El Watan, on December 12, 2002, in the following words: “Dans les commissariats et les brigades, véritables antichambres de l’enfer carcéral, les pratiques de mauvaises traitments oscillent entre bavure et torture systématique, selon les militants des droits de l’homme.” And prisons are worse – the “enfer carcéral” to which the quotation referred. Evidence to confirm this view emerged at the end of the week when it was announced that Serkedji prison in central Algiers was to be closed and El Harrach prison is to become a remand prison. Two new prisons are to be built to the east and west of the capital. The press claims that the main reason for prison over-crowding is the excessive use of remand in custody by the Algerian court system.

35 In the “CIPU Enquiry to France, Germany, NL and Belgium February 2000”, in response to the question (question 4), “If you have returned asylum seekers any views/knowledge of how they have been treated at the airport or subsequently on return”, the German government’s response was that “There are serious indications of torture in police custody but no proof that an Algerian expelled from Germany has been subject to State repression.”

36 They include Malik Medjnoun and Samir Hamdi-Pacha, who, seven months later, were identified in Tizi Ouzou and Blida military prisons respectively. In another case, a former presidential aide, Ali Mebroukine, returning from a visit to France was arrested at the airport and turned up seven months later in Blida military prison. No charges have been preferred against any of these detainees (Amnesty International: Truth and justice obscured by the shadow of impunity, November 2000). Chenoui Abdelhakim and Samira Guelbi simply disappeared after their return and have not been subsequently traced.

37 The Netherlands, Department of Asylum and Migration Affairs, Algeria Situation: July 2001, The Hague, 2001, p. 34. 38 El Watan, 3 November 2002. 39 See, for example, CBC News, December 18, 2002 “The CSIS case against Mohamed Harkat” http://ottawa.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=ot_csis_harkat 40 Jacques Derogy, Frédéric Ploquin, Ils ont tué Ben Barka, Fayard, 1999 ; Robert Arnaud, France-Inter, L’affaire Ben Barka, dimanche 25 octobre 2000 ; Gilles Perrault, Notre ami le Roi, Gallimard, 1990. see also: www.confidentiel.firstream/article.php3?id_article=264

41 Mohamed Samraoui (2003), Chronique des années de sang, Editons Ladécouverte (Paris)

42 Campell G., “The French connection”, New Zealand Listener, February 14-20, 2004, 192, 3327

43

As far as the United States is concerned, there was no formal cooperation before 1995 as the Clinton administration was not certain that the Algerian government would survive. Thereafter, contacts began slowly to improve and, by the advent of the new century, the Pentagon had decided to improve contacts with its Algerian counterparts. The Algerian army and presidency had also decided that improved relations with the United States were a priority, both to escape dependence on France and because the Algerian army wished to modernize its forces and chose the American model to follow. Matters were expedited by the events of September 11, 2001, not least by Algeria’s prompt furnishing of its details on extremist organizations.

As a result, President Bouteflika has had excellent access to the Bush administration and the Algerian army has begun to receive American material aid and soon expects to receive weaponry also. As described above, there is increasing cooperation in the Sahara and the Sahel and Algeria seems set to play a role similar to that of Pakistan in Afghanistan in American strategic thinking. There have also been direct contacts between Algeria’s security services and their American counterparts. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA all sent officials to a meeting in Algiers with representatives of the Algerian army and the DRS in early February 2002. The officials set up a framework for intelligence cooperation46.

The British situation is less explicit insofar as, until September 11, 2001, British interest in political violence in North Africa was limited. The British authorities, both police and security services – to the fury of their French and North African counterparts – considered that it was far better to monitor such movements in Britain than to arrest or harass them. London earned the sobriquet “Londonistan” in European and Algerian intelligence circles as a result of this policy and British extradition cases initiated by France, particularly, became matters of diplomatic discord as a result of the exigencies of the British courts. Thus Rachid Ramda, who was sought by the French police in connection with the RER bombings in Paris in 1995 and 1996 has still not been extradited.

Within the British system, however, far closer cooperation developed after a reorganization of the security system after the end of the Cold War and a reorientation

43 The French intelligence services comprise:(1) Direction Générale de la Securité Exterièure (DGSE), which reports to the presidency and

the premier but is administered by the ministry of defence;(2) Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which deals with counter-terrorism and

activities of foreign nationals in France and is administered by the ministry of the interior;(3) Renseignements Généraux (RG), which handles general domestic intelligence issues and

is administered by the ministry of the interior; and(4) Direction de la Protection du Secret Défense (DPSD), which handles military intelligence

and is administered by the ministry of defence.See: dcaf.ch/news/Intelligence%20Oversight_051002/ws_papers/Faupin.pdf

44 www.anp.org/merc/mercengl.html

45 Aggoun A. and Rivoire B. (2004), Francalgérie: crimes et mensonges d’etats, Editions Ladécouverte (Paris).

46 El Watan (09.02.2002)

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of domestic security services. In the words of Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, in a speech in 2003:

Police and the security and intelligence services are working together to combat this problem [terrorism]. I can assure you that cooperation has never been better. The UK arrangements bring together the best from the intelligence world on the one side and law enforcement community on the other. Tackling complex and organized threats is a difficult and dangerous business. There is, without doubt, unequalled transparency and cooperation between us compared with other systems overseas.

Indeed, there is no doubt that this is true and, as far as terrorism is concerned, this is also managed through the terrorism coordination centre within the Home Office. However, in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, this cooperation has also extended overseas. As Ms Manningham-Buller went on to remark:

International cooperation to combat the terrorist threat has never been closer or more productive. Exchanges of intelligence have long been routine and we and other agencies, SIS and GCHP, work closely with foreign intelligence and security services to combat the threat. International cooperation too has never been better.47

Even allowing for the hyperbole that a speech in public over secret matters inevitably contains, the message here could not be clearer. There is coordinated communication and exchange of information within the British intelligence and security services, from the police to MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and there is good cooperation internationally as well. This has also been made clear by the recent Madrid bombings where the European Union’s Justice and Home Affairs pillar is now to be amplified by a special terrorism coordinator operating through the Common Foreign and Security Policy directorate under Xavier Solana and there is to be improved information exchange between European security and intelligence services48.

Within the Barcelona process, which formulates European Union policy towards the countries of the South Mediterranean, there is a mechanism for Justice and Home Affairs cooperation – for intelligence information exchange, in other words, with South Mediterranean countries49. The Canadian security services are known to have close contacts with the American and British counterparts and will have checked with them for information on Mr Harkat. They will also have sought direct contact with their Algerian counterparts for further information on him, either because such links already exist or through British of American good graces.

National reconciliation and general amnesty

47 Speech by Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of MI5 at the RUSI conference in New Delhi on June 19, 2003. See www.ukinindia.com/press/speeches/speech_50.asp

48 See also Munchau W., “Europe needs to rethink its security”, Financial Times (15.03.2004)

45

There remains one other circumstance in which it might be argued that Mr Harkat could be safely returned. This is that President Bouteflika has consistently argued that it is necessary to draw a line under the civil war of the past twelve years. He proposes to introduce a new spirit of national reconciliation into Algeria and draw up a general amnesty law, to be approved by referendum, which would extend the civil concord law of 1999 which was used to bring the members of the AIS that entered into a truce with the Algerian army in 1992 back into Algerian society. The problem is that, to date, nobody knows what the amnesty will contain, nor is it evident that it will be acceptable to the mass of Algerians.

Currently, a Commission Nationale de l’Amnestie Générale, ostensibly created by a political party, the Parti du Renouveau Algérien, but probably a clandestine initiative from the presidency, has been sounding opinion, both within the Algerian elite and amongst the former emirs of the resistance, as to what the amnesty should offer. Some indication of the president’s approach has been provided by the recently concluded ad hoc commission, headed by the director of the Conseil National Consultatif pour la Protection et la Promotion des Droits de l’Homme (CNCPPDH), Farouk Ksentini. This commission was set up last year to deal with the cases of the “disappeared”. It was, in effect, to resolve the issue by offering monetary compensation to the families affected.

The proposal led to an enraged response from Algerian non-governmental organizations representing the families of the “disappeared” – which the government had refused to register as non-governmental organizations so that it could ignore them! They demanded a truth and reconciliation commission, as in South Africa or, more recently, Morocco. This the presidency was determined to avoid because of its tacit agreement with the army, whereby the army was to be protected by the regime against any attacks on its past behaviour in return for it ceding the political ground to the presidency – as it did last April. Instead, Mr Ksentini’s commission identified 6,146 cases of “disappeared persons” and was able to persuade 70 per cent of them to accept compensation without further investigation. In other words, the past is to be swept aside.

This appears to be the intention under the new amnesty proposals as well, for the security forces, the paramilitary forces and the armed groups are to be offered amnesty with no investigation or restraint. The amnesty, however, will not apply to “international terrorism” – in other words, to persons accused of links with organizations such as al-Qa‘ida. The issue prompted last week a joint statement issued by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights – the very first time the three organizations have jointly issued such a document – warning against such an approach50.

49 In fact there is such cooperation through the European Union, NATO and the OSCE. By far the most important is the EU Plan of Action, adopted in September 2001. All these details can be seen on the following three web-sites:

www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/wn/aussenpolitik/vn/itb/itb_eu_htmlwww.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/en/aussenpolitik/vn/itb/itb_osze_htmlwww.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/en/aussenpolitik/vn/itb/itb_nato_html

50 See http://www.hrw.org

46

In any case, other groups inside Algerian society, particularly the secular “éradicateurs” are not going to tolerate such an approach and there have already been strident attacks on the proposal from some of the political parties. The president seems now to have admitted this for in his latest speech for he warned that the “throat-cutters” could not be forgiven51, thus implying that the extremists and those accused of contacts with terrorism are not going to be allowed to participate in the amnesty. In reality, the final initiative is likely to be very limited, excluding all those who could be associated with terrorism and thus providing little hope to individuals such as Mr Harkat who will certainly not be allowed to benefit from its terms.

E.G.H. JofféApril 20, 2005

Notes

51 El Watan 10.04.2005

47