We hope that this kind of openness will continue and will broaden. Justice Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, as well as other officials we met with in May, delivered this same message: that this visit should be not be a solitary one, and that relations between our organization and Algeria should become routine. It is in this spirit that we would like to request the government's authorization for a Human Rights Watch delegation to pay a return visit to Algeria in February of 2001. The mission, like the one mounted in 2000, would be to conduct research and interview a variety of Algerians concerned with human rights, including government officials.
In this regard, I would also like to take the occasion of this private communication to share with you one of Human Rights Watch's preeminent concerns with respect to human rights conditions in your country, namely the problem of impunity. We had conveyed this concern to the officials that graciously met with us during our visit in May, and we hope that this is an issue that your government will give attention to in the coming year.
As an organization that has monitored human rights conditions in Algeria throughout the 1990s, we are encouraged by the decline in a number of reported human rights abuses since 1998. We are also pleased by some of the measures you have taken that have a positive impact on the human rights situation. You have pardoned and released thousands of prisoners, many of them unjustly incarcerated after being prosecuted for nonviolent offenses deemed supportive of "terrorism" or "subversion" and subjected to trials that fell short of international norms. You also offered a bold and much-needed acknowledgement that the issue of "disappeared" persons was a serious one requiring official attention.
As we have publicly stated on earlier occasions, we took encouragement that the Civil Harmony law of 1999 offered an amnesty to militants who surrendered but appropriately exempted from the amnesty acts of a heinous nature, specifically murder, inflicting permanent injury, rape, and placing explosives in public places. By exempting these crimes, your government signaled that national reconciliation may be built on leniency but not on impunity for the most serious abuses.
While this is a principle Human Rights Watch endorses, we have grown increasingly concerned that, in practice, impunity for grievous abuses is more the rule than the exception and threatens the long-term goal of national reconciliation. The indications of impunity, which are developed at greater length in the chapter on Algeria of Human Rights Watch's new World Report 2001, include:
1. The "pardon with a force of amnesty" (grâce amnistiante) that you decreed on January 10, 2000 gave a complete and unconditional amnesty to all members of two surrendering armed groups, the Islamic Salvation Army and the Islamic League for Preaching and Holy War, regardless of any acts they may have committed. Officials in the Ministry of Justice told our mission that Article 10 of the Civil Harmony law, which states that newly ascertained and previously undeclared facts regarding criminal acts committed by beneficiaries of the law are grounds for opening criminal proceedings, does not take precedence over Article 41 of the law, which exempts from scrutiny or culpability persons belonging to organizations that had "decided to halt acts of violence and placed themselves entirely at the disposal of the state"-that is, the persons covered by the grâce amnistiante. This means that members of these groups suspected of having murdered civilians or having kidnapped and raped women and girls have been cleared without any manner of investigation into their past, or any requirement that they even acknowledge responsibility for heinous crimes. This blanket amnesty betrays a core principle of the Civil Harmony law, which recognized that perpetrators of the most grievous offenses must be held accountable.
2. The "probation committees" established under the Civil Harmony law to rule on amnesty applications submitted by armed group members who surrender as individuals appear to function with no transparency whatsoever. They meet in closed session and involve neither victims nor the general public in their deliberations. Some Algerian rights activists accuse the committees of quickly and routinely approving applications without making a reasonable effort to ascertain whether the individual in question has committed grievous offenses that, under the law's provisions, would disqualify that person from escaping criminal penalties. Justice ministry officials told our delegation on May 23 that some 340 persons had been prosecuted under the Concorde Civile law but, in the absence of names and specifics, it is not possible to weigh the significance of this statement.
3. Members of the security forces continue to enjoy near-total impunity for human rights violations. Ministry of Justice officials told our delegation on May 23 that 348 persons associated with the security forces, including members of the "self-defense" militias, had been prosecuted for human rights abuses since 1992. Quite apart from the fact that this number appears relatively small compared to the number of acts of torture, summary executions, and acts of "disappearance" that are alleged to have been committed since 1992 by the security forces and self-defense militias, it is a number that cannot be verified or evaluated in the absence of specific information. Despite Human Rights Watch's written and oral requests to your government, submitted both before and during the mission, officials have declined to furnish any details regarding the names of the defendants, the charges for which they had been convicted, their punishments, or other information that would enable Algerians and others to evaluate the extent to which security forces were being held accountable. Such information should be a matter of public record, as it is when the defendants are ordinary citizens.
4. Impunity is reinforced by the absence of systematic investigations in the aftermath of human rights abuses. The forensic law enforcement expert who participated in our mission confirmed what we had already understood from Algerian human rights lawyers: Law enforcement authorities do not routinely collect and preserve forensic evidence at the scene of violent crimes; nor do they systematically attempt to identify murder victims before burying them. Such lapses make it easier for human rights abusers, be they members of armed groups or of the security forces, to operate in a climate of impunity.
5. Little effort is being made to investigate past abuses, no matter how horrific their nature. For example, in the three years since large-scale massacres were perpetrated in such places as Bentalha, Rais, Sidi Messous, and in remote parts of the wilaya of Relizane, none of the perpetrators has to our knowledge been identified or brought to justice. This fall, Algerian officials denounced a new book by a survivor of the Bentalha massacre who presented disturbing but inconclusive evidence of security force complicity in that tragedy. We agree with Ambassador Mohamed Ghoualmi, Algeria's envoy to France, when he wrote in Le Monde of November 20 that what happened at Bentalha "is too serious to be 'investigated' by the allegations and unsupported suppositions of a single individual." Yet the government has failed to conduct a credible investigation of its own in order to inform the public who committed these massacres and how, in more than one instance, the killers were able to work uninterrupted and then escape after several hours without being challenged by the security forces that were stationed nearby. Nor has the government permitted any sustained and thorough investigation into these events by an independent organization, be it Algerian, international, or mixed. Officials have accused the Islamic Armed Group of committing the massacre at Bentalha but has not, to our knowledge, identified or brought to justice a single individual on charges of participating in it, even though, as Ambassador Ghoualmi claims in his essay, survivors came forward to say they recognized their neighbors among the culprits.
The passage of time has not lessened the need for a thorough and public investigation into these and other massacres. Such investigations must seek to determine the identities of the individual assailants and their present judicial status, the complete list of victims, and what has been learned with respect to the security forces' failure to intervene on repeated occasions when they were aware that nearby civilians were being slaughtered. Providing a full picture of these events is, we believe, a safeguard against their recurrence. To urge an investigation presumes nothing about the identity of the perpetrators; it is not, as Algerian officials frequently charge, a veiled attempt to cast suspicion on the armed forces and exonerate the Islamist groups that are alleged to be the real culprits.
6. Government officials routinely refuse to divulge basic information about serious abuses that have taken place, frequently using the pretext of "ongoing investigation" to justify their refusal. When our mission asked Ministry of Justice officials why there had been no prosecutions in the cases of the two mayors and GLD leaders in the Relizane area who had been briefly detained in April 1998 for allegedly carrying out abductions and executions, we were told that the case was still "under investigation." While we were in Algeria, Mohamed Smain, head of the Relizane office of the independent Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was detained after he had videotaped one of the mass graves associated with this case and his videotape confiscated on the grounds that he was "interfering with the investigation."
Similarly, when we asked officials for the names of allegedly "disappeared" persons whose whereabouts had been "elucidated," we were told that such information could not be provided because of the "ongoing investigation." In fact, "investigation" appears in many cases to consist of no more than occasional correspondence between different government bureaus. The category of "under investigation" in Algeria today appears to be a means of obscuring the truth rather than uncovering it.
7. Your welcome acknowledgement of the plight of the families of "disappeared" persons has not been followed by any measurable progress in disclosing the fate or whereabouts of the more than 4,000 Algerians whose "disappearance" at the hands of the security forces since 1992 has been documented by nongovernmental organizations. During the course of the past year, officials have given out various statistics pertaining to the fate of the "disappeared." Ministry of Justice officials told the Human Rights Watch delegation on May 23 that the ministry had opened 3,019 cases of reported "disappearances." Of these, the officials said, 833 were persons being sought by the security forces, ninety-three had been killed in clashes with the security forces, eighty-two were in detention, nine had been killed in clashes among armed groups, forty-nine had been released from detention and "may have joined the terrorists," and seventy-four were at their homes.
Regrettably, these same officials turned down a request from the Human Rights Watch delegation to provide the names of individuals in any of these categories. This makes it impossible to check the ministry's information against the lists of cases compiled by lawyers and rights organizations, or to check with families whether the government had provided them with this same information about their loved ones. M. Kamel Rezzag-Bara, head of the National Human Rights Observatory, also declined to share with Human Rights Watch any kind of information or nominal list of "disappeared" cases from the ONDH database during meetings in his office on May 22 and May 27.
Organizations representing families of the "disappeared" insist that, with extremely few exceptions, their relatives have not been found and the government has furnished no credible information about their location or status. We have no reason to question their assertion so long as the government declines to disclose what it knows in each individual case that has been brought to its attention.
8. Algerian organizations that monitor and lobby on human rights issues face a variety of restrictions on their right to assemble and associate freely. The National Association of Families of the Disappeared and the Association of Families of the Disappeared of Constantine have both been refused official recognition. This prevents them from renting offices and hiring public halls for meetings and assemblies. Police have on occasion forcefully dispersed the peaceful demonstrations that these organizations regularly hold, although they are tolerated most of the time. Another organization, Sumoud, which opposes impunity for members of armed groups, has been waiting for three years for legal recognition.
Organizations concerned with human rights that have legal recognition, such as the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights and the Rassemblement Action Jeunesse, have been frequently refused permission to hold rallies and public meetings, even when they applied long in advance.
We object to such restrictions because they violate fundamental rights. They also reinforce a climate of impunity by making it harder for Algerians to demand accountability from their government in the sphere of human rights.
9. No mechanisms have been instituted to ensure that complaints and inquiries regarding human rights abuses are handled more promptly and seriously than in the past. Although the police and justice system have fewer new cases of abuse being reported than in past years, petitioners face the same difficulties in obtaining information. To cite one fairly recent example, Samir Hamdi-Pacha, arrested in December 1999 after his return from the United States, was held in secret detention until May 2000. Inquiries during his detention by family members, lawyers, and human rights organizations failed to yield any information about his judicial status or whereabouts.
If the authorities continue to show a lack of accountability or responsiveness at a time when complaints of abuse are fewer, it indicates the problem is attributable less to a strain on resources than to a lack of will.
In closing, we respectfully urge you to implement the following recommendations to ensure that the national reconciliation you are working toward is built on respect for human rights and accountability:
(1) Void those amnesty decrees, such as the grâce amnistiante of January 10, 2000, that allow grave human rights abuses such as killings of civilians and sexual attacks against women to go unpunished in contravention of international human rights law.
(2) Ensure that each member of an armed group who surrenders is subjected to a thorough investigation in a manner that allows for public input, and that each individual responsible for serious human rights violations be brought to justice in accordance with international standards for a fair trial.
(3) Ensure that all complaints of human rights abuses by the security forces are promptly and impartially investigated, that complainants are kept informed of the status and findings of any investigation, and that those found responsible for human rights violations be brought to justice;
(4) Ensure that the resources and directives are in place so that officials handling investigations routinely collect, preserve, and evaluate material evidence of human rights abuses in such a way as to assist in a judicial inquiry into the events that occurred and the identity of the perpetrators;
(5) Continue down the bold path you started on with respect to "disappearances" by requiring government agencies to disclose all information they have about the whereabouts and status of all persons who went missing allegedly after being taken into state custody; such information must go beyond past recitation of nameless statistics and attempt to account for each person who is reported missing;
(6) End all restrictions on the rights of members of nongovernmental rights organizations to gather and associate freely; such groups must not be denied legal recognition, if that recognition is necessary to conduct certain legitimate activities like renting a meeting hall or office; and
(7) Welcome missions to Algeria early in the coming year by those United Nations human rights mechanisms that have requested access, namely the special rapporteurs on torture and on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
Human Rights Watch would be eager to hear your views on these and other issues of mutual concern. We acknowledge again how grateful we are for the hospitality extended by your government toward our delegation in May 2000. We hope that the government will accede to our request to make another visit to Algeria, during February of 2001. We would be honored to have an audience with you at that time.
I thank you for your consideration and look forward to your reply.
Sincerely yours,
Hanny Megally
Executive Director
Middle East and North Africa Division
