Since early 1998, hundreds of women - mothers,
sisters and wives of people who disappeared - have
gathered each Wednesday in front of the headquarters
of the official organisation, the National Human Rights
Observatory.
In Constantine and Oran, similar demonstrations are
held regularly in front of courts and government
buildings while hundreds of families in more than 20
districts, terrorised and silenced for years, now dare to
come out with the truth: their relatives ‘disappeared’
after arrest or kidnapping by different security forces
involved in the fight against terrorism since 1992
(armed forces, national police force, municipal guards,
‘ninjas’, so-called legitimate defence militias, etc.). The
phenonemon has been either ignored or its extent
largely under-estimated, but now the private press
reports on the initiatives undertaken by the families of
those who disappeared are turning it into one of the
main subjects on the country’s political agenda. At the
People’s National Assembly, Labour Party and Socialist
Front MPs, Mrs. Louisa Hanoune and Dalila Taleb
bravely question the Minister of the Interior, raising the
question about these families: Where are our children?
Look at the photos of those who disappeared that the
women of Alger have now been waving in the streets
for months, and look hard at them: a series of
portraits of young people, looking young in their
wounded country, appearing militant to some, but most
of them not belonging to any political party, snatched
from their families at any time of the day or of the
night. Listen carefully to the stories of these women
demonstrating in the streets, stories that almost all
sound similar, stories of people kidnapped or arrested
by official forces, almost always before their very eyes;
the hope of release after investigation or that the
arrested member of the family may at the very least be
handed over to the court; shattered expectations, then
this endless list of steps undertaken, letters sent to
all the new bodies, authorities remaining silent, always
telling the same old story or playing for time. Try to
imagine these mothers walking around all the prisons,
courts, barracks and police stations trying to spot
those members of their families who disappeared,
hoping that they might reappear, and thinking about
them, walking up and down the cemeteries in the early
hours of the morning where the police take coffins
marked with the words, ‘X, Algerian.’
These pictures are, of course, reminiscent of others,
written in our collective memory and brought back to
life: those of the ‘crazy’ Latin-American women and
their steadfast rebellion. And it is not because it is an
easy comparison or that it just happened to come to
our minds that we mention this incident: The National
Association of Displaced Families, founded ironically, in
Alger which has recently elected its Council, and has
counted more than 3,000 cases of forced
disappearances (attributed to the authorities and their
different departments), which confirms the worst of our
assumptions. This figure unfortunately puts Algeria at
the head of the list of states where this practice is
most widespread.
Regardless of the denunciations made by human rights
defenders, both in Algeria and on an international
level, the Algerian authorities have long refused to deal
with this tragedy, claiming that those who
‘disappeared’ had secretly left the country or taken to
the wilderness. Now that the families of those who
disappeared are insisting on the truth, the authorities
reluctantly admit that there were some ‘offences’,
though they were few and always punished. ‘There are
some cases, just a few’ we were told. Today, faced
with these families insisting on the truth, the
authorities can no longer deny it and they are trying to
both suppress the movement altogether and to distort
the truth. In August last year, after the President of the National Human Rights Observatory had
announced to these families that his organisation
could not do anything, the President of the Republic,
the Ministry of Justice and the Interior denied detaining
any of those who disappeared and refused to deal with
the hundreds of cases reported since then. It even
refused to accept the Association’s registration, even
though it is perfectly in accordance with Algerian law.
Its answer to the MPs questioning its action consists
of accusing them of rescuing the victims (and their
families) as if the duty of MPs were not to respond to
the outcry of their people, in a national forum as well.
The Ministry is trying to encourage the families of
victims of terrorism against the families of those who
‘disappeared’, as if they had to put the suffering of all
the victims into different categories. And what is more,
some newspapers have recently been reporting that
mass graves ‘of victims of the GIA had been
discovered, among which, there were apparently some
of those who had ‘disappeared’.
Last July, the United Nations Committee of Human
Rights, which is composed of independent experts,
drew an appalling picture of human rights violations in
the country after two days’ investigation into the report
of the Algerian government. It is for the first time since
1992 that an international body for the protection of
human rights has at last seriously dealt with the
Algerian tragedy. With the families now coming out into
the open, a second turn-around has just begun. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its recently
celebrated 50th anniversary is a reminder at this very
moment that states are under the international
obligation to protect these rights and the victims of
their violations. It is important today that we do not
allow the voices of Algerian victims to be silenced
again.
Patrick Baudouin,
President of the FIDH
Driss El Yazami
Deputy Secretary General of the FIDH