Many Algerians Are Not Reconciled by Amnesty Law
ALGIERS — In the 1990's,Algeria was the Iraq of the Arab world, ripping out its own heart in a bloodbath that pitted a rising Islamist movement against military death squads, killing more than 100,000 people. It was a model of hell on earth.
More recently the country has offered itself as a very different kind of model, one of reconciliation after civil war. American officials have said that as Iraqis fashion their own national reconciliation effort, Algeria is worthy of close study.
But interviews with dozens of people affected by Algeria's approach suggest that its amnesty program is less a model than a cautionary tale. Few are happy, and the fighting is not over. Dozens of people are dying monthly, according to journalists here who follow the killing.
"We've reached a dangerous point when the criminals are out of prison and the people who don't agree with it are arrested," said Cherifa Kheddar, whose brother and sister were killed by Islamic extremists in 1996.
The Algerian approach is this: a national reconciliation law, approved by referendum in September and promulgated in March, set thousands of convicted Islamist fighters free while ordering silence from their victims. The law shelters government death squads from prosecution.
It provides money to some Islamist fighters to help them start new lives and even seeks to expunge the word terrorist from the national discourse. The people who cut throats and those whose throats were cut are now referred to as "victims of the national tragedy."
[To date, according to a government report issued on June 27, 40,000 people — 2,200 former Islamist fighters and 37,800 others — have applied for amnesty or compensation under the program, Reuters reported.]
It was a faster, more sweeping solution than the cathartic "truth and reconciliation commissions" that have operated in South Africa and elsewhere, creating a public forum in which victims could tell their stories and others could confess their crimes in return for amnesty.
But here in Algeria, people like Ms. Kheddar are frustrated and angry that the killers will never be judged.
But here in Algeria, people like Ms. Kheddar are frustrated and angry that the killers will never be judged.
................"We don't have the right to talk about these things anymore," said a woman in a bookshop on Didouche Mourad Street in downtown Algiers, referring to a black-and-white photograph of her friend Joachim Grau, a Portuguese man who once owned the shop and was gunned down in 1994. "They want people to forget."
At Notre Dame d'Afrique, a Roman Catholic basilica outside town, the police recently forced nuns to remove portraits of the seven monks beheaded in the failed bid to free Mr. Layada, because the display breached the reconciliation law.
Ms. Kheddar, who watched Islamists drag her brother and sister off to brutal deaths, spends every Sunday with other survivors of the violence in front of the governmental palace, displaying photos of women who were killed and demanding justice.
More here:
http://www.nytimes.com
More recently the country has offered itself as a very different kind of model, one of reconciliation after civil war. American officials have said that as Iraqis fashion their own national reconciliation effort, Algeria is worthy of close study.
But interviews with dozens of people affected by Algeria's approach suggest that its amnesty program is less a model than a cautionary tale. Few are happy, and the fighting is not over. Dozens of people are dying monthly, according to journalists here who follow the killing.
"We've reached a dangerous point when the criminals are out of prison and the people who don't agree with it are arrested," said Cherifa Kheddar, whose brother and sister were killed by Islamic extremists in 1996.
The Algerian approach is this: a national reconciliation law, approved by referendum in September and promulgated in March, set thousands of convicted Islamist fighters free while ordering silence from their victims. The law shelters government death squads from prosecution.
It provides money to some Islamist fighters to help them start new lives and even seeks to expunge the word terrorist from the national discourse. The people who cut throats and those whose throats were cut are now referred to as "victims of the national tragedy."
[To date, according to a government report issued on June 27, 40,000 people — 2,200 former Islamist fighters and 37,800 others — have applied for amnesty or compensation under the program, Reuters reported.]
It was a faster, more sweeping solution than the cathartic "truth and reconciliation commissions" that have operated in South Africa and elsewhere, creating a public forum in which victims could tell their stories and others could confess their crimes in return for amnesty.
But here in Algeria, people like Ms. Kheddar are frustrated and angry that the killers will never be judged.
But here in Algeria, people like Ms. Kheddar are frustrated and angry that the killers will never be judged.
................"We don't have the right to talk about these things anymore," said a woman in a bookshop on Didouche Mourad Street in downtown Algiers, referring to a black-and-white photograph of her friend Joachim Grau, a Portuguese man who once owned the shop and was gunned down in 1994. "They want people to forget."
At Notre Dame d'Afrique, a Roman Catholic basilica outside town, the police recently forced nuns to remove portraits of the seven monks beheaded in the failed bid to free Mr. Layada, because the display breached the reconciliation law.
Ms. Kheddar, who watched Islamists drag her brother and sister off to brutal deaths, spends every Sunday with other survivors of the violence in front of the governmental palace, displaying photos of women who were killed and demanding justice.
More here:
http://www.nytimes.com
posted by VIVA at 3:37 PM
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