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VII. THE EVOLUTION OF GOVERNMENT DISCOURSE ON DISAPPEARANCES

In a letter dated September 30, 1997 - after the huge majority of Algeria's "disappearances" had already been carried out - then-ambassador to the U.S. Ramtane Lamamra dismissed a request from Human Rights Watch for information on "disappearance" cases:

Under the improper title of "disappeared," your correspondence lists names of individuals some of whom have been duly sentenced by courts of law, other persons whose arrests you noted have not been established by the competent authorities, along with other cases being handled by the Observatoire national des droits de l'Homme [then the state's official human rights monitoring body]. This amalgam and the circumstantial approximations surrounding it in your document would lead any reader to think that its writers have sought to and succeeded in assembling "info-ammunition" in order to deliberately dramatize the situation of human rights in Algeria.89

Six years later, presidential advisor Major General Mohamed Touati told journalists that "disappearances" were an "unfortunate and prickly issue that must be addressed by the governing institutions."90 General Touati's remarks reflected the dramatic evolution in the way Algerian officials spoke about "disappearances." But this evolution, while encouraging, cannot obscure what has not changed in the government's handling of the issue.

First, authorities have not once acknowledged state responsibility in a single, named case of "disappearance." In the more than 1,000 cases that authorities claim to have investigated and "clarified," not one inquiry led to a finding of official responsibility for the person's being unaccounted for. For the authorities, "clarified" has meant a denial that the person is in official custody or, in a handful of cases, an unsubstantiated declaration that the person has been killed in a clash or is in prison pursuant to normal judicial procedures.91

Second, none of the state institutions that authorities have at different times pointed to as capable of addressing the problem - the judiciary, the Ministry of Interior's now-defunct missing-person bureaus, and the national human rights commissions (the ONDH and its successor, the CNCPPDH) - has produced tangible results for the families that have approached them.

The missing-person bureaus are part of the Ministry of Interior, whose forces are deeply implicated in the practice of "disappearance." The ONDH and the CNCPPDH lack the power to compel persons to give sworn testimony or to turn over official information or records. The ONDH did little more than transmit correspondence between families and state security services, and the successor commission has yet to prove that it will achieve more.92 Algerian courts have been equally ineffective in determining the fate of missing persons or in identifying and pursuing those responsible for abductions, or even in establishing the participation of state agents in the operations.

1998: The Government First Acknowledges the Problem
As suggested by the 1997 letter, cited above, from Algeria's ambassador to the U.S., officials at that time refused to acknowledge "disappearances" as anything more than a few isolated cases. It did not matter that the state's human rights monitoring body, the ONDH, had been reporting each year that it was receiving visits or correspondence from hundreds of families who stated that their relatives had "disappeared" after being arrested by state agents. It did not matter that, in many cases, a person's secret detention had been informally or confidentially confirmed to the families by members of the security forces and by officials." Authorities admitted only that in the course of Algeria's bloody and chaotic internal conflict, a number of persons had gone missing. Military authorities in 1996 announced the establishment of a "social services" department to receive relatives who wish to report missing persons and attempt to trace them. Then-Justice Minister Mohamed Adami told Human Rights Watch in 1997, "We give these [missing person] cases all our special attention. Sometimes we find the person in question, but until we do we keep the files open on these cases."93

But just around the time that Ambassador Lamamra sent his October 1997 letter, mounting evidence of "disappearances" and the stirrings of a protest movement was placing the issue on the domestic and international agenda. This eventually forced the government to modify its handling of the issue.

On September 22, 1997, a group of wives, mothers, and sisters of "disappeared" persons staged their first protest, attempting to enter the Aurassi Hotel in Algiers, where an ONDH-organized conference on political violence was taking place. Police blocked their access.

One month later, with international journalists gathered in Algiers to report on nationwide municipal elections, relatives of the "disappeared" gathered in front of the main post office in downtown Algiers, brandishing photos of their missing relatives. Police rapidly dispersed them and confiscated the equipment of some foreign reporters. But others snapped pictures that were published around the world, giving prominent media attention for the first time to the families of the "disappeared."94

During the fall of 1997, this new activism among the families coincided with heightened international attention to human rights in Algeria, mostly in response to a series of large-scale massacres just beyond the outskirts of Algiers. These mass killings, which claimed hundreds of lives between August and October, were officially attributed to armed groups. However, there were suspicions among many in Algeria and abroad of security-force complicity, fuelled by their failure to prevent or stop the perpetrators.

International human rights organizations urged an international commission of inquiry into Algeria.95 Government officials rejected this demand as an intolerable affront to national sovereignty. However, they agreed to receive a delegation of European parliamentarians in February 1998 and a delegation dispatched in July-August 1998 by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"Disappearance" activists exploited the presence of these missions and the reporters who accompanied them to bring their issue to national prominence. In particular, they had ready access to the U.N. team and presented it with numerous lists of missing persons. Delegation head Mario Soares, the former president of Portugal, then met with ONDH President Mohamed Kamel Rezzag Bara and presented him with a list of 230 "disappeared" cases.96 These events, coming shortly after the U.N. Human Rights Committee had harshly criticized Algeria on "disappearances" (see below), forced, for the first time, a government response.

Rezzag Bara informed the U.N. team that authorities might soon establish a special institution to deal with reports of "disappearances." On August 3, 1998, Rezzag Bara commented on the list of cases he had received from Soares. He stated that only 120 were known to his commission and under investigation. Of these cases, sixty-eight individuals were the subject of court action, twelve had been sentenced to jail by Algerian courts for "terrorist" activities, two of them to life terms in absentia, and another two had died during clashes with security forces.97 Human Rights Watch wrote a letter to Rezzag Bara on October 14, 1998, requesting that he disclose the names and details of the 120 cases, but never received a reply. (See below for a closer examination of the ONDH's handling of the "disappearance" issue.)

Just prior to the arrival of the Secretary-General's representatives, the U.N. Human Rights Committee formally reviewed Algeria's second periodic report on the status of civil and political rights in the country. The harshness of the committee's conclusions apparently caught Algiers by surprise. Algeria's fifty-five-page report to the committee, dated March 11, 1998, had not mentioned the issue of "disappearances." 98 The committee, which began its study of the government's report on July 20, raised the issue with the Algerian delegation, which was headed by Mohamed-Salah Dembri, Algeria's permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva. The delegation responded that most cases of "disappearances" involved persons who had gone off to join underground movements, according to a U.N. account of the session. Even so, the delegation stated, authorities were cooperating with all groups investigating "disappearances." They had received and responded to forty-nine case inquiries submitted by the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, the delegation said.99

The U.N. Human Rights Committee challenged this response, stating that authorities had in fact answered only twenty-seven of the forty-nine cases submitted by the WGEID.100 The committee pronounced Algeria's response "unsatisfactory" and said it was "gravely concerned at the number of `disappearances' and at the failure of the State to respond adequately, or indeed at all, to such serious violations." The committee urged the government "to establish a central register to record all reported cases of disappearances and day to day action taken to retrace the disappeared" and "to assist the families concerned to retrace the disappeared." The committee also asked Algeria to "give an account of the number of cases reports, the investigations conducted and the results achieved."101

Since the visit in July-August 1998 by the Secretary-General's panel, scores of families of the "disappeared" have been staging weekly sit-ins in Algiers, outside the headquarters of ONDH, demanding answers on the fate of their relatives. Demonstrations are also held frequently in Constantine and Relizane.

On August 17, 1998, a government official received a delegation of relatives of the "disappeared" for the first time. Three men and two women who had been mandated by 284 families of "disappeared persons" met with an official from the president's office, identified by the press as a public relations official named Mr. Rouane (no first name given).102 This official set up a meeting for them that afternoon at the Ministry of the Interior.103 There, they presented the list of the 284 cases to an official identified by the press as an official in charge of public liberties named Mr. Akrouf (again, no first name given). A member of the delegation told the media that Mr. Akrouf had promised to brief the interior minister on their concerns and to see that the ministry investigated all the cases submitted to it then and in the future.104

But the same Interior Ministry that promised families to take charge of the dossier refused to grant legal recognition to the organization they had created. When the National Association of Families of the Disappeared (Association Nationale de Familles des Disparus, ANFD) first sought legal recognition in November 1998, the Interior Ministry refused even to take its application.105 The ANFD remains without legal status.

1998: Government Sets Up Offices in Wilayas to Receive Complaints of "Disappearances"
The U.N. Secretary-General's delegation called in its mission report for the "invigoration and strengthening of the Algerian institutions responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights as well as for expeditious attention to complaints of disappearances."106 In August 1998 the Interior Ministry announced the opening of offices in each of the country's forty-eight wilayas to handle complaints about "disappearances."

Questions were quickly raised about this initiative, first because these bureaus were part of the same ministry whose forces were suspected in many of the "disappearances," and second because their working methods and powers to collect information were never made public. In November 1998 the Ministry of Interior issued a statement chiding the doubters:

This institution was established precisely to enable all interested families to present their concerns and submit their requests in special offices opened in the wilaya of Greater Algiers, and in every other wilaya of the country. These bureaus function properly. All requests have been officially recorded and the families received responses as the actions and research evolves and is completed. The manipulations and posturing of those who seemingly aim to take advantage of the good faith of families in distress cannot diminish the State's determination to address this issue.107

On May 10, 2001, Minister of Interior Yazid Zerhouni reported to the National Popular Assembly on the bureaus' accomplishments during their first three years. He said that they had been operating continuously since they were set up and, as of March 31, 2001, had compiled a dossier of 4,880 cases of persons declared missing.108 Authorities were working in a "legal and transparent manner" to handle the complaints. Of the cases investigated, Zerhouni broke them down as follows:

"persons sought by the security forces for criminal acts: 884 (in these cases, the relevant judicial procedures have been initiated);
persons killed in clashes with the security forces: 33
persons killed by terrorist groups: 11
persons convicted by the courts and currently imprisoned: 7
persons tried and released: 9
persons released after questioning: 27; and
persons who had been found at their homes: 7."

However, these numbers, like all other official claims to have clarified cases (see below), remain unverifiable because authorities have never rendered public any nominative list of the cases with the status of each.

There is no evidence that the bureaus established by the Interior Ministry conducted serious investigations into cases. The letters that the Interior Ministry sent to families resembled those provided to families by the ONDH: terse, formulaic statements that the person concerned could not be found, or was being sought by the police, or was not the subject of any judicial inquiry. Sometimes, the ministry's letter even contradicted information that had been provided earlier by the ONDH. But it never led to determining the fate or whereabouts of the missing person.

The following illustrative cases were collected by Algerian human rights workers:109

· Kamal Lounes Oumsaâd "disappeared" in 1994 after being taken into custody at the El-Mouradia police station in Algiers. He had presented himself there in response to a summons delivered to his home. Replying to a complaint by the family, the missing-persons bureau of the wilaya of Algiers wrote (letter 1090/99, dated April 5, 1999) that "the effort to locate [Oumsaâd] did not succeed."

· Mebarek Fatmi "disappeared" in 1994. Witnesses report he was arrested at his home in the wilaya of Sétif by soldiers who arrived in four military trucks and an unmarked white car. His father filed complaints with various authorities and received contradictory responses from the ONDH and the wilaya's missing-persons bureau. The ONDH's letter (number 79/98 of February 17, 1998) stated that Fatmi was not the object of any inquiry on the part of the security services. However, in response to a complaint filed with the missing-persons bureau of the wilaya, the Interior Ministry replied in letter 1111/99 that Fatmi was in fact being sought by the security services.

· Belkacem Aouni "disappeared" in 1995 after allegedly being arrested by gendarmes near his home in the wilaya of Tipaza. His family stated that Aouni was held in the local gendarme barracks for three days before they lost track of him. Following Aouni's arrest, police arrested Aouni's father twice, holding him for eight and then six days. Aouni's mother filed a complaint with the missing persons office in the wilaya, and got a reply (letter 2356/98 of November 22, 1998) saying her son "was being sought by the security services for breaking the law."

1999: The New President Breaks the Taboo
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected on April 15, 1999, to a 5-year term. He marked the first months of his tenure with a refreshing candor about many of Algeria's woes, including the human toll of the seven-year-long conflict. Whereas officials had previously criticized observers who said the toll of political violence had surpassed 100,000 dead, Bouteflika quickly embraced that figure.110 He also railed against the state of the justice system, saying, "I've said it before and I should repeat it here and underscore it: Algerian judges, not all, but many of the judges obey all sorts of influence other than the law."111

Perhaps most startling of all was Bouteflika's discourse on "disappearances." He put the number at 10,000 and did not repeat the prevailing line that the phenomenon was mainly due to kidnappings by armed groups and to persons "disappearing" of their own free will to join armed groups or for other purposes. He did not try to discredit accusations of security-forces responsibility, although he stopped short of accusing them directly.

In numerous interviews after his election, the president promised that his administration would investigate "disappearances." Bouteflika identified with the suffering of the families, he said, because he himself had a nephew who had "disappeared" in 1987:

I am personally interested in this file, particularly as I myself belong to the families a member of whom has "disappeared." My nephew, my brother's son, is one of those who have "disappeared." Therefore, I cannot, if only from a subjective point of view, be insensitive to their grief, concerns and anguish.112

In September 1999 he reiterated, "I belong to the families of people who have `disappeared.' It is a problem I feel in the same way as families of disappeared people."113

Bouteflika also acknowledged that some of the "disappeared" may be dead - the first time an official had openly acknowledged this - and suggested he had already begun to examine how the state might identify their remains:

There may be some "disappeared" whom we will never see again. As for my nephew, I am sure I will never see him again. Others will be found and I believe [sic] I have approached a number of countries which are very advanced in the identification of the "disappeared." Maybe among the dead, and thanks to the progress of science and the progress of genetics, we could perhaps, through the DNA and other complicated tests, determine [who is who].114

Bouteflika repeated the claim that he was seeking foreign forensic medical expertise in an interview published in the Financial Times on July 19, 1999. During the summer of 1999 Bouteflika spoke sympathetically and resolutely on "disappearances," raising hopes among families that the state would soon take action. By autumn, however, those hopes were sagging.

On September 16, 1999, Algerians overwhelmingly approved in a national referendum the "Civil Harmony" law, which the president had presented as the keystone of his strategy for national reconciliation. The law, which offered a partial amnesty to rebels who voluntarily surrendered, had already been adopted by parliament.115

Claiming a mandate for his plan for reconciliation, Bouteflika's discourse on "disappearances" began to change. On September 15, 1999, during a meeting in Harcha auditorium in Algiers, a representative of the ANFD spoke, at the president's invitation, about "disappearances." But the president appeared to grow exasperated that night, either with the persistence of the families in the hall or with his inability to help them, blurting out at one point, "I have no interest in keeping [the "disappeared"] in my pocket." Referring to his missing nephew, he declared, "I am the first to be affected by this problem... so no one should be lecturing us on this subject." "How can you put this war behind you if you do not forget?" he asked the families. "Don't be like Iraq and Kuwait, who continue to go at each other over a business of 600 prisoners."116

Bouteflika seemed to backtrack on his tacit recognition of state responsibility for "disappearances," telling an interviewer:

In the national tragedy there is a situation of such confusion: in the end I leave to you the responsibility of saying the [security] services have "disappeared" people. It is your responsibility. I am not sure there have been no settlings of scores. I am not sure people have not been, quite simply, I don't know, God forbid, put in sulphuric acid by terrorists. I cannot comment on such a problem...117

In an interview in July 2000 the president was asked what he had to say to victims of violence and "disappearances." He replied:

This really concerns a national tragedy that affected the entire nation in the flesh of its children, its economy, and its prestige. This misfortune must be overcome in order to approach the future with courage and dignity. The Algerian people must get back in touch with their traditional values of solidarity, fraternity, and love in order to weave once again the tissue of community life that is indispensable for meeting the challenges of our era. May the duty of memory serve the cause of peace and harmony so that there will, never again, be such a descent into darkness. Meager consolation for you, but need I remind you that I too come from a family of the "disappeared"?118

In another interview the same month, he called on relatives of the disappeared to "be patient," explaining, "We must first try to establish peace and security.... If we try to attack all the problems at once we shall lose our way."119

Inaugurating his new human rights commission one year later, Bouteflika again counselled patience to the families. He also implicitly cautioned them to stay in line. Saying he understood their needs and their impatience, he asked them to:

have confidence in the administration and law of the country, and to resist all manipulations and maneuvers. In this country, everyone has a political agenda. There are unfortunate families for whom we have sympathy, but there are also those who exploit oversights of the state to sow the wind. The day will come where the truth will emerge. I have a right to speak in this way because I am, without being presumptuous, the doyen of families of the "disappeared." I continue to search but I do nothing that could tarnish the image of the country or of Algerians.120

Since the CNCPPDH's inauguration, its president, Farouk Ksentini, a Bouteflika appointee, has been outspoken on the need to resolve the "disappearances" question, while Bouteflika himself has had far less to say.

To the best of Human Rights Watch's knowledge, the identity of Bouteflika's nephew and the circumstances of his "disappearance" have never been divulged. Activists on behalf of the "disappeared" said they had no information about the case.

Nor has there ever been clarification concerning the contacts that the president said in 1999 had been established with foreign experts for the purpose of identifying the remains of persons who may have been the victims of "disappearances."

1998-2003: The Official Statistics, Unverifiable and Inconsistent
Both before and after President Bouteflika broke new ground in discussing the fate of the "disappeared," government officials have been releasing statistics that chart the headway they have supposedly made in solving cases brought to their attention.

The statistics they have given, while often inconsistent, uniformly refrain from identifying any state agency as responsible in a single case. Nor have the statistics ever been backed up by nominative lists, or by an explanation of the investigative procedures, or the reasons for placing an individual in one category or another.

The government began to issue statistics only after it acknowledged the existence of the problem in the summer of 1998 and established offices across the country where families could submit complaints. In an early progress report on these bureaus, then-Interior Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was quoted in El-Watan of January 16, 1999, as saying:

We have already conducted more than three hundred investigations. We have received 120 responses and another fifty will be finalized during the course of this week. These cases take a lot of time .... Most of the persons about whom we received responses apparently took up arms. We never denied that some abuses took place. But pending proof to the contrary, I cannot say more until we get further in this process. Most of the persons considered to have disappeared fell in clashes with the security forces. We continue to believe that a number of them are still among the rebels.

On April 29, 1999, El-Watan, a daily considered to have good contacts in the security services, reported that the missing-person bureaus had logged a total of 3,500 disappearance cases. Unnamed "reliable sources" were quoted as saying, "All of these cases were studied and responses were provided." The sources claimed that the Ministry of Interior had "provided answers" in a total of 3,011 cases, which broke down as follows:

· 693 were wanted by law enforcement authorities for terrorist acts;
· 127 were in prison or left prison having served their sentences;
· 69 were found at home after an investigation;
· 412 were reported dead by repented or arrested terrorists;
· 89 were freed after having been held for questioning by the security services;
· 1003 had never been questioned by the security services;
· 38 disappeared following family problems; and
· 580 were kidnapped by terrorists.121

Two years later, Minister of Interior Yazid Zerhouni stated that "the total number of people reported as `disappeared' to the wilaya offices is 4,880 as of March 31, 2001." As noted above, Zerhouni broke down the cases that had received responses as follows:

"persons sought by the security forces for criminal acts: 884 (in these cases, the relevant judicial procedures have been initiated);
persons killed in clashes with the security forces: 33
persons killed by terrorist groups: 11
persons convicted by the courts and currently imprisoned: 7
persons tried and released: 9
persons released after questioning: 27; and
persons who had been found at their homes: 7."

Of the remaining cases, Zerhouni said, "The inquiries remain in progress and ... the results will be brought to the attention of the families concerned ... as soon as the investigations are completed. After that, it's up to the courts. In fact, all complaints on this subject have been received and registered and have led systematically to the opening of judicial investigations."122

Minister Zerhouni's figures clashed not only with those from April 1999 (particularly in the drop in the total reported as dead or kidnapped by "terrorists"), but also with numbers that Justice Minister Ahmed Ouyahia gave to a member of the European Parliament in May 2001. MEP Hélène Flautre quotes Ouyahia as telling her that out of 3,000 missing-person complaints received by the government "a thousand had been cleared up: 833 had joined the armed groups, ninety-three had been killed, eighty-two were in detention, seventy-four had returned home, and seven had benefited from the Civil Harmony [amnesty]."123

Ouyahia did not reconcile his figure of 3,000 missing-person complaints with the interior minister's contemporaneous figure of 4,880. Ten months later, on March 10, 2002, Ouyahia said on Algerian radio that 3,200 to 3,300 persons had been reported as disappeared, of which some 600 had joined armed groups.124 He did not explain his downward revision of "disappeared" persons found to have joined armed groups. A May 16, 2002, written request by Human Rights Watch to clarify and reconcile the figures went unanswered (see Appendix 2).

More recent figures come from the National Gendarmerie. According to Le Monde of January 7, 2003, that agency said it registered and investigated 7,046 complaints for enforced disappearances during the 1990s. In 4,740 of these cases, the search was "unsuccessful." In the rest, the responsibility of the security forces was never established.

In addition to all the statements by officials who sought to discredit imputations of a state role in "disappearances," a Ministry of Interior official suggested to Human Rights Watch in a meeting on May 23, 2000, that 3,000 missing out of a population of 30 million should be viewed as a very small number when compared to the number of Algerians who "disappeared" during the 1954-1962 War of Independence.

89 The ambassador's letter is reprinted in full in Human Rights Watch, "`Neither among the Living nor the Dead': State-Sponsored `Disappearances' in Algeria."

90 Hasna Yacoub, "Les familles des disparus demandent audience au général major Touati," La Tribune, October 31, 2002.

91 According to a recent article in Le Monde, the number of cases that have supposedly been "clarified" is far higher, but the overall findings remain the same: "The gendarmerie, tasked since 1995 with managing the issue, admits today (semi-officially) to having logged 7,046 complaints for enforced `disappearances' during the 1990s. It claims to have investigated all of these cases, and states that in 4,740 of them, the search was `unsuccessful.' As for the rest, there are explanations. But the responsibility of the security forces has never been established, according to the Gendarmerie." Florence Beaugé, "En Algérie, aucun survivant parmi les disparus de la `sale guerre,'" Le Monde, January 7, 2003.

92 Nothing in the presidential decrees creating or governing the CNCPPDH give it such powers. See presidential decree 01-71 of March 25, 2001, published in the Journal Officiel, March 28, 2001, and presidential decree 02-47 of January 16, 2002, published in the Journal Officiel, January 20, 2002. The Journal Officiel is online at http://www.joradp.dz (retrieved February 14, 2003).

93 Human Rights Watch interview, Algiers, April 8, 1997.

94 Roula Khalaf, "Protesters Seek News of Missing Men in Algeria," Financial Times, October 21, 1997; June Ray, "Le mur du silence se fissure en Algérie," Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1999.

95 Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Human Rights Watch, Reporters sans Frontières, "A Call for Action to End a Human Rights Crisis," online at http://www.hrw.org/press97/oct/algcall.htm (retrieved February 14, 2003).

96 United Nations, "Report of Panel appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Gather Information on the Situation in Algeria in Order to Provide the International Community with Greater Clarity on that Situation" (New York: United Nations, 1998), online at http://www.un.org/NewLinks/dpi2007/contents.htm (retrieved February 14, 2003).

97 "Les cas des disparus expliqués à Soares," Liberté, August 5, 1998; Amnay Idir, "La guerre des chiffres" El-Watan, August 9, 1998. There is an unexplained discrepancy between the 230 cases mentioned by the U.N. delegation and the 240 mentioned by the ONDH.

98 CCPR/C/101/Add.1.

99 United Nations Department of Public Information, "Algeria presents report on civil and political rights to United Nations Human Rights Committee," dated July 20, 1998," (New York: United Nations, 1998).

100 United Nations Department of Public Information, "Human Rights Committee continues to review Algeria's civil and political rights," dated July 20, 1998, (New York: United Nations, 1998).

101 CCPR/C/79/Add. 95

102 Daikha Dridi, "L'Intérieur ouvre une enquête sur les disparus" Le Quotidien d'Oran, August 18, 1998.

103 Ibid., and "L'Etat se saisit du dossier," El-Watan, August 18, 1998 ; "Le dossier pris en charge," Le Matin, August 18, 1998.

104 Ibid.

105 See ANFD communiqué of November 24, 1998, online at http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/mrvdisp/anfd2.htm (retrieved February 14, 2003); and Lyes Malki, "Les familles des disparus défendent leur droit de constituer une association," La Tribune, November 27, 1998.

106 United Nations, "Report of Panel appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to Gather Information on the Situation in Algeria."

107 "Affaire des disparus: Le ministère de l'Intérieur précise," Liberté, November 26, 1998.

108 "Réponse de la part de Zerhouni à l'interpellation d'un groupe de députés sur la question des personnes disparues," online at http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/mrvdisp/zerhouni_100501.htm (retrieved February 19, 2003); and "Algeria says 4,880 people missing since start of Islamic insurgency," Associated Press, May 10, 2001.

109 Algeria Watch, "1000 cas de disparitions forcées (1992-2001)," [online] http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/2002/1000_disparitions/1000_disparitions_MN.htm (retrieved February 20, 2003). This list was compiled by Algeria Watch and Dr. Salah-Eddine Sidhoum.

110 "Algeria Says 100,000 Dead in Seven Years' Strife," Reuters, June 27, 1999. Prior to this statement, the last official figure of persons killed was 26,536, announced on January 22, 1998. See "Algeria PM Defends Actions, Gives First Global Toll since 1992," Agence France Presse, January 22, 1998.

111 Interview with Radio Television Luxembourg (RTL), September 14, 1999.

112 Interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI), July 7, 1999, transcript online at www.algeria-watch.org/farticle/boutef/boutefspeech.htm#africa (retrieved February 17, 2003), translated into English by the BBC Monitoring Service: Middle East, July 8, 1999.

113 Interview with La Chaîne Info (Paris), September 12, 1999, translated into English in BBC Monitoring Service: Middle East, September 15, 1999.

114 RFI interview, July 7, 1999, translated into English in BBC Monitoring Service: Middle East, July 8, 1999. When Human Rights Watch visited Algeria in May 2000, we were told by officials that DNA tests were not used for aiding in the identification of bodies.

115 On the Civil Harmony law, see Human Rights Watch World Report 2000 (events of 1999). The law is online in French at http://www.el-mouradia.dz/francais/algerie/histoire/loi_sur_la_concorde_civile.htm (retrieved February 19, 2003). Various English translations can also be found online.

116 Nefla B., "Il faut oublier," Le Jeune Indépendant, September 16, 1999, online at http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/mrvdisp/disp16999.htm (retrieved February 19, 2003).

117 Interview with La Chaîne Info (Paris), September 12, 1999.

118 El-Moudjahid, July 19, 2000, reprinting the text of an interview published the previous day in Le Parisien.

119 Interview with Bouteflika, Radio France Internationale, July 7, 2000.

120 President Bouteflika, speech, online at http://www.elmouradia.dz/francais/president/recherche/President%20rech.htm (retrieved February 17, 2003).

121 Salima Tlemçani, "Dossier des disparus: Polémique autour des chiffres," El-Watan, April 29, 1999.

122 "Réponse de Zerhouni à l'interpellation sur la question des personnes disparues."

123 "May 18-23, 2001. Algérie: Le rapport d'Hélène Flautre," Brussels : Groupe des Verts-Ale au Parlement Européen, June 2001, online at http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/mrvrap/flautre_juin2001.htm
(retrieved February 18, 2003).

124 Interview quoted in "Droits de l'homme et dossier des disparus au centre du débat," El-Moudjahid, March 11, 2002.

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