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Background

In 1992, after the government cancelled parliamentary elections that the Islamist Salvation Front was on the verge of winning, Algeria plunged into a cycle of political violence.  That violence has since claimed the lives of more than one hundred foreign nationals and more than 100,000 Algerians — a number that includes soldiers and militants, but mostly civilians.  President Bouteflika himself has referred in speeches to 200,000 killed.

The vast majority of crimes committed during this period have never received a thorough investigation to identify the perpetrators and establish their responsibilities.  The extent of this failure cannot be fully explained by the prevailing insecurity and violence; it represents above all a lack of political will on the part of authorities to establish truth and accountability for human rights violations.

Islamist armed groups that became active after the cancellation of the elections first targeted police and soldiers but then began assassinating civilians. Initially they targeted persons they deemed hostile to their political agenda or who deviated from their interpretation of pious behavior, but later they attacked civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately and on a wide scale.  They committed massacres in rural areas and abducted hundreds, if not thousands, of Algerian civilians, and raped large numbers of women.⁶

The military-backed authorities, acting under a state of emergency declared in February 1992, first interned thousands of suspected Islamists in detention camps in the southern desert. These camps were eventually closed.  The security forces engaged in ferocious repression of suspected militants as well as those they suspected of supporting or sympathizing with them.  Acting with near-total impunity, army units summarily executed suspects, engaged in reprisal killings against civilians, and carried out large-scale torture of suspects under interrogation.  In 1997, the security forces failed signally to intervene as armed groups committed several large-scale massacres of civilians not far from army outposts, raising suspicions about the forces’ passivity that have never been allayed by conducting impartial investigations into these events.  Algeria’s judiciary sentenced thousands of militants and those suspected of assisting them to prison terms in trials that did not meet international fair trial standards.  Many were tried in “special courts” established by 1992 anti-terrorism legislation.⁷  Although the special courts were eliminated in 1995, the other main provisions of the anti-terror law, with its vague definition of terrorism, were incorporated that year into the penal code.⁸  The precise number of Algerians still in prison on terror-related charges is not known, but easily exceeds one thousand.

During the mid-1990s, the security forces abducted several thousand Algerians who subsequently “disappeared” and remain missing to this day.  Earlier this year, the President’s Ad Hoc Commission on the Disappeared said it had registered 6,146 such cases; some Algerian human rights organizations say the real number is much higher.

When President Bouteflika was elected in April 1999, political violence had already been in decline since its peak in the mid-1990s.  The security forces had secured most regions of the country, and one of the key armed groups had been observing a cease-fire since the autumn of 1997.

Among President Bouteflika’s first acts in office was to propose the Civil Harmony Law (Loi sur la concorde civile, Law n^o 99-08 of July 13, 1999), which offered militants who surrendered voluntarily an amnesty from prosecution.  They were eligible only if they disclosed fully all of their past deeds and had “not committed or participated in the commission of crimes that led to the death of a person or a permanent injury, had not committed a rape,” and “had not used explosives in a public place or in a place frequented by the public” (Article 3).  Militants who had committed any of these crimes would be eligible for a reduced sentence but not a full amnesty. The Civil Harmony Law passed both houses of parliament with little debate and without a single vote in opposition, entering into force on July 13, 1999.  It was then endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Algerians who voted in a referendum held on September 16 of that year.⁹

A July 20, 1999 executive decree (n^o 99-142) following on the Civil Harmony Law set up “Probation Committees” in each wilaya (province), headed by the general prosecutor responsible for the area, and composed primarily of representatives of various security forces.  The decree charged these committees with examining whether each surrendering militant was eligible under the terms of the amnesty and setting the terms of his probation.

The Civil Harmony Law apparently contributed to reducing political violence but has also stoked controversy, especially in the manner of its application. The law excludes from amnesty those responsible for grave crimes.  In practice, however, the Probation Committees worked in a non-transparent manner, with no public accounting of their deliberations or decisions, leaving a widespread impression that, acting on political instructions, they waived applicants through the process without trying to determine whether they committed or ordered the commission of grave crimes.

Also controversial was presidential decree n^o 2000-03 dated January 10, 2000, which collectively amnestied the members of two militant groups that had agreed to lay down their arms and disband.  The so-called grâce amnistiante (grace conferring amnesty) decree was based on the Civil Harmony Law’s Article 41, which exempted from its terms the members of armed groups that agreed without reservation or condition to disband and disarm.  Thus, members of the Islamic Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut, AIS) and the Islamic League for Preaching and Holy War (Ligue Islamique pour le Da’wa et le Djihad, LIDD) benefited from a total amnesty. The decree stated that appended to it was a list of the names of the beneficiaries of this amnesty, but no such list was ever made public.  The beneficiaries thus escaped scrutiny of their possible involvement in grave crimes of any kind, and were entitled to enjoy their civil and political rights right away, in contrast to militants who surrendered individually under the Civil Harmony Law.

Authorities claim that more than 5,500 militants took advantage of the Civil Harmony Law and the grâce amnistiante to surrender,¹⁰ helping to reduce the number of still-active armed militants below one thousand.¹¹

The amnesty measures provided by the Civil Harmony Law did not extend to state agents, who continue, in principle, to be fully liable under Algerian law for their actions.  But the law’s offer of a partial amnesty to militants prompted calls for a parallel measure to benefit state agents who might otherwise face prosecution for offenses committed while combating the armed groups.¹²