كلمة الناطق الرسمي بخصوص تجريم وترحيل جزائريين من بريطانيا في لقاء CAMPACC

نظمت "حملة مناهضة تجريم المجتمعات" (CAMPACC) لقاء بعنوان "الجزائريون المتهمون بما يسمي بالارهاب من الاعتقال و الترحيل الى التعذيب" بلندن في 28.6.2006.

شارك في اللقاء عدد من الناشطين في مجال حقوق الانسان ببريطانيا منهم السيد رشيد مسعودي الصحفي و الناشط في مجال حقوق الإنسان و السيد نافيز أحمد صاحب كتاب "الحرب علي الحقيقة و تفجيرات لندن" و المحامية Gareth Pearce و السيد Doug Jewell الناشط من منظمة Liberty و Anne Gray منسقةCAMPACC .

و أرسل الناطق الرسمي باسم منظمة الكرامة محمد العربي زيتوت كلمة القت على الحاضرين أثار فيها عدد من النقاط حول الوضع في الجزائر خاصة و أن هذا الإجتماع يأتي قبل أيام فقط من زيارة الرئيس الجزائري عبد العزيز بتوفليقة لبريطانيا.

و من أهم ما أثاره السيد زيتوت في كلمته أن مذكرة التفاهم بين بريطانيا و الجزائر الخاصة بترحيل المعتقلين والتي من المنتظر أن توقع خلال زيارة السيد بوتفليقة لن تحول دون تعذيب المرحلين خاصة و أن سجل السلطلت الجزائرية "يزخر" بإنتهاكات كبيره في هذا المجال .

إن الجزائر في الاصل منضمة لعدة إتفاقيات تحرم التعذيب مثل إتفاقية مناهضة التعذيب و المعاملة القاسية و الإنسانية و المهينة ( إنضمت إليها الجزائر منذ أكثر من 20 عام) لكن ذلك لم يمنع السلطات الجزائرية من ممارسة التعذيب طوال تلك الفترة خاصة منذ إستيلاء جنرالات الجيش علي السلطة بعد أن فازت الجبهة الإسلامية للإنقاذ بأكثر من 80% من المقاعد النيابية في الدور الأول للانتخابات في 26.12.1991. كما أشار الي الإنتهاكات الفظيعة لحقوق الإنسان و التي سادت في النصف الثاني من التسعينات و عرفت بالمجازر الكبرى و منها مجزرة قرية بن طلحة و التي راح ضحيتها 400 شخص و مجزرة قرية رمكه التي راح ضحيتها أكثر من 1000 . و رغم بشاعة تلك المجازر الي أن الرئيس بوتفليقة يرفع الآن شعار المصالحة و العفو حتي يمنع العقاب عن عملاء الحكومة الذين ارتكبوا تلك الجرائم البشعة.

أضاف الناطق الرسمي أن صفحة الإنترنت الخاصة بوزارة الخارجية البريطانية تشير إلى إنتهاكات فظيعة لحقوق الإنسان بالجزائر مثل الإختفاء القصري لأكثر من 4000 شخص (والواقع أن عددهم يزيد على 15000 مختطف) و تعدد حالات التعذيب و القتل خارج إطار القانون و الخطف. طبقا لتشريع حقوق الانسان الخاص ببريطانيا لايجوز ترحيل أي معتقل إلى أي دولة قد يتعرض فيها للتعذيب و بالتالي فأن مذكرة التفاهم المزمع توقيعها ما هي إلا وسيلة للالتفاف حول القانون و إعطاء أولوية للمصالح الإقتصادية على حساب قضايا حقوق الإنسان.

في نهاية كلمتة دعي الناطق الرسمي المجتمعون إلى المشاركة في وقفه تنديدية المنتظر تنظيمها يومي 11و 12 يوليو 2006 أمام مقر رئيس الوزراء البريطاني بلندن اثناء لقائه مع الرئيس الجزائري عبد العزيز بوتفليقه.

وفيما يلي نص الكلمة كاملة بالإنجليزية:

Ladies and gentlemen,

The issue of Algeria is even more relevant to the UK than usual today. Just three weeks ago, the UK and Algeria finalised the text of a long-planned extradition agreement, making Algeria, along with Libya, Jordan, and Lebanon, part of the select club of Arab countries that the UK trusts not to torture deportees from the UK. (They regularly torture people who haven’t been extradited from the UK, but that, of course, has no bearing on the issue.) Already two Belmarsh detainees, Khaled Sellali and Farid B., have been sent back. Just the week after next, on July 9, President Bouteflika will come to London to formally sign the extradition treaty.

You might wonder: why is the Government so keen on this treaty? Well, the problem is that Algeria tortures people. In fact, it does so quite regularly. The Foreign Office website puts it like this: there are “numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias, including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings.” Under the terms of the Human Rights Act, this means that British authorities are legally barred from deporting to Algeria (and many other countries) someone who will most likely be tortured when he gets there. To get around this “problem”, Tony Blair proposed a cunning plan: sign “memoranda of understanding” with states like Algeria under which they agree not to torture anyone sent to them from Britain, and promise to give them a fair trial.

Of course, most of these governments have already signed several documents under which they agree not to torture people (Algeria, for instance, signed most of the UN human rights conventions, including the UN Convention Against Torture, more than 20 years ago); most, in fact, already prohibit it under their own laws (including Algeria.) But the Prime Minister apparently takes the position that this new piece of paper will have a profoundly different effect to all the other pieces of paper. I can only think of one convincing argument for this position: that, once the UK government has signed it, it would be very embarrassing to find that Algeria was torturing deportees anyway, and thus any hypothetical monitoring mechanism is likely to follow the Swedish government’s practice in the case of Ahmad Agiza (namely, censoring all reports of torture and doing nothing about them.)

The point is moot in any case, because, according to reliable sources within the Algerian Foreign Ministry, no monitoring mechanism will be allowed. To be more precise, the Algerian negotiators made it clear that they will never accept allowing any foreign judge to monitor Algerian jails, calling it a matter of sovereignty over their subjects. They threatened to scrap the agreement entirely rather than allow foreigners to check whether Algerians were being tortured or not. During the negotiations, the Algerian government even suggested that, while it realises that it is politically difficult for Britain to deport genuinely peaceful members of the opposition who are calling for democracy and freedom for Algeria, the British authorities have means of pressuring such people to keep them from criticising the Algerian regime. We don’t know to what extent the British government has accepted this demand, but it clarifies what Algeria’s rulers are after; indeed, on Channel 4, a spokesman of the Algerian embassy said they were not interested in the 17 people that the Home Office wants to deport.

Algeria also demanded the rapid extradition of Rafik Khalifa, the Algerian former billionaire, created and destroyed by the generals, whose collapse created a scandal not long ago. Khalifa is officially accused of stealing at least $5 billion – enough to solve many of Algeria’s problems – but for Bouteflika this is a personal matter, not a financial one. Bouteflika’s brother Said used to be an advisor to Khalifa, with all the monetary benefits that this implied; but the two fell out, and Said was fired. After this, Khalifa tried to use his satellite station KTV, established in London in 2004, to help Bouteflika’s opponent (and former ally) Benflis win the election – and Bouteflika does not forgive and forget easily.

However, the Algerian situation goes well beyond the extradition issue, and provides an instructive case study in repression. Officially, President Bouteflika has won two elections, by more-than-respectable margins of 74% in 1999 and 85% in 2004, but there is only one constituency that he is ultimately responsible to, the constituency that chose him in the first place and that can guarantee him electoral victory or defeat: the handful of generals who took over Algeria in 1992, and who still control it today.

In 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front, FIS for short, had just won an overwhelming victory in the first round of Algeria’s first and only fair parliamentary elections, promising an end to government corruption. The military responded with a coup d’Etat: FIS activists and leaders were arrested by thousands and sent to concentration camps in the Sahara, a state of emergency (still in place) was declared, the president was deposed, and the elections were cancelled. Many of those who escaped the roundup took to the hills, self-consciously emulating the guerrillas of the war of independence, and the country was plunged into civil war.

But this was just the start of the problems. From about 1994, more and more mass killings of civilians were reported. In 1997, the violence took on an unprecedented scale: in at least 13 massacres that year, more than 50 people of all ages or sexes were killed in single nights. The massacres continued in 1998; in one day of appalling violence in and around the remote village of Ramka, more than one thousand villagers, including every single inhabitant of Had Chekala, were slaughtered as they sat down in the evening to break their Ramadan fasts. The government only revealed the true death toll at Ramka in April this year, with the explanation that it “hid the truth because you don't go into battle proclaiming defeat.” To the horrified world, it initially seemed the ultimate proof of the inhuman barbarity of the Algerian government’s foes.

But as more information came out, certain disquieting patterns began to be clear. At Bentalha, where 400 were savagely slaughtered in one night by assailants who hacked off limbs and dashed babies against walls, the army arrived at midnight, scarcely half an hour after the massacre began. They stationed themselves in armoured vehicles outside the village, not only making no attempt to stop the killing, but actually turning back people attempting to flee the massacre, and stopping neighbours outside the quarter where the massacre was happening from coming to their aid. The killers stayed there, calmly carrying out their grisly work, until 5:00 AM, when they departed entirely unmolested by the security forces. One survivor, Nesroullah Yous, later emigrated to France, where he wrote an emotional account of the massacre and the years leading up to it which has been banned in Algeria; his reports corroborate those of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, BBC, ITN, and many previous interviewers of the survivors.

Bentalha, like most of those targeted, had overwhelmingly voted FIS in the elections; and practically all the massacre sites were located within minutes of military barracks, as those familiar with the geography of Algiers can now corroborate with Google Earth. In an odd coincidence, the organisation which took credit for these massacres, the Armed Islamic Group, had shortly before declared outright war on FIS (the winners of the elections), assassinating several of FIS’ leading members and purging many of its own longstanding leaders, and its new leader had been accused by several of its own former members of being an agent of the secret services. The simplest explanation is terrifying, but clear: most of these massacres, if not all, were committed at the state’s behest and with its active help.

In this war, at least two hundred thousand people were killed (as Bouteflika acknowledged recently.) More than fifteen thousand were “disappeared”, their families left in suspense to this day wondering whether they are alive or dead. A million fled the country, and nearly two million were internally displaced. The more abstract damage done to the Algerian economy, and to the fabric of Algerian society, is incalculable. The generals who rejected democracy in favour of military rule in 1992 have hurt Algeria in ways it will take generations to recover from; their kleptocracy has brought Algeria to the point where even a breakup of the state, something unthinkable ten years ago, is seen as possible by some observers. It was one of the dirtiest wars of the second half of the twentieth century.

However, with the armed opposition largely defeated, the government has been taking measures to achieve what they like to call “national reconciliation”. Under the latest of these, the “Decree Implementing the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation” put into law earlier this year, the guerrillas are to enjoy immunity from prosecution except for rape or mass murder, and the army is to enjoy blanket immunity for any action committed in defense of the State, while the victims of these barbarous crimes can in principle be prosecuted for criticising the state’s role in the war! Article 46 states: “Anyone who… uses or exploits the wounds of the National Tragedy to harm the institutions of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, to weaken the state, or to undermine the good reputation of its agents who honorably served it, or to tarnish the image of Algeria internationally, shall be punished by three to five years in prison and a fine of 250,000 to 500,000 dinars…”

In fact, then, anyone attending this meeting, let alone speaking at it, is liable for this punishment!

Some idea of the state the country is in even now with the fighting over may be gleaned from Lahouari Addi (Le Monde Diplomatique, Apr. 2006):

Every week, several riots erupt in different regions of Algeria. Price rises, unemployment, corruption, the reasons for discontent are innumerable, despite the fortune amassed thanks to the manna of petrol. The return to civil peace and amnesty, decreed by Bouteflika’s government despite much opposition, have not allowed the country to leave the global crisis in which it has been trapped for many years.

Unfortunately, Algeria’s oil and gas are more highly valued by many Western governments than its people or their rights, especially now. US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, for instance, said in December 2002 that Washington “has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism” (!); a British minister said nearly the same three years later. UK-Algeria relations are clearly flourishing – let alone Algerian relations with France, Italy, Spain, Germany...

The current Algerian state is a façade of democracy built on a foundation of military rule. But even the façade is now being undermined by a power-hungry President, with recent proposals to change the Constitution again. Now changing constitutions is no unusual event in Algeria, which has had five constitutions so far in the forty-four years since independence; Algeria changes constitutions more often than its generals change their offices. But this change is… interesting.

The main amendment planned is to remove the current two-term limit on presidencies and to make the term seven years instead of five, allowing Bouteflika to keep rerunning for office indefinitely in the classic Arab mould. But the government has been careful to emphasise that that is not all: in addition to this, the position of Prime Minister will be downgraded to coordinator of the government and still be appointed directly by the President, as will the new post of Vice-President, while the Council of State, one of the principal subdivisions of the legislative branch, is to be directly subordinated to the President. In short, Bouteflika – oh, sorry, I mean whoever happens to win the next election – will gain substantially more Constitutional legitimacy for the power that in practice he already possesses over both the legislative and the judicial branches.

The largest party in the ruling coalition, the former single party the FLN, took the initiative to push this proposal in the first place, and still leads it. The “baby born with a moustache”, the RND, a party that emerged out of nowhere in 1997 to serve as a vehicle for the army’s candidate, has been competing with it in issuing ever more fervent statements of support, exemplified by RND leader Ouyahia’s statements “"if it's at the initiative of the president of the Republic, I support it” and “I am personally proud to have had the honour to know Bouteflika for 20 years.”

It was recently reported that Bouteflika will officially announce his plans to revise the constitution on July 5, Algeria’s Independence Day, just days before he comes here to be received with honours by the government of one of the world’s earliest democracies. We would like Prime Minister Tony Blair to ask his new friend a few questions when he comes to visit in July:

• Mr. President, Mauritania was recently hailed for adopting, by popular acclaim, a new Constitution which prevents presidents from seeking more than two terms. Yet, even as they take steps to prevent presidents-for-life, your government is preparing to amend the Constitution to allow this. Do you feel that Arab countries benefit from being ruled by presidents with multiple decades of experience in the job, such as Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Salih or Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi, another new friend of Mr. Blair? Or is it that you feel obliged to stay in power due to the lack of any successor that meets the army’s exacting standards?
• Mr. President, do you feel that it is more important to change the constitution, which has been in place barely a decade, or the generals, who have been in place since independence? Is it true that General Toufik and General Smail still occupy the same offices that they did in 1992? Is this the secret of good governance?
• Mr. President, it seems that a number of people have been complaining that the law by which you recently enacted the “Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation” grants impunity to killers, including those within your own ranks, while punishing their victims, and makes a mockery of the rule of law. Why would they make such a libellous statement?
• Mr. President, there seem to be some Algerian troublemakers outside, asking for an independent inquiry into the massacres of 1997 and ’98, and for information on the thousands who have “disappeared”. Why are they still harassing Your Excellency?
• Those who want to be among these troublemakers will be welcome on July 9th or 10th just outside Downing St – details to be confirmed. Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you there, greeting Bouteflika in a manner befitting his eminent position.
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