Abstract

Letter From Algeria

The author reports on efforts by families in Algeria to force the state to acknowledge its role in the deaths of thousands of people killed in the course of its violent struggle with Islamist militants. Ten thousand people don't disappear without leaving many relatives behind, and the mothers and wives and sons of Algeria's disappeared are organizing. They hope to use the occasion of the first presidential elections since the civil war ground to an ambiguous halt, to be held on April 8, to force the state to acknowledge its role in the disappearances. Last year President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is running for a second term, announced that he was forming a new commission to investigate the thousands of cases documented by local groups. There is almost no democratic opposition in Algeria--the election is expected to be a competition between the two men now trying to nail down the nomination of the former governing party, Bouteflika and former Prime Minister Ali Benflis. At the beginning of the decade, a majority of voters had picked the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist political party that appropriated much of the symbolism of Algeria's war for independence but promised to cure the country's ills with the Koran. During his last election campaign (which he won easily after all the other candidates withdrew the night before the election), President Bouteflika was accosted onstage by a number of mothers of the disappeared. "I can't just pull the disappeared out of my pocket," he shouted, enraged at their temerity in raising the issue. If Hadj Smain and others keep pulling them out of bags, though, their survivors won't be so easily dismissed this time.