Abdelaziz goes for three

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Great Diplomat. Great Combover.

Egad PF lovers! It seems that unbeknownst to us the slacker grad students we hired as interns to write this blog while we were away globe trotting and attending fabulous international conferences reneged on their promise to write this blog for us.  We came back to find the PF office trashed, our office stash of fine coffees decimated, and a sodden toga hanging in the closet but clearly no blog posts! That’s the last time we farm out blogging duties to a bunch of smarmy, liberal, slacker, grad students who claim to be interested in international politics.

But have no fear: your regular crew is back in the saddle.  Be on the lookout for a piece on those devilish Somali pirates with their “khat” and “Kalashnikovs” and “piracy” that seem to be all the rage these days.  As well as perhaps something zesty about Afghanistan and the policies of a certain senator from Illinois who seems to have made his way into the white house (hoorah!).

In other news, for all of you Maghreb watchers it was an exciting week in North African politics particularly in Algeria where President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was able to push through an amendment on term limits that will allow him to run for a third term.  For a very knowledgeable and interesting analysis of the wheeling and dealing please check out the always insightful Moor Next Door.

For not very insightful but hopefully interesting musings keep it right here as I think through the implications of a third Bouteflika term on the Algerian amnesty.

Essentially the Algerian amnesty flies in the face of most conventional thinking about transitional justice.  Under Bouteflika’s careful maneuvering the amnesty has basically thrown out every single suggestion regarding transitional justice that would be promoted by most academics or professionals in the field in order to get the major rebel groups to lay down their arms.  These are some bad guys: the GIA and GSPC committed horrible massacres, murders, bombings, rapes and essentially terrorized the country for 10 years. (For an interesting paper exploring the strategic “logic” behind the campaign of massacres checkout a paper by Kalyvas here) Not surprisingly the government has also provided almost de facto immunity for government troops and government sponsored local militias who were responsible for their fair share of egregious violence including torture, disappearances and murder.

Absent from the Algerian amnesty is any attempt to establish a truth commission, much less to punish those who were responsible for the worst crimes in some kind of tribunal, and perhaps most ominously there seems to be some concern that the Algerian amnesty could actually be used to target and arrest Algerian activists who  try to publicize the cause of the disappeared or who advocate for an investigation into the atrocities.  You can see a particularly damning press release by the ICTJ, HR Watch and Amnesty International from 2005 here that describes all the reasons they view the amnesty as flawed.

In short the Algerian amnesty doesn’t do much in terms of reconciliation, or justice.  All of these mechanisms have been sidelined in an attempt to maintain the peace.  Even when there has been a concession, for example the promises of compensation for the families of victims who were “disappeared” this process has been hopelessly muddled by the government, which has had to my knowledge, no clear consistent position, on the disappeared  even though President Bouteflika has acknowledged officially that there were individuals who were “disappeared” during the civil war.

What does all of this spell for a 3rd term of Bouteflika? Well it seems highly unlikely that even in his 3rd term President Bouteflika will or can make the changes needed to restore some teeth to the amnesty and begin to restore some sense of reconciliation to a country that is still incredibly divided just three years after major violence stopped. For one thing Bouteflika has wrapped himself in the amnesty and used the relative peace and stability as a kind of PR campaign to keep him in power: he is not likely to turn on it to correct some of its flaws, even with his new “mandate.”  Secondly, in the current scenario the amnesty bestows impunity for the military, government sponsored militias, and major terrorist groups (except those GSPC members who now constitute AQIM) but the government seems incredibly reluctant to address any of the numerous concerns about the amnesty for fear that any adjustment to the amnesty law or investigation into the atrocities committed during the civil war would open up the proverbial can of worms and risk a resumption in violence.  Even if there was a will on behalf of the Bouteflika government to somehow begin to address these crimes (perhaps with some kind of truth commission like the one currently ongoing in Morocco) if most Algerians see the hands of Bouteflika as too corrupt or involved with the military even if he were to initiate such a proceeding, would his very involvement condemn it? Will Algerians have to wait until the end of the Bouteflika/Pouvoir embrace to finally discover and receive official acknowledgment of the fate of their loved ones? The reluctance to even acknowledge the flaws in the amnesty program smacks of the same tone deafness and resistance of the government to listen to and address the concerns of the people that led to the rise of the FIS in the early 90s.   The list of national concerns confronting the Bouteflika government is lengthy and growing: How effectively or to what degree will Bouteflika be able to address resentment over the amnesty, tackle serious economic challenges, reassure citizens that a 3rd term does not represent some new from of autocracy,  clamp down on an active AQIM, and address a restive host of issues with the Berbers in the Kabyle especially as oil revenues drop? Are there other major challenges I am missing?

So fire away Algeria watchers.  I am eager to hear your thoughts.

- C

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Filed under Algeria, North Africa

Tags: Algeria, Maghreb, Policy