Under the guise of turning the page, Algeria threatens to jail dissenters
You might expect these trends to auger more openness and democracy. But after turning the corner on a conflict between government forces and Islamist rebels that since 1992 claimed more than 100,000 lives, mostly civilian, Algeria is moving toward less freedom.
The new "Law Implementing the Charter on Peace and National Reconciliation" makes this clear. Never before has a government, in the guise of healing a nation after a fratricidal war, threatened to impose such heavy punishments on those who pose critical questions about the past.
The law provides up to five years in prison for any statement or activity concerning "the National Tragedy" that "harms" state institutions, "the good reputation of its agents," or "the image of Algeria internationally."
Over the years, families of the more than 6,000 Algerians who "disappeared" during the conflict overcame their fear and began holding weekly sit-ins to demand answers about the fate of their loved ones. They managed to win a measure of public sympathy, media attention, and, finally, an official acknowledgment that state agents had carried out "disappearances."
Under the new law, wives and mothers who brandish the same photos and who ask the same, still-unanswered questions could be bundled off to prison.
The new law ratifies the impunity that allowed abuses to become systematic in the first place. It grants a sweeping amnesty to security-force members for the torture and summary executions they carried out." It also grants an amnesty to Islamist militants for all but a few of the unspeakable atrocities that they committed.
Nine years ago, a series of large-scale massacres near the capital, Algiers, focused world attention on this conflict's civilian toll. Yet the government never properly investigated these crimes against humanity, attributed to Islamist armed groups but carried out within a few kilometres of military bases. The same goes for most of the scores of assassinations of leading cultural figures, intellectuals and journalists. Mass gravesites have been reported by the private press, but the bodies they hold have never been properly exhumed and forensically analyzed.
The new law contains some positive features, including financial compensation to families of the "disappeared." But it denies them their right to the truth about the fate of their relatives. It is also refuses them justice: The new law shields the still-unidentified state agents responsible for "disappearances" from prosecution, civil suits, and perhaps even any basic public inquiry.
Many countries in transition from civil war to peace have established truth commissions to investigate and learn from the past. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has said that Algeria's wounds are still too raw for a truth commission and that Algerians yearn to look toward the future.
What Algerians really think is not so clear. They voted "Yes" last September in a referendum on the amnesty, but only after the state hammered home the message that those who opposed it were the enemies of peace and reconciliation.
Algerians reasonably disagree about the right mix of punishment and forgiveness, but it is hard to believe that many support a decree that criminalizes critical discussion of the "National Tragedy." Such a measure is less about healing wounds than about muzzling criticism.
In 1962, when Algeria won independence from France, the two countries agreed to an amnesty covering the war of liberation. Algeria's new leaders implemented the amnesty and imposed a single narrative glorifying the heroism, sacrifice and unity of the mujahedeen. In so doing, they prevented discussion of the many massacres and liquidations that the mujahedeen perpetrated against their countrymen. Algerian historians have broken this taboo only recently, linking the autocratic tendencies of the liberation movement to its imposition of one-party rule after independence.
The conflict of the 1990s was also marked by events that authorities never properly investigated and now want to sweep under the carpet. But if Algeria is to emerge from the "National Tragedy" as a nation both more democratic and better protected against future atrocities, it will be by trying to understand and achieve accountability for the abuses committed in the 1990s, not by decreeing amnesty and amnesia.