Algeria to announce results of peace plan referendum
Algeria expected to announce referendum results today on a peace plan that provides amnesty for a broad spectrum of Islamic extremists, an effort to move past a brutal insurgency that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika says left 150,000 dead.
Critics of his Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation were legion, from opposition to human rights groups. But they predicted it would pass when the official results are announced – expected at a news conference by Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni.
Yesterday, after polls closed, Zerhouni put the participation rate at 79.5 per cent with just a few districts left to be counted.
A big win would further strengthen the hand of the already popular Bouteflika, who won a landslide re-election victory in 2004, five years after taking office following an election tarnished by allegations of fraud.
The president said his charter aims to close the wounds from the deadly violence and atrocities that gripped the North African nation for more than a decade. The insurgency erupted in 1992 after the army cancelled a second round of voting in Algeria’s first multiparty legislative elections to thwart a likely victory by the now-banned fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front.
Some opposition politicians and human rights groups accused the president of using the charter to consolidate his power in the gas-rich nation of nearly 33 million. Critics also lamented a lack of public debate and accused Bouteflika of trying to whitewash years of agony.
The United States voiced regret the referendum was not preceded by a full public airing of the issues. However, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington “will respect the decision of the Algerian people as it is reflected in the balloting”.
“Each individual country has to find its own pathway,” he said. “This is one particular pathway that, if the Algerian people approve it, will be one best suited for Algeria.”
The lengthy, but vaguely worded charter, offers something for everyone, from Islamic rebels to families whose loved ones joined the insurgency, or simply vanished.
It would end judicial proceedings for a broad span of Islamists, including those who lay down arms, those sought at home or abroad for allegedly supporting terrorism and those convicted in absentia.
An exception is anyone who perpetrated massacres, rapes or bomb attacks in public places. But the text does not spell out how this would be determined.
The charter also provides for reparations for families whose loved ones disappeared. Victims’ families contend that security forces were responsible for many of the thousands of disappearances.
Bouteflika said recently that the violence left 150,000 dead.
Although the insurgents have been largely tamed, sporadic violence continues. The government says 800-1,000 insurgents remain active.
After years of living in fear, calm has returned to the capital, Algiers, and much of this vast country that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Sahara Desert. A sense of normalcy has settled even in places like Sidi Rais, 15 miles south of Algiers at the entry to what became known as The Triangle of Death at the height of the insurgency in the 1990s.
Sidi Rais was the scene of one of the bloodiest massacres, with more than 300 people killed on March 27, 1997. There, the pain remains just beneath the surface, with few voters saying they could put the past behind them.
“People who have been so hurt hesitate to pardon,” said Abdelaziz Bensmail, head of the Rais voting station. “It is so easy to say ’sorry’ but in reality here it is difficult to swallow.”
But Keltoume Hamideche, principal of the Mohamed Ikbel primary school that served as a voting station in Algiers, said the country must move on. Citing the example of former enemies France and Germany – “now on very good terms – even Germans with the Jews” – she said: “If we don’t dare, we have nothing. We must dare.”
Asked whether she was worried about pardoning former insurgents, she said: “Even if it upsets me, we want peace.”
