The National Reconciliation Process in Algeria During the Bouteflika’s Era: The Official Narrative

Introduction

During the 1990s, Algeria experienced a fierce civil war between state forces and extremist armed groups. Shortly after the suspension of the electoral process in 1992 by the army, various armed groups embracing extremist religious narratives were constituted and spread throughout the country (International Crisis Group, 2004). Causes and justifications behind the explosion of violence are multiple, including the economic bankruptcy and the failure of the rentier development model (Jolly, 2001; Ouaissa, 2010), political corruption and legitimacy crisis (Lavenue, 1993), and the emergence of religious extremist narrative (Carlier, 1992; Labat, 1995). However, it is primarily argued that the suspension of the electoral process by the army in 1992 was the main trigger for the violent explosion and human rights crisis. In 1994, various observers and experts assumed and anticipated that Algeria would collapse and the Islamist groups would capture power (Martinez, 2003). The state failed to provide security for civilians, particularly in peripheral villages highly vulnerable to violence. The emergence of state-sponsored paramilitary organizations guaranteed state control of the various remote prefectures since 1995; however, violence escalated to unprecedented levels with the spread of massacres and mass killings around the Mtidja triangle (Bedjaoui et al., 1999; Kalyvas, 1999; Martinez, 2001).

Among the explanatory factors of this curve in violence, according to Luiz Martinez (2001), was the emergence of state-sponsored auxiliary forces and the militarization of society. But, it is argued in this article that this escalation of violence is also justified by the multiplication and fragmentation of armed groups, the rupture between the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) constituency and the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) pretending to represent the FIS’ interests and the mismanagement of political crisis by eradicator party ¹ in the power. Responding to this alarming situation, various political figures and old veterans, such as Abdelaziz Belkhadem, Abdelhamid Mehri, and Hocine Ait Ahmed, called for dialogue and negotiation. Besides, after years of inaction, the international community’s pressure increased and intensified on a country facing a deep economic crisis and diplomatic isolation, specifically after the criticism from international human rights organizations (Amnesty International, 1996a, 1997; Human Rights Watch, 1997). Those factors were among the underlying determinants that led and incited the incumbents in power to search for possibilities of dialogue with armed groups.

In 1997, a peace agreement was concluded between the Intelligence and Security Department and the AIS leadership as a first step toward peace. It is assumed that the truce was a unilateral initiative by the AIS to stop the violence, but many interviewees affirmed that it was the result of multiple contacts and meetings between the Intelligence and Security Department officers, army commanders in the eastern region of the country, and the AIS leadership. This initiative was encouraged and supported later, even by the representatives of the suspended political party, the FIS. Abassi Madani sent a letter to President Abdalaziz Bouteflike on 11 June 1999 announcing that he supported the AIS efforts to stop the violence and called other armed groups to lay down their arms (Le Matin, 1999).

This initiated truce was followed by the organization of presidential elections and then the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika as the president of the republic in 1999 (until April 2019). One of the main challenges faced by the new president was restoring peace and finding a sustainable solution to end the violence. This concern was broadly evoked in his discourses during the electoral campaign. Thus, upon assuming office, he declared the Civil Concord Law project, which came to assert the above-mentioned peace agreement and contained a series of measures to contain violence and guarantee the AIS demobilization. This law that addressed past legacies was put to a referendum on 16 September 1999 and gained widespread popular support. ² Since then, Bouteflika became the dominating figure in the peace process: his giant posters, portraying him as the country’s savior, were put on every street. Although scholars maintain that the Civil Concord was only a measure to establish and restore the security situation (Moussaoui, 2013), it is argued here that this was part of the top-down reconciliation project in Algeria. After 1999, the word “National Reconciliation” was consistently mentioned in the president’s statements and discourses. Indeed, it became the conducive vocabulary to describe the peace process in the country. However, it is worth noting that reconciliation at that time did not necessarily signify a whole project involving punishment, victims’ healing, past disclosure, and accountability. Instead, this terminology was used interchangeably for “forgiveness,” “national dialogue,” and “peace,” It was often linked with religious symbols embedded in societal values and norms of collective identities as a discursive strategy to mobilize more clients for the presidential project.

At the end of 2004, President Bouteflika announced the project of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, an additional step toward peace. Since then, National Reconciliation has been used frequently in the public arena to symbolize the post-war regime’s approach to addressing the past legacies. It became a terminology defining a whole national project sponsored by the political regime to guarantee the non-reoccurrence of violence and national stability as its prime objective rather than tackling the interrelated relational dimensions of reconciliation: state–citizen, victim–perpetrator, victim–victim, and perpetrator–perpetrator reconciliation. The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation draft was approved overwhelmingly through a national referendum on September 29, 2005 and published in the official journal on February 28, 2006. ³

The presidential project, in both forms, was unsatisfactory for many actors and generated resentment among political parties and civil society organizations. Before the referendum, the president never discussed the details of the Civil Concord and Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Instead, his language was ambiguous from the beginning. Instead, he concentrated on the need to restore peace and stop violence, which partially justifies the support that he gained, especially in 1999. For instance, the referendum question of Civil Concord was, “Are you for or against the general policy of the President of the Republic aimed at achieving peace and civil concord”? Thus, highly traumatized people voted for peace and not for the content of the Civil Concord. Political parties also supported the national initiative to stop the violence, but they later asked for access to the content of the agreement between the Intelligence and Security Department and the AIS (Belkadi, 1999; Madani, 1999). Moreover, the restrictions have been exerted on the international agents and third parties by the presidency, and the rejection of the state to collaborate with the international community to set up ad hoc forms of accountability and public hearings raised suspicion and mistrust around the state-sponsored initiatives for reconciliation.

The Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), WAFA movement (Democratic and Social Movement of Al-Hachemi Cherif), Movement for National Reform of Abdallah Jaballah, Workers’ party of Luisa Hanoune, and activists of the suspended party FIS, such as Abdelkader Hachani, criticized the presidential projects of reconciliation. Representatives of these political actors declared their opposition through the local media denouncing the political aspects of the Civil Concord and the Charter and the absence of public discussion (Allouache, 2005; Ameyar, 2005; Arkat, 2005; Azzouz, 1999; Chih, 2004; Ouargil, 1999). The RCD, for instance, called for the boycott of the referendum of the Civil Concord, claiming that the law does not address the political aspects of the war (Cherfaoui, 1999). The FFS leadership affirmed that reconciliation entails the engagement of all internal actors representing society, the suspension of the state of emergency, and different restrictions imposed on collective activism (Bouabdallah, 2005; Kebir, 2005). Karim Tabbou, an FFS member then, described the initiative as another attempt to keep the status quo and serve political ends (Tamani, 2005). This view has been largely expressed in the public arena and surfaced during the Hirak protests (2019–2020) through slogans, street performances, and colloquiums of civil society organizations. In a similar vein, the Social and Democratic Movement (MDS) considered the content of the Charter “dangerous, suicidal, and has serious implications on the future security of the country” (Ameyar, 2005).

Various national civil society organizations agreed with those political parties. Even victims of armed groups’ violence that supported the Civil Concord later perceived that the presidential reconciliation project was a form of “treason” for people who sacrificed their lives to protect the republic (Le Matin, 2003; Tazaroute, 2003). Besides, victimized groups from different sides expressed their opposition, officially and unofficially, through contests and manifestations that affected different prefectures. Despite the high-level polarization within victimized communities at that time due to the absence of a consensus on the explanation of violence, there was a consensus that the presidential reconciliation project banalized the victims’ suffering. The Committee of Citizens to Defend the Republic (CCDR) emphasized the “duty to remember,” “truth,” and “justice” (Liberté, 2005). According to its members, the presidential project serves much more political interests than treating victimized groups’ main concerns. Meanwhile, Ali Yahia Abdnour, the previous head of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH), confirmed that human rights and peace are inseparable and called to reveal the truth and discuss the past (Hammadi, 2005c).

Academically, scholars who write on Algerian affairs also criticized the presidential projects. Some focused on the victims’ narratives and studied how the reconciliation process failed to address victims’ rights. It is largely presumed that the reconciliation process in Algeria was framed on the culture of denial and forgetfulness (Dutour, 2008; Gèze & Mellah, 2008; Kedidir, 2022; Zeraoulia, 2020). From a political and legal perspective, other scholars prefer to analyze the Charter by analyzing the idea of pardon and the absence of punishment, and truth commissions by refereeing to similar experiences in post-conflict settings (Joffé, 2008; Moussaoui, 2013). Other researchers addressed the bottom-up perspective of reconciliation by analyzing victims’ narratives and scrutinizing how victimized communities recollect the past violence (Zeraoulia, 2021).

These studies contributed to the understanding of the reconciliation process in the country. However, they do not examine the main components of the official narrative of reconciliation and its justifications. For instance, the idea of silence has been asserted and noticed in different writings, but still, no studies examined how this silence has been operated and materialized on the ground. The absence of similar studies does not help much in comprehending the emergence and the augmentation of protests of civil war actors even before the Hirak movement and the noticed development of victims’ opposition through digital platforms. Besides, limited research has been presented about the dilemma of victims in the official accounts and how the victim is defined in the official perspective through the main decrees underlining the reconciliation process.

This article tends to fill this scientific void by addressing the official narrative on reconciliation. The study illustrates and examines the components and main pillars of the official reconciliation account. It seeks to understand the main ideas driving the reconciliation process, shedding light on its implementation, linguistic recollection of the past, and the narrative reconstruction of collective memory and its political interpretation. All those analytical factors directly affect victim and perpetrator boundaries, victims’ self-perception, generational transmission of memory and mutual blame, and the processes of exclusion and inclusion. The article focuses mainly on the Bouteflika regime between 1999 and 2019 and its policies. The regime here signified the main powerful clans inside the country that acquired real power, including the presidency, army generals, intelligence and Security Department members, politicians and diplomats, business people, and even old veterans (Addi, 2020; Benderra, 2003; Dris-Ait Hamadouche & Duteil, 2017; Gèze, 2005; Hachemaoui, 2016; Merhi, 2003). This generally is known as ‘pouvoir’ in Algeria. The black box of decision-making in Algeria is highly closed and complex, and there were various central divergences regarding the reconciliation process and peacebuilding strategies. Thus, ‘regime’ does not necessarily indicate absolute internal homogeneity. Discussing the divergences inside the power center is beyond the scope of this article, which is more interested in the main guidelines of reconciliation process and its pillars during the Bouteflika era.

The study is based on substantial field research conducted in Algeria between April and December 2019 and between April and June 2022. It draws on a large range of empirical sources. The first source is the official decrees of the reconciliation project: the Civil Concord Law and the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Second, the author relied on the articles of different newspapers: Liberte, Almodjahed, La Tribune, Le Soir, and Le Matin, to survey the official statements of national authorities and to code the main expressions and concepts that have been used to describe the process since the arrival of Bouteflika. It also relies on a set of the collected speeches of the president between 1998 and 2013 from the archives of the national channels. In doing so, the analysis focused more on the presidential discourses that addressed the reconciliation project and past legacies. Besides, it scrutinized debates of commanders of the military institution and demobilized armed groups’ leaders such as Mezreg Madani. The final source is the interviews that covered various actors from different prefectures: army officers, academics, journalists, members of pro-government forces, and human rights activists. All interviewees have been anonymized to protect their identities. The interviews were semi-structured with open questions.

The article is divided into three sections. The first part illuminates the approach of general pardon embraced by the national authorities to implement national reconciliation. It tries to demonstrate the main justifications and explanations introduced by the post-war regime. Second, it highlights how silencing policies drew the lines of the official reconciliation account in Algeria, its mechanisms, actors, and strategies. The last section explores dichotomous attributions and victim dilemmas. It seeks to scrutinize how the official perspective presents the victim of the civil war and how this presentation links to its general approach of reconciliation.

Amnesty and Reconciliation: Between Moral Concerns and Security Obligations

Since announcing the Civil Concord Law project, the Algerian government has stressed the necessity of amnesty to achieve peace and strengthen reconciliation. Accordingly, amnesty policies were reaffirmed again with the Charter. Scholars define amnesties as acts that provide an individual with protection from liability—civil, criminal, or both—for acts committed in the past in a political context (Freeman, 2009; O’Shea, 2002). Granting amnesties to the perpetrators of human rights crimes in post-conflict societies is a controversial subject that came to the forefront of debate among scholars in the context of the “third wave of democratic transition.” According to the legalistic approach, society is not reconciled with its violent past unless it creates a culture of respect for fundamental human rights by punishing offenders for the committed crimes (Pensky, 2008). Under this insight, holding perpetrators accountable is necessary to consolidate reconciliation and sustainable peace, while including amnesties in peace agreements or transitional justice processes breaches international human rights standards and basic principles of justice. Moreover, amnesty decrees could further entrench the culture of impunity and diminish future peace prospects (Neil, 2002).

Nevertheless, implementing justice in the form of criminal prosecution after a violent conflict is still questionable (Anonymous, 1996; Licklider, 2008, p. 382; Mallinder, 2014). Complex victim–perpetrator cycles and the grey areas resulting from the nature of violence spread in authoritarian contexts make the linear correlations between peace and criminal justice highly contested. This article does not question the efficiency of punishment in implementing the rule of law. Instead, it asserts the necessity to scrutinize the variation of criminal justice effect across post-conflict contents underlying the key analytical elements that would affect crafting the headlines of that criminal justice, including the contextual characteristics, balance between the victims’ requirements and peace prerequisites, justice expected from different victims’ communities, and winner impact. Addressing those peacebuilding concerns, and far from the view that focuses on international law issues and whether amnesties are legitimate and legal, various scholars started to explore the diverse array of amnesty laws and investigate the extent to which those procedures could contribute to reconciliation and how those measures could be balanced with alternative mechanisms to guarantee a smooth transition (Chapman & Hugo ven der, 2008; Gavron, 2002; Mallinder, 2009; Mundy, 2015; Sarkin, 2009).

Indeed, scholars maintain that amnesties may be more successful in resolving armed conflict and establishing peace (Dancy, 2018). A cluster of peace agreements excluding human rights violations from their scope emerged in post-conflict contexts to calm insurrections and guarantee peace, at least in the first phase of transition (Freeman, 2009; Rose, 2008). Renée Jeffery (2021) mentions that of the 146 peace agreements signed between 1980 and 2015, 39% included either an explicit amnesty or a statement eliminating the possibility of prosecutions (p. 42). Certainly, the practice of states on amnesties varies considerably regarding scope and temporality. While some, such as those implemented in Burundi and East Timor, have explicitly excluded human rights violations, many others have not (Mallinder, 2012, p. 76). Thus, the question one faces here is what pattern of amnesty has been implemented in Algeria? What justifications have been advanced in the official narrative? And who is named as the target beneficiary of the amnesty measures?

The Algerian case could be categorized as a peace settlement amnesty where general pardon procedures serve mainly to end the cycle of violence: a general pardon was agreed upon during the negotiations between the AIS and the Intelligence and Security Department. President Bouteflika emphasized later that amnesty is not only a means for stopping the cycle of violence but also an essential mechanism for enhancing national reconciliation. ⁴ It was thus imposed after validating it through the Civil Concord Law and the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, then rigorously enforced through a clientelist bureaucracy over two decades. The political regime used two concepts to connote amnesty, which are semantically differentiated. Amnesty procedures were mentioned in the Civil Concord as i’faa, a legal term that means exemption from the charges and probation. While the charter refers to “pardon,” a highly contested concept with a profound religious meaning, it associates in the local dialect to individual pardon and forgiveness. The screening process of those eligible for amnesty was highly confidential and centralized: state institutions conducted it without involving either bottom-up actors or international partners.

The state agents such as police, brigade, army, and state-sponsored paramilitary organizations, who committed atrocities against civilians, have not been mentioned in the amnesty section in the Civil Concord and the Charter, but they benefited from an implicit exemption from punishment. During the campaign for presidential elections in 1999, Bouteflika expressed his willingness to bring peace to the country and to cooperate with all parties regardless of their political or ideological backgrounds, and he made an exception for those who “have the blood of innocents on their hands and instrumentalized the Algerian crisis for personal or political benefits.” ⁵ However, despite the evidenced disagreements between army factions opposing unlimited amnesty and the new president (Bourrat, 2012; Mortimer, 2006), ⁶ Bouteflika conceded his rejection of any reconciliation design that would criminalize the National Popular Army (ANP). The post-war regime acknowledges the state’s responsibility for the disappearance of more than 7000 victims; nevertheless, it precluded any criminal prosecution against state forces. The president publicly expressed his rejection of all competing accounts, which put military and police officers in the spotlight as criminal defendants and located the image of responsibility in the security apparatus. Article 45 of the Charter prohibits pursuing, individually or collectively, charges against state agents whose perpetrations have been considered officially a part of the acts directed to protect the nation and the institutions of the Algerian republic. But, it is significant to mention that an undeclared number of army officers were removed from their jobs under the charge of disobeying orders or committing large atrocities against civilians. ⁷ This has never been evoked in academia due to lack of information, but it is broadly recognized in the informal public discourse. Those cases were regulated under the umbrella of army institutions without engaging third parties. ⁸

Amnesty measures on the Civil Concord and the Charter target only the armed groups. Bouteflika’s regime provided a general pardon for Algerians involved in the war against the government: prisoners, combatants, and opponents-in-exile. According to the Civil Concord, the government will not prosecute or punish such persons if they reported to the nearest local authority, renounced and abandoned involvement in violence, and surrendered any weapons in their possession before 13 January 2000. Amnesty was conditioned by surrendering, disarming, and providing information on comrades. ⁹ Those granted amnesty received a pardon from criminal prosecution or any other form of punishment by the state. Following the president’s instructions, the Committees of General Probation were formed nationwide, whose objective was implementing the official insight. Each committee consists of the republic’s public prosecutor as a president, members from the defense ministry and brigade, and the chief of the operational sector in each prefecture. The committees’ functions specifically require monitoring demobilization programs, reintegration, resettlement of demobilized combatants, and issuing amnesty certificates. Moreover, the presidency constituted the National Commission of the General Amnesty, headed by the previous president Ahmed Ben-Bella, to treat demobilized combatants’ concerns (Hammadi, 2005).

Based on the text, restrictions excluded those most responsible for human rights violations from benefiting from the amnesty act. However, in practice, the amnesty was collective and combatants were rarely subjected to judicial prosecution, which is explained by the nature of amnesty. As mentioned above, the amnesty was an outcome of a top-down peace agreement. Around 3000 prisoners, who were arrested during the 1990s on different charges, benefited from that pardon, even though many of them were arguably involved in serious crimes against civilians. Besides, combatants who surrendered collectively in 2000 along with Mezreg Madani benefited from blanket amnesty and these include “Emirs” ¹⁰ who ordered attacks against civilians and state institutions. In 2005, the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation emphasized the amnesty approach with additional procedures addressing the enforced disappearance caused by state-sponsored violence. The Security Delegations replaced the Probation Committees, the statutory body responsible for all issues relating to victims and survivors of the civil war.

Opposition parties and local human rights organizations coalesced around establishing truth commissions and punishing perpetrators who violated gross human rights. It is deemed that those amnesty acts were designed to achieve particular sets of political ends, which typically include protecting powerful factions of the ongoing regime from future prosecutions. From its side, the presidency denied all those accusations and reasserted that amnesty was conceived partly to facilitate the peace process rather than to deny the past. President Bouteflika embraced a security-centric perspective justifying his choice that focused on making insurgents return home rather than following accountability.

Based on official statements, three factors can be identified as to why the post-war regime endorsed the amnesty approach. First, the power perceives digging into the details of past violations as a danger and a destabilizing factor that might disrupt fragile relationships between either civil war actors or victims and perpetrators. Criminal trials could create an endless cycle of revenge and violence, threatening the state’s sovereignty and stability. Farouk Ksentini, ¹¹ who pioneered the presidential initiative, mentioned this point, saying: “justice is a duty, but the Algerian state is the supreme priority” (Hammadi, 2005). He added that all calls for justice and punishment in Algeria were mere media shows and attempts to reinforce the existing fractures within the Algerian society (Lokmane & Hammadi, 2005).

Despite the evidenced contest against the amnesty policies, many interviewees from state forces argued that individual retributive justice could not end the violence in Algeria. Given the existing correlation between powerful factions in power at the time of the war and the map of widespread armed groups, it would be extremely difficult to try those responsible for the most serious human rights violations from both camps. Powerful anti-punishment constituencies, or what can be called peace spoilers, could take the country to an endless cycle of violence. Amnesty, therefore, was a form of reassurance designed to respond to the other’s needs and fears, and was significant for confidence-building during the negotiation process; it helped to break conflict deadlock by drawing the AIS to peace negotiations and encouraged its leadership to work toward a mutually satisfactory outcome.

According to the official milieu, even a restrictive amnesty would never end the cycle of violence at that time and would create a state of sustainable violence. A reduced sentence shema was indeed suggested for the first time in 1996 by President Liamine Zeroual called Rahma Law, ¹² but it failed to guarantee the demobilization of armed groups combatants. Scholars considered that the Civil Concord a continuation or a similar to the Rahma Law because they analyzed both initiatives from a political perspective (Dutour, 2008; Gèze & Mellah, 2008). A simplistic approach that overlooks the legal consequences and security aspects of both frameworks. Rahma was a one-sided initiative that is based on individual amnesty that targeted combatants seeking to return to their homes. The army officers distributed announcements for Rahma in remote villages, and often army commanders addressed families of insurgents to encourage them to contact their relatives and persuade them to leave combat. This fact was confirmed by families of insurgents interviewed for this article. In addition, the Rahma procedure was a limited amnesty. Articles 4 and 5 of this law permit a limited remission of sentences for demobilized insurgents involved in human rights violations, while insurgents who committed no crimes would be integrated into society. This unilateral attempt to mitigate violence, which was highly condemned by the AIS, ¹³ failed in its first phase for a variety of reasons, including the fragmentation of violence, the conflict within the power center regarding the strategies that should be followed to eradicate the violence, and the lack of required judicial infrastructures. It is alleged that many combatants who surrendered within that legal framework were sentenced for long years or killed by the security apparatus, which in turn deepened the trust deficit within troops willing to end violence. Thus, the general pardon was necessary to create a climate of confidence, entice the insurgents to surrender, isolate radical actors within both belligerent parties, and enable peace negotiations. ¹⁴ In the absence of a collective amnesty, interviewees refer that there would be no prospect of a negotiated settlement, and, as a result, the abuses or mass violence would continue or possibly worsen.

Amnesty opponents, shortly after the Civil Concord validation, either local agents or international human rights organizations, stated that the amnesty act failed to attain its objective. It was claimed that around 2000 were killed by armed groups between January 1999 and July 2000 (Hadou, 2003). Similarly, Ali Yahia Abdenour, a human rights defender, ¹⁵ stated that between 850 and 1,250 died annually due to terrorist attacks since the announcement of the Civil Concorde (Hammadi, 2005). Furthermore, observers and experts debated the dilemma of demobilization and mobilization: how the state would guarantee that the demobilized insurgents and released prisoners would not join the armed movements again. A local newspaper mentioned that about 200 “repentant” re-joined the armed groups in 2002 (Hadou, 2003). Containing violence in a few years was difficult; various armed groups embraced a more extremist narrative, rejected the presidential approach of amnesty and intensified their attacks in 2000 and 2005 before the charter was validated. However, it is uncontested that the massive demobilization of the AIS combatants decreased the levels of violence and tremendously allowed to neutralize of the eastern part of the country, which was one of the main bases of violence. Life returned to many peripheral abandoned villages. About 50 networks of The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) were dismantled between January and September 2003 by the police and brigade, which allowed them to neutralize around 7000 active informants working with the armed groups (Hadou, 2003). The collective demobilization of 6300 insurgents of the AIS in 2000 was an essential step toward stopping the continued violence against civilians. The post-war regime seemingly accomplished a certain level of stability and even succeeded in containing the spread of extremism after the Arab uprisings.

The second factor that was largely advanced by state authorities and also responded to justify amnesty policies is the complexity of the violence. The conflict type does appear to have a significant bearing on the likelihood that the political regime endorsed amnesty for human rights abuses in the peace agreement. Conflict studies literature emphasizes that the type of conflict being settled, its severity, duration, and intractability influence the likelihood that a peace agreement includes amnesties for human rights violations (Olsen, Payne, & Reiter, 2010, p. 128). From the same perspective, the post-war regime in Algeria viewed the violence dynamism and the escalation trend that the war took in 1996 as a key explanatory element for granting amnesty. President Bouteflika expressed that complexity frequently in his speeches describing the violence in the country as an incomprehensible war between brothers. It was a war without clear enemies and clear loyalties. The identities of the victims and perpetrators were often overlapping and fluid and could change over time, a fact that has been asserted even by victimized communities. Indeed, since 1995, the dynamism took a trend toward a more violent viciousness or destructive qualities that were the result of many factors such as the mismanagement of political crisis by the state, the enforced militarization of society, the constitution of the southern camps, and marginalization of the opposition parties. Civilians were facing various patterns of extremism, either criminal or religious, and since 1996, the country entered a fragmented war that associated with the multiplications of radical armed groups and the intensification of violence against more vulnerable civilian sectors (Ali-Yahia, 1999; Amnesty International, 1996b, 1996c).

The third factor related directly to the precedent one is the lack of required judicial infrastructures for implementing criminal justice. Establishing criminal justice to address the perpetrations committed in similar settings is the most difficult task a post-war regime could face. The antagonists’ polarization affected even families where one could find a victim of state violence and a victim of armed groups’ violence. Thus, the cognition of social proximity is highly affected and most of the mechanisms of social solidarity that manufactured the societal fabric even before independence were lacerated in favor of the prevalence of societal distrust. Thus, war antagonisms profoundly weakened the norms, values, and social beliefs that bonded local communities for decades. Under these circumstances, it may be practically impossible to provide an account of past wrongs because of the difficulty of figuring out who did what to whom.

Moreover, huge financial resources from national and international agencies were required to establish a transparent legal system that would lead the transitional phase. The Bouteflika regime neither had the resources nor accepted the international ad-hoc forms that have been generally used to bring justice to victims of war crimes in other countries. Instead, they have been considered a means of foreign intervention in the country’s domestic affairs. Also, there were plenty of questions regarding the timeline of similar measures. The lack of independent and prepared judicial frameworks to conduct and monitor the transition would lead to an endless transitional phase, waste state resources, and create an institutional vacuum or institutional crisis like in neighboring countries.

Amnesty procedures succeeded in guaranteeing the demobilization of combatants and diminishing the level of violence in Algeria. However, amnesty failed to build trust between citizens and the post-war regime. In contrast, it generalized impunity and undermined the rule of law, two essential components for building and establishing a real democracy. Besides, making amnesty a non-limited term measure raised suspicion about the purposes behind this security perspective; how does one explain extending amnesty for involved combatants in terrorist attacks after 2010? Certain levels of accountability were needed to enhance social security and restore the societal fabric destroyed during the war. In long-term authoritarian contexts where divided rules play a crucial role in determining political and social interactions, amnesty would be required and necessitated as an initial step to avoid sustainable conflicts or the collapse of the state and the prevalence of chaos. However, this amnesty should be crafted to guarantee a certain equilibrium between security concerns and the reconstruction of a social contract.

Locked Archives

Archives are considered a society’s collective memory: materials, art, crafts, and documents present archival collections that allow future generations to remember their past. They are evidential repositories and communicational means that enable the reconciliation of the present with its past to design and build a peaceful future in societies that emerged from violence. They are also a space of knowledge where scholars and historians can discover alternative truths; then revise, criticize, and frame new histories and new memory narratives. However, the political role of archives in transitional contexts is subject to a large variety of determinants, mainly the documentation policies during the war and archival strategies and approaches of the post-war regime. Indeed, archiving is a complex socio-political process where neglected stories and acknowledged narrations intersect and overlap and where much objective information could be affected by framing subjectivities of the archive’s producers (Accatino & Collins, 2016; Viebach, 2017; Viebach et al., 2020).

Despite the state censorship generated and sustained on the flow of information during the civil war in Algeria, bottom-up agents from various backgrounds succeeded in organizing archiving initiatives and recording the ongoing violence and patterns of victimization. In addition to the state repositories, parallel archiving processes were implemented by grassroots organizations, state-sponsored forces, individuals, and diaspora communities. Many victims’ families mentioned the collaborative efforts of lawyers, journalists, and activists to record their stories, collect their pictures, and even record their testimonies during the war. But the arrival of President Bouteflika marked the emergence of a systematic policy to hide these archival collections and intensified censorship on all attempts of bottom-up recording acts. Reports regarding victims’ names and disaggregation became confidential subjects that should not be discussed; they have been portrayed as sensitive materials and put under lock. Even the annual reports of ad-hoc commissions and state publications concerning the war of the 1990s became confidential and inaccessible. Nevertheless, bottom-up organizations such as SOS Disparu succeeded in preserving the collected data, while the archives of local organizations created during the war were hidden. Newspapers archives can be accessed but are generally only allowed for national researchers: foreign researchers require a security declaration or a document explaining the main objectives of their research in Algeria and the sponsoring partners.

Repression and Coercion

Since mobilizing the counter-memory of civil war is one of the most critical issues for the incumbents of power, a huge pressure has been exercised on all actors, either individual or institutional, seeking to open the closed past. The government retains control over all mechanisms of engaging with the past and writing the civil war narrative and muzzles the politicians of various tendencies, independent publishers, graphic artists, and any other vehicle of public opinion. The political regime developed processes of suppression of the alternative narratives in which the official media participated with particular enthusiasm, prioritizing a narrative that privileges economic development and country reconstruction over discussing past antagonism and reconciling past violence. Organizing academic forums, conferences, and seminars critically examining past legacies and reconciliation in Algeria was almost impossible before 2013, especially in smaller cities. It is undeniable that various workshops, either national or international, were organized and sponsored by state institutions dealing with aspects of reconciliation, but most of them focused mainly on the president’s achievements.

Besides academic hubs, human rights organizations are subject to continued state censorship. Pressure on human rights activists is much greater regarding the overlapping connection of these associations with international partners and their predominant role in shaping and framing the paths of active collective remembrance. Activists declared that they were victims of multiple transgressions due to their commitment to defend truth and the duty to remember: they have been prohibited from social subsidies and, in extreme cases, expelled from their jobs. Added to the oppression exercised against human rights activists, the national authorities tried hard to oppress the manifestations of victimized communities in different prefectures. Victims’ families proclaimed that organizing protests in the periphery was impossible until 2013.

All the above-mentioned mechanisms played a crucial role in silencing the excluded and marginalized narratives of civil war in Algeria. However, it is significant to mention that the boundaries of this national silence are changing and have been contested during the last few years by memory agents and civil war actors. There is a tendency to discuss the subject that was long considered “a forbidden area” at universities and political sciences institutes. Various scholars started to work on the memory of the civil war and the main atrocities. A remarkable tendency toward examining the past critical subjects, such as enforced disappearance and trauma of massacres victims, has been noticed (Bouatta, 2003; Saadouni, 2015, 2018a, 2018b; Zeraoulia, 2020, 2021). The past surfaced in the academic arena to be a subject of discussion in the classroom and a subject of research for many doctoral students within the country. Yet, those contributions, especially Ph. D. theses, stay modest regarding their arguments to examine reconciliation and information about past atrocities. However, they have been considered a positive step toward encouraging memory work and research.

In the public arena, the contestation movement of different actors increased remarkably after the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The massive protests of the pro-government forces claiming their economic and social rights and the symbolic reparation for their “sacrifices” illustrated that state-sponsored silencing policies face deep challenges. The first large protest was on March 7, 2011, focusing much on socio-economic demands. Then, their manifestations expanded geographically and augmented in number to take a political meaning: political slogans contesting the official accounts and questioning reconciliation policies became more apparent. With the Hirak protests in 2019, the recent past of a violent civil war was present in the songs, slogans, colloquiums, and street theatres. The victims’ families, including those of political prisoners still in jail, intensified their participation and reintegrated their demands with other contesting groups. Although the state forces succeeded in containing this contest movement, it is undeniable that this historical turning point provoked and incited a large discussion around the silencing policies and the legitimacy of the official account.

Collective Victimization: “We are all Victims,” “Algeria is a Victim”

Victims are at the core of the reconciliation process design. They provide legitimacy for different peace stakeholders and transitional institutions in post-conflict settings. However, victims’ identification processes in the aftermath depend on the context, victimhood polarizations, peace agreement approach, and power structures: many voices would be silenced, excluded, and suppressed. Those processes became more complex in highly divided societies that face deep cleavages between identity-based groups involved in violence (Hearman, 2017). Multiple victimhood narratives could emerge and be generated; they could be politically and socially constructed, re-configured, and manipulated to serve either political or factional ends (Jankowitz, 2017). This sense of victimhood is mobilized, transmitted, and disseminated via a large range of societal channels in a way that would let past grievances influence future actions (Jacoby, 2015; Mamdani, 2001; Nadler & Shnabel, 2015; Rouhana, 2011). Identifying victims in post-conflict societies, thus, could be the more difficult task for transitional justice entrepreneurs in their efforts to establish and implement reconciliation.

During the civil war in Algeria, contested victimhood narratives emerged in the public arena and continue to play out in the post-conflict situation; they struggle around the causes, the context of the conflict, and blame. Those narratives cluster around the binary traced through the perpetrator’s identity: victims of state-perpetuated violence and victims of armed groups’ violence. These victimization boundaries do not separate from the complex societal polarization configured before the outbreak of violence in 1992. The presidential decrees founding for reconciliation, Civil Concord and Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation avoid intentionally defining “victims” and “perpetrators.” Instead, they use only “victims of terrorism” to mention victims of armed groups’ violence, more specifically civilians and state-sponsored paramilitary organizations, while denoting the victims of state-sponsored violence as victims of “the National Tragedy,” mainly victims of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions. ²⁴ This semantic selectivity does not separate from the discursive strategy of silence embraced by President Bouteflika regime for two decades.

However, in the official statements of the president, it is easy to notice that a new victim has been produced and presented as the supreme actor in the reconciliation process. The traumatic events of the war of the 1990s were served generally as a basis for incorporating the nation in its totality as a victim. “All Algerian people are victims,” “the whole nation was lacerated,” and “the victims are not the only ones hurt in this war, the whole country has been,” were used during the campaign for the referendum of the Civil Concord. ²⁵ This victimization tone, where the perpetrator’s identity is unknown and ambiguous, was associated with a tendency toward equalizing the dead of the civil war: “we have all lost a loved one.” In this discourse, victimhood is widely dispersed so that most people can claim status as victims. “We” as a connotation blurs the lines between “us” and “they,” dampens the horizontal competing narratives, and creates political solidarity for the presidential reconciliation project by providing a sense of common identification overlooking the complex boundaries that had resulted from the war. Even when the president discussed the idea of perpetrator and amnesty, he used the same linguistic frameworks affirming and prioritizing the urgent need to accept each other to serve the national interest rather than addressing societal and political differences: “Algeria accepts all its sons, and Algeria has a place for everyone would like to repent and regret his acts,” the president said. ²⁶ This narrative has been better understood in the global strategy of the system sought to implement amnesty, but it also reflects the linguistic frameworks of reconciliation in Algeria.

The official narrative produced a superior victim that should be prioritized and defended: Algeria. In so doing, President Bouteflika distanced himself from those who ruled the country during the civil war and who have been perceived as responsible for the explosion of violence. In his discourse in Laghouat in 1999, he said, “Algeria was governed during the 1990s by people who do not know how to write or to how to read, they ruined Algeria…. . they wanted to sell the country.” ²⁷ Similar statements accusing an unspecified clan of the violent turbulence that the country lived during the 1990s were recorded in most of the presidential discourses during 1999. Bouteflika never explained who were “they” and what their ideologies were. This tendency toward accusing a non-known “they” is associated with a tone of “international conspiracy” to justify the violence of the 1990s. A perspective found in the events of September 11, 2001 the occasion to be generalized among the political regime clients and integrated into the general direction of the post-war regime. ²⁸ Indeed, this tone surfaced again shortly after the spread of the Arab uprisings in 2011. Manipulating the collective trauma and memory of pain through diffusing images and videos of mass killings and massacres, the country has been portrayed as a victim of a hidden conspiracy blaming non-announced external enemies.

Through “we are victims,” the post-war regime created a competing narrative, where all Algerians are equal in their suffering in the face of meso-level grievance-based identities; a discourse that could affect the temporal distance of these last ones and direct their accounts into silence. “We” became a political currency that addresses the attitudes, affective responses, and behaviors of different victimized groups; more specifically, it has an impact on empathy patterns that play a crucial role in shaping compensation policies, commemoration acts, symbolic reparation, the generational transmission of past narrative, and socialization process of collective memory. Notably, the official account does not necessarily banalize the harm inflicted on sub-victimized groups but devaluates their suffering in favor of a supreme “imagined victim.”

As a part of the official victim identification process, the post-war regime used ambiguous connotations and language to conceptualize the violence of the 1990s. Labeling this one has been a subject of controversy in the academic arena as well as the public sphere. According to armed groups, violence against the state was a legitimate reaction against the political regime that chose to suspend the electoral process in 1992. The AIS insurgents often called themselves Mujahadeen, a term that presents a part of the insurgency’s strategy to instrumentalize the war of independence symbols during the 1990s and to legitimize its violent actions socially. Mezreg Madani, the AIS chief, frequently maintained in his media statements that violence was a legitimate war against a corrupted regime that did not respect the people’s choices. Second, state opponents who fled the country and dissident army officers developed demonization mnemonic concepts that mainly blame the army. They described the violence as a dirty war and state terrorism followed by the suspension of the electoral process, a discourse that criminalizes army commanders claiming their complicity in massacres and human rights violations against civilians (Habib Souaidia, 2001; Yous & Mellah, 2012).

Meanwhile, state officers and security apparatus prefer to label the violence of the 1990s as a “security crisis,” denying the state responsibility for the escalation of violence. However, they acknowledge that the state apparatus mismanaged the crisis, particularly in its first phases. In the academic arena, scholars have not been able to obtain a consensus identification of violence in Algeria; it has been perceived as an armed conflict that is inherently ambiguous. Jacob Mundy (2011), writing about the politics of naming, discussed the difficulty of identifying violence in Algeria. Plenty of concepts have been used to describe it, including crisis, period of instability, sacred terror, armed rebellion, and insurgency (Addi, 1999; Belarouci, 2010; International Crisis Group, 2004; Mundy, 2015). Civil war, a concept that the article uses to mention violence in Algeria, also has been used by scholars (Martinez, 1998, 2001). However, Algerian affairs experts, such as Roberts Hugh (1999), also hardly contested this concept.

The post-war regime described the civil war as uncomprehensive violence, a rupture in the history of Algerians, who were well-known for their solidarity to liberate their country during colonialism. The regime rarely acknowledges that the violence resulted from the social and economic crisis, political authoritarianism, and the failure of post-independence Algeria to reconcile and cohabitate with its cultural diversity. In contrast, it adopts ambiguous concepts fitting its perspective. During the war, the violence was described as Islamic terrorism, but since 1999, saw the emergence of different connotations about that violence. The regime rejected “civil war” to mention what happened in Algeria. In an interview for Al-Jazeera on March 24, 1999, Bouteflika declared that the violence almost became a civil war, but it was not a civil war (Al-Jazeera, 1999). In the Civil Concord, the political regime used “subversion,” “terrorist acts,” and “terrorism.” But during the referendum campaign, he described the violence of the 1990s as “Fitna” and “tragedy”: both are ambiguous concepts that portray all the Algerian people as the victim and blur the boundaries between victim/perpetrator. Fitna, a word used frequently by the local and national newspapers and media in 1999 and 2000, indicates in Arabic the split and dispute that could happen between brothers and people from the same community, while tragedy illuminates the brutality of the armed conflict and how much civilians suffered during the war.

In the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, the post-war regime used two different terms to describe the same historical period. “National Tragedy” was used often when addressing the concerns of victims of enforced disappearance. “Terrorism” was used when evoking concerns of armed group violence victims. The term “terrorism” was integrated after the attacks of September 11 into the global discourse to fight al-Qaeda, which allowed the regime to export the Algerian experience as a model for fighting terrorism, then legitimizing itself and having access to international support. In the media, seminars, and conferences since 2005, the civil war often referred to as the “black decade.” The concept indicates in the public imaginary the intensity of violence, brutality of committed crimes, international isolation, humiliation that Algerians suffered during the 1990s, and high levels of human rights violations. All the above-mentioned official connotations of the civil war prioritized the discourse of national interest and collective victimization.

Affirming the necessity to prioritize this supreme victim, the post-war regime linked its narrative of “Algeria is the supreme victim” to the memory of the war of independence. Indeed, a nationalist tone marked the statements of President Bouteflika, who played a significant role during the War of Independence and was one of the close figures to President Houari Boumediene during the 1960s and 1970s. Bouteflika used to mention Boumediene’s economic achievements and social development projects portraying him as a national hero. Furthermore, he shared with the audience his experiences, manipulating and exploiting their nationalistic affection by appealing to the language of kinship to denote the ties that bound Algerians to their country at that time. Besides, although the split among the old veterans about the reconciliation project, the president openly emphasized the crucial role that these historical actors played during the war of independence and successively in the civil war to protect the nation from the explosion. Extolling the nationalist values and deployment of the national reconstruction narrative was accompanied by a parallel comparison between the declaration of 1 November for the war against colonialism and the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. It is largely affirmed that national reconciliation is as important as the declaration of November 1, 1954 that instituted the war of independence; the charter was presented as another historical turning point where old veterans played an important role in protecting the country. So, the charter should be approved and accepted as it is, and any criticism could be perceived as a threat to national unity. Furthermore, opponents of the national reconciliation were described as “Hizb Franca” or “anti-patriotic” on various occasions.

Conclusion

Reconciliation during Bouteflika’s term is deeply connected to concepts of silence, divorce, rupture, and turning the past chapter. He prioritized national unity, economic construction, and social development, while the role of rehabilitation of individual relationships, writing history, and memorialization in the peace implementation were rarely examined, and they have been perceived as triggers of past hatreds. Furthermore, he linked the discourse of reconciliation to the nationalist narrative to emphasize the role of old veterans in building the country’s future and regenerating the revolutionary symbols used for the long-term political legitimacy. Reconciliation under Bouteflika succeeded in achieving certain stability. However, the official reconciliation perspective failed to address the main driving factors of the societal divisions during the 1990s and failed to create the social contract needed to establish a real democracy. The protest movement in 2019 demonstrated how the untreated boundaries of past blame could incite and provoke various divergences and become an obstacle in the face of political change. Reconciliation should be enhanced and consolidated by implementing programs and measures that address mainly mutual blame and the conflicting interpretation of the past. Social and economic development play a crucial role in social change and strengthening security; however, a whole agenda targeting the main doctrines and divides that affected the violence should be established and materialized through different channels. The past never disappears. It could be neglected, ignored, and abandoned, but during crises, it surfaces.

During his inauguration speech on December 19, 2019, newly elected president Abdelmadjid Tebboun stated that he would follow the pathways outlined in the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, protecting the achieved peace. President Tebboun mentioned that he would tackle and treat the main concerns of auxiliary forces that were recruited during the civil war. But the last year marked two contradictory decisions. In 2022, two events related to past legacies were recorded. On August 4, 2022, the national day of the APN, the new president honored three army figures—Khaled Nezzar, Mohamed Mediene, and Hocine Benhadid—who had played a critical role during the 1990s and entered into an open confrontation with Bouteflika’s regime. Nezzar was responsible for suspending the electoral process in 1992 and has been accused of vast human rights violations against civilians.

On the other hand, in a recent attempt at national dialogue, the new president announced before the Independence Day ceremony on July 5, 2022 a new draft law addressing concerns of the political detainees of the 1990s. The draft suggests the possibility of releasing around 160 prisoners from the extra-legal courts sentenced during the civil war. An issue that was neglected during the Bouteflika era and provoked controversy among victims’ families. This project, which reflects the political will of the new regime to discuss new opportunities for dialogue, could present a significant turning point to rehabilitate the reconciliation process and valorize bottom-up initiatives to acknowledge victims’ rights. However, in contrast, it could provoke the resentment of other competing victimized groups or trigger a large contest movement calling to open truth investigations about past atrocities.