Algeria Alert International New Website

Algeria Alert International has a new website since March 2013.
We keep supporting the equal rights and dignity of  all Algerian people.

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Algeria Alert Internationa
Chairman.

Algerian youths riot over food prices, unemployment

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/


ALGIERS (Reuters): Hundreds of youths clashed with police in several cities in Algeria, including the capital, over food price rises and chronic unemployment, residents said on Thursday.

Anti-riot police used tear gas to disperse youths in the Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued late on Wednesday. A store selling cars and one selling mobile phones were among buildings set on fire, witnesses said.

Media also reported rioting in the cities of Oran and Blida.

Opec-member Algeria has seen periodic outbreaks of social unrest, but riots due to rises in the cost of basic foods are rare.

The cost of flour and salad oil has doubled in the past few months, reaching record highs, and 1kg of sugar, which a few months ago cost 70 dinars ($0,274), is now 150 dinars.

"The youth is mad at the regime. It doesn't understand why a rich country is unable to offer jobs, houses and a decent life to its people," Mohamed Said (55) who lives in the crowded Bab el-Oued district, told Reuters.

Another resident, Miloud Aziz (47) said: "It is all about feeding our children. Prices are too expensive for people like us. Too much, it is too much."

Officially unemployment is about 10% in Algeria, but independent organisations put it closer to 25%.

The government has announced an investment plan worth $286-billion over the next four years to create jobs and improve living conditions. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has also promised 1 million new housing units by 2014.

An Open letter to Barack Obama from Algeria Alert International-Norway

December 18, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500.


Dear Mr. President,

On behalf of the members of Algeria Alert International – Norway, we would like to extend our congratulations to your Excellency on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and to all those who are acting to make the world a better place to live.

Taking advantage of your visit to Oslo, so brief in time yet accompanied by a tremendous speech announcing your pragmatically-driven foreign policy and morally-enlightened diplomacy. It is such words as “The promotion of Human Rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy” that pushed Algeria Alert International to address your Excellency, in line with its scope of supporting the cause and spreading the words and stories of those who felt betrayed by the Algerian government.

Excellency, in the course of your Oslo Address you stated that “we cannot accept a world in which more people are denied opportunity and dignity that all people yearn for – the ability to get an education and make a decent living; the security that you won’t have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for future”. And so does Algeria Alert International denounce the political discourse aiming at discrediting Human Rights and their defenders across Algeria. In attempting to do such, our organization trusts that supporting human rights across the Algerian society is both a patriotic and sensitive demarche.

According to your Oslo speech, three ways the world can try to build a “just and lasting peace”, and one of them is “to protect the inherent rights and dignity of all peoples”. In Algeria Alert International our credo is supporting victims of depravation and oppression; revealing and denouncing the Algerian Military’s systematic policies which have led to the impoverishment of the majority and the boosting of extremism and political violence. The lack of political changes in Algeria coupled with miserable living conditions of the average Algerian, are bound to inflate recruitment for AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) among sections of disillusioned Algerian people.

Excellency, it is not a coincidence that the recent surge of Armed Groups’ activities in Algeria came in the aftermath of the embarrassing Presidential election prolonging the suffocating and corrupt “reign” of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for another 5-year term. The ineptitude of the Algerian security forces to protect citizens is no accident, but a conspiracy against the Algerian people to keep the Military relevant and “needed”. Wasn’t the electoral platform (used by the Military to back Bouteflika during his 2009 campaign) : “Algerians need Bouteflika to keep peace and order”.

Since the 1990’s, there has been a bloody chapter of a bungled war being seemingly fought on terror across Algeria, while the country is plagued with political violence whose end looks still elusive. In the last few months, AQIM has claimed responsibility for a number of high profile attacks in several countries in the Sahel region. But, with such hits especially in Algeria, AQIM is more operational than ever.

Faced with this recent surge of political violence that accumulated with ever more alarming bomb attacks in areas reported by the Algerian Army as being safe and “cleansed”, is a signal that AQIM is active in several regions and can strike at will and ease simultaneously and lethally throughout the Algerian heartland. And as long as some elements of the Algerian Army are financially “benefiting” from the chaos, innocent Algerians will keep paying the price.

In your Oslo Address you stated that due respect and implementation of law does empower and reward firstly those who comply with it. Yet, in Algeria, and unlike other Southern countries (namely South Africa, Morocco and Chile) which established successful “truth commissions”, no genuine process of transitional justice has been launched. Instead, the Algerian police started last September distributing door-to-door “official death certificates” to wash by force the government’s hands off any legal responsibility of the horrendous crimes perpetrated during a ten-year bloody internal war whose unresolved human rights consequences still linger today. More alarmingly, these Sate-imposed “death certificates” have been delivered under threat and clear abuse of law.

It is common knowledge that hydrocarbon products count for roughly 97% of Algeria’s exports and 70% of its fiscal revenues; however the social tension in Algeria is on the verge of explosion and popular discontent that started last summer continues. Algeria is the third largest producer of gas with billions of dollars in oil revenues, but a blatant case of governmental incompetence is to have gas-rich Algeria suffer from gas and electricity cuts. Algeria’s billion dollars-oil bonanza is being openly mismanaged at a time when Algerian citizens are crippled in countless underdevelopment problems. Algerians live in a country sitting on one of the largest reserves of hydrocarbons in the world, but their politicians cannot come up with sound economic policies to address structural deficiencies and handle the country’s structural imbalances which have only worsened and the powder keg can explode anytime.

Mr. President, the advent of terrorism on the Algerian already volatile political scene and its sporadic touches upon the rest of North Africa, can never be dismantled in the absence of exhortation and implementation of a painstaking diplomatic stance in the face of the Algerian regime, in order first to install democracy in Algeria and endeavour for an integrated Mahrebian economic space.


President of Algeria Alert International

France must not deport terror suspect to Algeria

France must not deport a man convicted of terrorist acts to Algeria where he may be at risk of incommunicado detention and torture or other ill-treatment, Amnesty International said today. According to a European Court of Human Rights’ judgement on 3 December Kamel Daoudi’s expulsion to Algeria would expose him to inhuman or degrading treatment and would be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

“Sending Kamel Daoudi to Algeria would put him at risk of being tortured. As a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, France must not carry out the expulsion,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Europe and Central Asia Deputy Programme Director.

The European Court’s judgement is significant as it spells out unequivocally that the prohibition on torture or other ill-treatment in the European Convention on Human Rights must be followed without exception. “The Court has spoken. This is a clear signal to other European states that may be considering deporting people they regard as threats to national security to countries where they may be at risk of torture or other ill-treatment. States enforcing such expulsions would be in violation of their obligations under international law,” David Diaz-Jogeix said Amnesty International and other organisations have documented the ill-treatment of terror suspects in Algeria, where they have been held in unrecognized places of detention without contact with the outside world, at times for prolonged periods, putting them at risk of torture. Originally an Algerian national, Kamel Daoudi acquired French citizenship but in 2002 he was stripped of it following allegations about his involvement with terrorist groups, even though the criminal case against him was still pending at the time.

In 2005, he was convicted of “criminal association in relation to a terrorist enterprise” and falsification of official documents and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment (subsequently reduced to six years), and permanent exclusion from French territory. On 21 April 2008, Kamel Daoudi was released from La Santé prison after serving his sentence and immediately taken into custody pending expulsion to Algeria.

Following a request by Kamel Daoudi’s lawyer, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the French authorities to suspend the deportation procedure while it considered whether Kamel Daoudi would be at risk ill-treatment if he returned to Algeria.

Source: Amnesty International

Algeria Alert International new website

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new website. Our new website comes with an improved design and many new features and updates. Most importantly, we added a news section that will keep you updated on Human Rights situation in Algeria.

Keep visiting us for news and information, and in the meantime, we hope that you will find our new site useful and informative. If you should have any questions and/or suggestions for us, please click on Contact Us.

Press freedom abuses during the last presidential campaign in Algeria

The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Abdelaziz Bouteflika to complaint about the press freedom violations occurred during the last electoral campaign that resulted in his re-election as a president of Algeria for a third term. Below the letter sent to the president Bouteflika:

Dear Mr. President,

The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to protest the rising incidence of press freedom violations, many of which occurred during the recent electoral campaign that resulted in your re-election to a third term.

CPJ research shows that the rate of abuses began to increase in February 2006, after your government issued a draconian decree restricting free expression and placing sharp limits on discussion of the conflict that ravaged Algeria in the 1990s. In a letter we sent to you at the time, CPJ pointed out that the decree prohibits further investigation into the serious human rights abuses perpetrated in the 1990s, including the murder of dozens of journalists and the disappearances of at least two. This decree has prompted greater self-censorship in the Algerian media, has served as a new prescription for the harassment and imprisonment of critical journalists, and has widened the gap between Algerian policies and international standards for free expression.

Many Algerian journalists and human rights lawyers recently told CPJ that the siege on independent journalism has gradually intensified over these past three years and that your government seemed increasingly inclined to use harsh measures to silence and punish critical journalists?

Read more »

Massacre of French monks in Algeria

The new chapter regarding the massacre of the French seven monks, in 1996, in Algeria comes to shed light on the Algerian military’s manipulative machine and raises the fundamental question in Algeria: « who’s killing who? ».

The Algerian army, and after murdering and decapitating the seven innocent monks, tried to capitalize its crime by accusing the Islamist rebels in order to win support from the West in its “war on terror”. In fact, the monks’ abduction was claimed by the “Armed Islamic Group” who, indeed, negotiated with France for their release, but the “rebel group” infiltration by Algerian security services, made the monks’ decapitation an easy task. Below the English version of “Le Monde Diplomatique” that provides material evidence of the bugbear organized by the Algerian Generals.

Taking profit on the so-called “global war on terror”, in order to extinguish social unrest that is so probable in such a deteriorating economic situation, the Algerian Generals became experts in manipulation.

The incompetence of the Algerian security forces to protect its citizens is no accident; it is a conspiracy against the Algerian people to keep the Algerian Military relevant and “needed” to protect the people. The electoral platform used by the Military junta to back President Abdelaziz Bouteflika during his last and third winning presidential campaign, was: “Algerians need Bouteflika to keep peace and order”.

Today, if a legal inquiry is under way regarding the French monks’ massacre, the case of over 200.000 Algerians killed, during the 1990’s, remains to be elucidated. The plaintive families are facing the Algerian government who makes attempts to force them to forget their beloved ones in the name of a “freak” policy of reconciliation imposed by the lifetime Algerian President, re-elected last April for a third mandate after a constitutional coup d’Etat, only a few months before the presidential elections.

Government forces have inflicted at least as many casualties as the Algerian rebel groups, according to Algerian exiles (among us) and leaders of the opposition parties being banned for life from running in parliamentary elections. The civil war crisis of the 1990’s was to make asylum applications peak at hundreds of thousands of Algerians and run at consistently high levels. Return of asylum-seekers has not followed a similar pattern though, and even domestic pressure within host countries of those asylum-seekers, has failed to return them to Algeria. Many of them are illegally staying in Britain, France, and alternative European countries.

What the Algerians gained since 1962, is a reign based on the State’s “Body of Lies”, crime, and falsification of History. The exacerbated feeling of “national pride”, based on nothing concrete, nothing veracious, has turned into a national psychosis: “Algerians are surrounded by enemies and spies”.

With rapidly deteriorating socio-economic conditions, and both a fragile security atmosphere and an ambiguous political state of affairs, Algeria is facing challenging times. The country sits on considerably rich reserves of oil and gas that profits only to the Military junta; whereas the poverty-stricken and starving Algerian people are left in the margin.

If Algeria is nowadays a base of North African armed groups, it is worth recalling that since the reign of Boumedienne, who, by the way, came to power through a coup d’Etat in 1963, whereby the current President Bouteflika was the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second man in power hierarchy, Algeria will then become a safe haven for notorious international terrorists. How could we easily forget the Algerian junta’s links with the Red Brigades, the Red Army, the Basque ETA and the worldwide-known terrorist Carlos who made an assault on the Vienna-based OPEC office just to kidnap the organization’s Ministers and fly with them as his hostages, the same day, to Algiers airport where he would be received as a hero by the same Bouteflika?

Therefore, Algeria Alert International looks to the Norwegian Council of Ethics and to all those cherishing democracy and freedom, to appeal to them to refrain and even cut off all ties of any kind of co-operation with the totalitarian military regime of Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Signed and approved by the Algeria Alert International board member.

1st August, 2009