The NYT's Michael Slackman was in Algeria last week covering the referendum on the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. (See his coverage here and here. See previous TJF discussion of the CPNR proposal here.)
In today's NYT, Slackman has a more reflective piece about the referendum. It has the flatly judgment-expressing headline Bygones can't be bygones if the pain is raw (though that headline was almost certainly not written by Slackman himself.) Still, the ideological lens through which Slackman seems to have assessed this story of a country struggling to escape from, while at the same time dealing with, the terrible scars of the recent past is an interesting one.
The approach of the CPNR is, in brief, to offer a blanket amnesty to all those from both (all) sides of Algeria's painful 1992-2002 civil war who committed atrocities during it-- and also to offer reparations to survivors of the violence and the families of those who were either killed or were "disappeared" during its course. But the CPNR notably does not go along with the approach of holding a truth-establishment exercise along the way...
At one point Slackman writes of what has been happening in Algeria:
Algeria is not the first country to try to sweep its past sins away. Argentina and Chile, for example, each tried to bury a violent past only to find that the years did little to ease society's collective conscience. Today each has moved toward accountability and repentance. Chile forced its military to apologize to torture victims. Argentina has declared its amnesty laws unconstitutional.Ah, the Chile and Argentina examples... (Though wouldn't you say that "repentance" is a little too much to claim for the record in either of those societies? Maybe some accountability... and in both cases this was won considerably further "after the fact" of the past violence than the situation that the Algerians are facing today... But repentance?)
Okay, if we're looking for educative examples of societies that have successfully moved on from earlier episodes of atrocity perpetration, there are scores of other examples one could choose over just the past 50 or 60 years. How about post-Franco Spain? Or post-civil-war Mozambique? Or the United States after the Vietnam War? In all of those societies-- and many others-- terrible atrocities were perpetrated during a period of internal or international conflict... the conflict was ended... and the members of the societies concerned then got on with rebuilding their lives in the post-conflict period without any "accountability process" being instituted at all.
But Slackman chose Argentina and Chile.
The civil war that plagued Algeria from 1992 until a couple of years ago was-- everybody inside the country now agrees-- truly unbearable, and a situation that no Algerian that I know of would choose to return to. (For example, read some of the descriptions in this section of the Wikipedia item on the war.) All kinds of atrocities were committed-- and by supporters both of the militant Islamist groups and of the hardline anti-Islamist government.
In his latest article, Michael Slackman includes this heartrending quote:
"We cannot make any concessions on knowing the truth," said Lila Ighil, whose brother Mohammed has been missing since 1997 and who runs an advocacy group for relatives of the missing. "What they are saying now, this is not true."He also includes a quote from another woman who seemed to be opposed to the trade embodied in the CPNR, which was--essentially-- one of "a chance for reconciliation" over "the continued pursuit of individual accountability." But the only person he quote who spke unequivocally in favor of the CPNR adopted almost a caricature of a pro-CPNR (and pro-government) position... he quotes this individual, parliamentarian Ayachi Daadoua, as saying that the government had recently come across new information that "proved that many of the missing were actually alive and well."
I don't think Slackman actually served the Algerian people very well by describing the very tough choices and internal tensions and discussions that this issue has raised for them in such caricaturing terms. These are not easy decisions. But he goes into the country for a couple of weeks, with one single kind of a template of what "ought" to happen there in mind-- that of Chile and Argentina-- and seems to judge the country according only to that template. And he does that, moreover, without giving any acknowledgment of the fact that it took both Chile and Argentina many years after the termination of the atrocities in question before those two societies started to return to the issue and try to establish some form of accountability for the events of the past... or, of the imperfect nature of the ventures in those two cases... or, of the existence of many other examples around the world where a decision not to seek strict individual accountability led to an outcome that has seemed generally successful.
It seems incontestable that President Bouteflika used an undue amount of governmental influence to win the "97%" popular support that the CPNR won in the referendum. There's nothing particularly new there. On the other hand, there is no evidence that suggests that, even if the voting had been more equitably organized, the CPNR would have been defeated...
Anyway, the "proof" of the value of the CPNR will emerge over the years ahead. Can Bouteflika and the country's other leaders really transform this troubled country-- one with a legacy of violence that certainly goes back to the brutal years of French colonial rule-- into one where the rule of law applies to (and gives protection to) everyone in the land? That is the test of a worthwhile political transition out of inter-group violence; and if the prize of a well-rooted, rule-of-law regime going forward is won in Algeria with the help of the CPNR, then almost any sacrifice that is made to win that prize will prove to have been worth it. I guess this is a point I've made here before, e.g. in this discussion.
I guess this is also much the same as the point Jonathan has made before: that sometimes there seems to be a tension between the needs of "justice", and those of the "transition." To me, the needs of the "transition"-- properly conceived-- have to take priority.... and in assuring a meaningful transition to a more rule-of-law-abiding order, major justice needs will themselves be met, going forward.
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