ALGIERS, 8 September 2005 — Algeria’s Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia has said some 1,000 armed Muslim fundamentalists are still at large in the country, long wracked by an insurgency, ahead of a referendum later this month on a national peace plan.
During talks Tuesday with managing editors of Algerian newspapers, Ouyahia answered a question regarding “the number of terrorists” in arms by saying there were “about 1,000,” the daily L’Expression reported yesterday.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Aug. 14 announced a referendum to be held Sept. 29 in the troubled North African country on a “proposed charter for peace and reconciliation” aimed at “bringing an end to the bloodshed.” Under this charter, authorities would end legal proceedings against extremists “who have already halted their armed activity and surrendered to the authorities,” Bouteflika said.
Ouyahia told newspaper chiefs that he was expecting “200, 300 or more” guerrilla fighters to turn themselves in under the plan. “The most important thing is to bring down their numbers. We don’t have any illusions, they won’t all come out of the maquis,” he said, according to the report on the meeting.
The maquis consists usually of arid highlands or scrubland across northern Algeria, where fundamentalist groups bent on establishing an Islamist state and overthrowing the secular regime have hidden out in ever dwindling numbers since launching a bloody campaign characterized by bombings and massacres in the early 1990s.
The project to go to a referendum would not be the first of its kind and Bouteflika stressed that any end to legal action excluded “those involved in mass massacres, rapes and bomb attacks in public places.”
For the past two years, Algerian defense and security officials have repeatedly asserted that remaining armed extremist groups have all but been wiped out, either by troops or by internal feuds and fighting, while thousands turned themselves in under a 1999 amnesty.
At its height, the low-level war that erupted in 1992 is officially estimated to have claimed 150,000 lives, left thousands wounded, hundreds of civilians vanished and unaccounted for and done more than $20 billion worth of damage to infrastructure and property.
“I’ll say this with all necessary strength. We shall never allow the terrorist hydra to grow one day again from the ashes and sow fresh misery among us,” Bouteflika said in a speech in the northeastern town of Skikda on Aug. 20. Last year and this, Algerian defense and security officials have regularly asserted that remaining armed extremist groups have all but been wiped out, either by troops or by internal feuds and fighting.
Ouhayia said the “influx of those surrendering has never stopped,” pointing out that 4,000 did under the clemency law of former President Liamine Zeroual in 1995-98 and then 6,000 more when Bouteflika offered a conditional amnesty in 1999.
However, Algeria’s opposition Socialist Forces Front (FFS) on Sunday called for a boycott of the charter, arguing that it “cannot endorse a text that glorifies force and deprecates political mediation, consecrates impunity and amnesty, and in the end negotiates away pain and suffering.”
The FFS has support among the indigenous Berber people who live mainly in northeastern Algerian provinces, but is not a major national political player.
