ALGIERS, 20 April 2004 — Newly re-elected President Abdelaziz Bouteflika took the oath of office here yesterday, vowing to devote his second term to the quest for “true national reconciliation” in war-torn Algeria.
Picking up on two other themes of the electoral campaign ahead of his landslide re-election victory on April 8, Bouteflika pledged to resolve a three-year-old crisis in the Berber homeland Kabylie and to emancipate women from the restrictive family code.
Peace and reconciliation “will allow Algerians ... to devote their energy and resources to the development” of the North African country, Bouteflika said at his lavish, televised swearing-in at the Palais de Nations 25 kilometers west of Algiers.
The president’s overwhelming victory was attributed largely to the “civil reconciliation” plan he unveiled shortly after first coming to power in 1999 under which several thousand extremist fighters surrendered in exchange for partial amnesty.
The civil war that raged for the decade between 1992 and 2002, and is now sharply diminished, claimed at least 100,000 lives, according to official figures, and up to 150,000 by independent counts.
Hard-line extremist fighters of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has been linked to Al-Qaeda, and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) have rejected Bouteflika’s offer, but are thought to be weakening. Bouteflika also called for renewed dialogue to resolve a three-year-old crisis in Kabylie, the northeastern homeland of Algeria’s Berber minority.
“Kabylie cannot exist without Algeria, and Algeria cannot exist without Kabylie,” he said. “I am certain that an acceptable solution will be found,” he said, calling for a return to the negotiating table between the government and traditional Berber leaders, known as aarches, who have not met together since talks collapsed in February 2002.
The re-elected president also vowed to free women from the yoke of the repressive “family code.” Bouteflika said he rejected that women “should be subjected to a status that assails their rights and condemns them to a condition inferior to men’s.”
