By Julio Godoy
PARIS, Mar 4 2003 (IPS)

The Algerian government set up a cheerful reception for visiting French President Jacques Chirac, but the official welcome could not cloak the misery from continuing human rights violations.

Chirac is the first French President to visit the former colony that secured independence in 1962. Following government directives, hundreds of thousands of Algerians cheered Chirac at public appearances on his visit from Sunday to Tuesday this week.

"The government asked students and state workers to welcome Chirac," an Algerian journalist told IPS on telephone from Algiers. "But Algerians have no real reason to cheer either Chirac or (Algerian President) Abdelaziz Bouteflika," said the journalist, who asked not to be named.

The Washington-based organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports that some 7,000 victims of political persecution disappeared in Algeria during the nineties.

"This number goes beyond the disappearances registered in any other country in the world during the last 10 years, with the sole exception of the war in Bosnia," HRW executive director for the Middle East and North Africa Hanny Megally told IPS.

HRW has urged the Algerian government to set up an independent commission to investigate the disappearances of opposition leaders and civilians. "To protect the Algerian people against future violence, it is necessary to punish past violations and to finish with the tradition of impunity political criminals enjoy in Algeria," Megally says.

The HRW report blames Islamic guerrilla groups for some of the kidnappings, but it says the army and police are responsible for most of the political crimes committed since the early nineties. A civil war broke out in 1992 after the army suspended the elections the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win.

The European Union and the United States supported the military regime on the grounds that an Islamic government would endanger political stability in North Africa. More than 100,000 died in the violence that followed.

Algerian authorities have refused to investigate the crimes committed by the army and police during the civil war, the HRW report says. "Our survey shows that the Algerian government did not investigate the disappearances even when the families could provide clear evidence of the involvement of soldiers or police officers in the crimes," Megally says.

HRW urged Chirac to press the Algerian government for an independent inquiry. Chirac ignored the demand. Nor has he spoken publicly about human rights abuses on his visit to Algeria.

President Bouteflika had said in 1999 when asked to look into the cases of those who had disappeared: "I don’t have the missing people in my pocket." He asked the Algerian people to "turn over the page" of political violence and to "look to a peaceful future."

Turning over the page has not been easy for Algerians whose relatives have disappeared. Several organisations of relatives of missing persons have held meetings in recent weeks to raise their demands again before the government. Ali Merabet, president of Somoud, an association of parents of missing people, demanded at a meeting in January that the Algerian government return the bodies of the victims.

"We want to bring our mourning to an end," Merabet said. "We want to see the bodies of our daughters and our sons, to bury them, and to start our lives again."

Human rights violations are continuing, says Amnesty International. The police and army continue to torture suspected Islamic opposition members, it says.

Roger Clark from Amnesty who spent two weeks in Algeria last month said the plans for reform drawn by the departments of justice, police, and education are useless because "what is needed is political will to put the reforms through, and the government has so far showed that it lacks that will."

Some French citizens living in Algeria have also been targeted. Seven monks were killed in the monastery of Tibéhirine in March 1996. The government blamed Islamic rebels for the killings but an inquiry conducted by the monks found that the Algerian secret services were the likely culprits.

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