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VI. MASS GRAVES
There is not one single person in Algeria being held in secret detention, an "authorized source" in the armed forces told Le Monde recently. The same source added that there were 3,030 Algerians buried in unidentified graves.82 Nothing illustrates the lack of transparency surrounding "disappearances" and kidnappings more vividly than the mystery surrounding the reported discoveries since 1998 of mass graves, primarily in regions torn by political violence. Algerian daily newspapers reported the discovery of mass graves, for example, in Haouch Hafiz, in the region of Meftah (La Tribune, Liberté, and El-Watan, November 26, 1998), in Ouled Allel (Liberté, February 21, 1999), in Haouch Vallonni (or Haouch Sbihi Mohamed) in the commune of Larbâa (El-Watan and La Nouvelle République, May 12, 1999), in a village near Djelfa (Liberté, May 20, 1999), in Oued Allel (Essahafa, July 20, 1999), in a forest of Boumerdès (El-Khabar, March 28, 2000), and in a woods in the wilaya of Tiaret (La Libre Algérie, April 10-24, 2000 and Le Matin, March 29, 2000). Another mass grave was reportedly discovered in Saïd Gassem, near Baraki, in August 2002.83 The press, and many observers, presumed these graves to contain the victims of armed groups that were active in the region. However, advocates of the "disappeared" have asked whether some of these sites in fact held the bodies of persons abducted by the security forces or allied self-defense groups. In the western province of Relizane, Mohamed Smaïn of the LADDH charged that a gravesite in Sidi Mohamed Benaouda, 17 kilometers south of Relizane city, contained the bodies of some twenty persons who had been "disappeared" by the security forces and a local "self-defense group." In February 2001 Smaïn alerted the press that gendarmes and the chief of one such "self-defense" group were in the process of trying to exhume and relocate the bodies in an effort to hide the evidence.84 Smaïn's efforts to document and denounce the alleged grave-emptying resulted in his being put on trial for defaming those he accused. The court of first instance of Relizane convicted him of defamation on January 5, 2002; an appeals court later increased his penalty to one year in prison and a fine of 210,000 dinars, the equivalent of U.S. $2,100.85 He is currently free while appealing to the Supreme Court. One thing that the exhumations of mass graves have in common - whether they are discovered in Relizane or in areas near the capital, whether they are said to contain victims of armed groups or of security forces - is the failure of authorities to disclose the procedures for preserving evidence and identifying human remains found at these sites. On many occasions, after one or more of Algeria's privately owned daily newspapers reported the discovery of a mass grave, authorities provided no confirmation or comment of any kind regarding the discovery. The victims' rights organization Somoud has been particularly outspoken in its claims that the families of missing persons were receiving no information about the process of identifying the bodies and the perpetrators. Somoud claims as well that the authorities have failed to exploit leads that could help solve cases of missing persons. It claims in particular that authorities are not acting on the information possessed by persons who took advantage of an amnesty to quit the armed groups (individuals known as "repentis"). Ali Mrabet, a founder of Somoud, states that an Islamist in prison had identified the burial site, in the district of Bougara in the wilaya of Blida, of Ali's two missing brothers, Aziz and Merzak. They were kidnapped in 1995 and have been missing since. The family filed a civil action September 28, 1998, at the court in Boufarik, to compel judicial authorities to check this report and exhume the bodies. Ali Mrabet wrote to the minister of justice in February 2000 reiterating this demand. Neither the court nor the authorities have informed him of any effort to check the site where his two brothers are reportedly buried. Mrabet later learned that the Islamist prisoner had been summoned by the Blida court to testify and denied his earlier remarks about the grave site. In any event, claims Mrabet, no search has taken place. When unmarked graves are examined, notes Amnesty International:
The U.N.'s "Model Protocol for Disinterment and Analysis of Skeletal Remains" provides a useful guide to proper forensic investigations into mass graves.87 Algerian authorities did not respond to Human Rights Watch's May 16, 2002, request for information concerning the procedures followed for investigating mass grave sites and providing information to the families of missing persons. However, during Human Rights Watch's May 2000 mission, Algerian authorities took the welcome step of escorting a member of the delegation to a mass gravesite and providing information about exhumations. Salah Slimi, at the time prosecutor in Larbâa, told the delegate on May 28, 2000 that he had overseen three exhumations to date. The first, conducted in 1998, was carried out in an abandoned well that he said contained a total of sixty-three bodies. The other two exhumations, one in 1998 and another in 1999, found two and five bodies. In all three cases, the perpetrators were "terrorists," Slimi said. The Human Rights Watch delegate was shown a video of the first of these exhumations and taken to the site, an abandoned poultry farm that is a fifteen-minute drive from Larbâa. Slimi said that the well was seventy meters deep and that the exhumation was carried out by local firemen [protection civile] and took twenty-one days to complete. The victims found in this well allegedly had been stopped and killed at roadblocks set up by members of armed groups. According to Slimi, the well contained several layers of bodies with debris separating them, indicating its prolonged use as a burial site. He stated that the testimony of a "repenti," in conjunction with the findings from the well, led to the prosecution and conviction in absentia of five individuals who were either still at large or dead at the time of the meeting with Human Rights Watch. The video showed the remains being removed from the well by a worker who was lowered in an oil barrel. The worker loaded the body parts randomly into the barrel. Decomposition was so advanced that no articulated bodies were recovered. The extracted body parts were then spread out on the ground near the well. The prosecutor stated that only one of the sixty-three bodies exhumed could be identified. The sole successful identification was made, he said, through dental and other characteristics. Authorities informed Human Rights Watch in May 2000 that DNA analysis, one of the key tools in human identification, was not in use in Algeria. This had not changed by the time of our mission in November 2002, as far as we were able to tell. Human Rights Watch saw no evidence that authorities had conducted a methodical recovery and classification of the human remains that they found. Even in the absence of DNA testing, there are established methods of making presumptive identifications on the basis of jewelry, belt buckles, clothing, and other items found with the human remains. A methodical recovery and classification of the bones exhumed would have aided in determining the minimum number of individuals present. It was unclear how Algerian authorities concluded that the total number of bodies recovered was sixty-three. Presumably, this was on the basis of the number of skulls exhumed, but that is not necessarily the best indicator in cases where disassociated body parts are exhumed. In Argentina, much evidence was destroyed by the use of improper techniques during the first efforts in 1983 to examine mass graves containing the victims of political killings. But when independent forensic anthropologists scientifically recovered and analyzed more than 500 bodies of victims, they were able to identify at least 150 beyond a reasonable doubt.88 These identifications were carried out even though the bodies had apparently been in the ground at least as long as those in the mass graves discovered in Algeria. The existence of a mass unmarked grave, in the context of Algeria's political violence, is prima facie evidence of the commission of a crime against humanity, regardless of who is determined to have been responsible for the slaughter. Yet the government has not handled these sites in a way so as to safeguard the available evidence. Nor, in a country where thousands of families are looking for missing relatives, has the government established a satisfactory system for involving these families in the process of examining the sites, or even for informing them of the results of the exhumations. 82 Florence Beaugé, "En Algérie, aucun survivant parmi les disparus de la `sale guerre'" Le Monde, January 7, 2003. 83 Human Rights Watch interviews with residents of Baraki, October 30, 2002, and Ligue Algérienne de Défense des droits de l'Homme, "De l'Etat de non droit à la barbarie," September 2002, online at http://www.algeria-watch.org/mrv/mrvrap/laddh_sept_02.htm (retrieved February 18, 2003). 84 See "Ikhtitaf dhahaya Fergane min al-maqabir al-jama'iyya," al-Ra'i (an Arabic-language daily based in Oran), February 6, 2001. 85 See Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, "Instrumentalisation de la justice : les victimes et leurs défenseurs sur le banc des accusés," July 2002. 86 Amnesty International, "Disappearances" and Political Killings: Human Rights Crisis of the 1990s (Amsterdam: Amnesty International, 1994), p. 149 and 251fn. 87 The protocol is contained in the Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions (New York: United Nations Publications, 1991), ST/CSDHA/12. The manual is online at http://web.amnesty.org/rmp/hponline.nsf/ 88 Amnesty International, "Disappearances" and Political Killings, p. 147.
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