Despite the fact that its laws allow the assembly of people on the streets and squares of Algeria, the public space remains firmly blocked by the Algerian state. This closure is assured in two ways: firstly, through the restrictions placed by law on civil associations, and secondly, by the ways in which the police control crowds.
The most recent amendment to Algerian law on public assembly details the administrative process required to form a legal public protest. In chapter II, on “public demonstrations,” the law requires the declaration of any public protest. A public crowd that gathers without the declaration and approval by state authorities is considered illegal. The punishment for unlawful assembly is considered “attroupement illegal” and carries one to three months in prison, and/or a fine of two thousand Algerian dinars, about twenty-five US dollars (Chapter III Art. 21, 1990 “Dispositions Penales”).
The "declaration" of public crowding is in fact a request since it has to be processed, accepted, and followed by a receipt. For the request to be filed, it has to include the time, place, itinerary, reason of the demonstration, and the name and addresses of the organizers. In addition, the request must include the name and headquarters of the association organizing the protest. Herein lies the problem--if the association has not been accredited by the state, then a request cannot be filed. Many associations in Algeria have been refused accreditation.
The most significant refusals have been for the associations of a political nature. And specifically, those associations challenging the 2005 Law of National Reconciliation, which in exchange for a cease fire, granted amnesty and impunity to those responsible for killings during the 1990s. It also makes it illegal to demand justice or truth about disappearances during the killings of the 1990s. The law institutes a historical "turning of the page."
The repression of civil society associations that challenge the 2005 "Law of National Reconciliation" is firm and ongoing. The law put an end to a decade of violence in Algeria in exchange for amnesty. It also, however, ushered in a new era of political repression of discontent and forced amnesia for the victim`s families. The suppression of violence was cleverly coupled with a legalized form of social and political forgetting that has also assured the repression of truth.
Two major associations who represent families of those disappeared and which are not accredited by the state are SOS disparus and SUMUD. The thousands of disappeare bodies unaccounted for, perhaps in the range of 25,000 from the period of the 1990s, forms not only the greatest wound in contemporary Algerian society, but also the biggest threat to the highly skilled political authority, which has skillfully prevented a revolution within its borders. In fact, these mass dissappearances, in addition to 250,000 dead, has been a deterrent to a popular uprising. Nonetheless, the suppression of demands for truth regarding these deaths is festering a political problem and represents a potentially powerful catalyst for political discontent.
SOS disparus is an association of families of those who disappeared during the 1990s. Their headquarters, which is not legally authorized to exist, contains eight thousand dossiers of individuals killed, or disappeared by the Algerian state. In their office, I listened to five women who told me how their brothers, sons, and husbands had been arrested by the state on the suspicion that they were Islamic militants. The women have not seen their family members since their arrests. One woman told me that she knew that her brother was tortured to death; another of her brothers was also arrested, then later released, recounted how he had seen his brother tortured in prison.
In defiance of the illegality of their association, the women of SOS disparu protest publicly. Late every Wednesday morning, they gather at Addis Ababa Square in Algiers, holding photos of their missing loved ones, demanding the truth about the circumstances of their disappearance. They want to know where the bodies are buried. The police surround them, used to spit on them, beat them, and called them families of terrorists. Today, the police continue to surround them, but no longer touch them as long as they do not move. Much like the women of Benghazi whose family members were killed or disappeared in the Abu Slim prison, these women fearlessly defy the state’s prohibition of public, political protest.
The need to see the cadaver of their loved ones is shared by the members of SUMUD. SUMUD is an association, also not accredited by the state, of people whose family members were disappeared by Islamists during the 1990s. Because they are not accredited, they are not allowed to have a headquarters, meetings, protests, seminars, conferences, or a bank account to run the association’s budget. SUMUD, like SOS disparus, opposes the laws of impunity for both sides--the state and the armed Islamist groups--who killed and kidnapped during the 1990s.The two associations are allied, work together, and are not political or partisan. Together they seek truth and to see the corpses of their family members.
In September 2012, Navi Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights visited Algiers. The spokesman for SUMUD, Adnane Bouchaib, met with Pillay, but had little faith that her visit or declaration will have any impact on the fate of these families. The women of SOS disparus were eager to make their stories visible and scrambled, despite attempts to prevent them, to make it to their spot at Addis Ababa square. Indeed, they were seen, and Pillay, at the end of her visit, made the following statement:
While recognizing that the driving force behind this state of affairs is rooted in security concerns, I encourage the Government to review the laws and practices relating to civil society organizations and freedom of assembly, and also to order all security forces to refrain from violating internationally recognized instruments guaranteeing the right to freedom of association, such as Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is a binding treaty that has been ratified by 167 States, including Algeria (19 September 2012).
One could argue that the Algerian state allowed a public gathering. Indeed, there are often crowds of protesters (some put figure at 11,000 protests during 2010) all around Algeria expressing demands, such as higher wages, better benefits, improvement of a road, highway, hospital, etc. I witnessed such a crowd in front of the Grande Poste in Algiers throughout the week of 8-12 January. During that week, large crowds in the hundreds, of postal workers gathered in front of the grade poste. The police did not disrupt the crowds nor did they inflict any violence, despite the fact that this was not a legal protest. But the crowd made no political demands. This crowd’s demands were limited to an improvement in benefits; they demanded a bonus to be delivered by the end of January. It was a protest with economic grievances, which is clearly tolerated, as opposed to political crowds, who are banned from the public space and whose leaders are repeatedly harassed and punished. On 12 January, the Minister of Communications came to address the leader of the postal workers, and accepted their demands for a bonus. Despite that, however, crowd leaders, as was the case on this day, are watched and controlled so as to assure that they do not speak to, collaborate with, or join with leaders of any other group. The police engage in targeted crowd-leader surveillance. While I was observing this crowd, a young man who is a leader of the Movement of Independent Youths for Change (MJIC), a youth group for radical political change in Algeria, approached the police and spoke to them during this postal worker protest. He was swiftly and somewhat brutally shoved into a police truck before my eyes.
In terms of crowd action, the red line in Algeria is politics. This line is drawn in full confidence during the exhalation of public satisfaction of economic demands and on the back of collective traumatism about the invisible, but very present, crowds of the dead.