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Algerian Civil War Massacres: The Question That Was Legislated Shut (Cold Files 019)
On the night of 22 September 1997, several hundred people were killed in Bentalha, a village in the Baraki district on the southern edge of Algiers. Three weeks earlier the same thing had happened at Rais, a short drive away. Survivors of both said the army was there, close enough to see, and did not come.
That is not a conspiracy theory. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both documented it, and the standard academic study of the massacres calls it beyond doubt. What nobody has ever established is why. Every mechanism that could have found out was refused or defanged, and then a law made the asking an offence.
Part of the Cold Files series.
The Night the Army Did Not Move
Rais, in the Sidi Moussa area south of Algiers, was attacked on the night of 28 to 29 August 1997. The toll Algeria later gave the UN Commission on Human Rights was 238. Amnesty International put it at up to 300. Bentalha followed on the night of 22 to 23 September. The first official statement said 85. Amnesty said more than 200 and Human Rights Watch more than 250. Nesroulah Yous survived it and wrote a book about it; one later study counts 417.
Amnesty's November 1997 report on the crisis, MDE 28/36/97, is the document to read. At Rais, it found, the killing happened between a few hundred metres and a few kilometres from army barracks and security posts, and one survivor put a barracks at about a hundred metres. A survivor told Amnesty: "The army and the security forces were right there; they heard and saw everything and did nothing." At Bentalha, survivors told Amnesty that "armed forces units with armoured vehicles were stationed outside the village," and that these units stopped some of those trying to flee.
Human Rights Watch documented the same pattern with different witnesses. A Bentalha survivor said security forces came within about a hundred metres, turned on floodlights, and rescued nobody. The government's explanation, which HRW printed, cited the danger to security forces of ambushes and mined roads. Hugh Roberts suggested two possibilities: orders from regional commanders, or posts that were "minor and weakly manned" and lacked the capacity to intervene.
Beni Messous was hit on 5 September 1997. Amnesty noted, flatly, that "Beni Messous has the largest barracks and military security centre of the capital." Neighbours telephoned the security forces, who refused to intervene, and the gendarmerie, which did not answer.
Stathis Kalyvas, whose 1999 study in Rationality and Society is the standard empirical treatment of the massacres, has no sympathy for conspiracy readings of them. He still wrote that "the reluctance of the army to intervene and stop some of these massacres is also beyond doubt," and devoted a section to explaining it.
Who Did It, and What That Does Not Settle
The perpetrator question has an answer, and it is not the one the exile press spent a decade arguing for.
The GIA claimed the killings. A GIA press release issued in London on 26 September 1997, reported by Agence France-Presse, claimed both massacres. Antar Zouabri had led the GIA since July 1996.
The International Crisis Group, whose North Africa work in this period was directed by Hugh Roberts, put the adjudication in a footnote in July 2004: "the hypothesis that the army itself committed the massacres has not been substantiated." In the same report it recorded that the defector testimony on which that hypothesis rests "should be treated with caution."
That testimony is thinner than its circulation suggests. Mohamed Samraoui, the former military intelligence officer whose 2003 book alleges that the services created and ran armed groups, left Algeria in February 1996, eighteen months before Rais and Bentalha. Anything he says about those nights is second hand, though the ICG rated his testimony important because he was himself inside the infiltration strategy. Habib Souaidia's 2001 book made related claims, and General Khaled Nezzar sued him for defamation in Paris and lost: on 27 September 2002 the 17th chamber of the Paris tribunal de grande instance dismissed Nezzar's claims in their entirety and granted Souaidia the benefit of good faith. A good-faith defence in French law turns on the seriousness of the author's inquiry, not on the truth of what he wrote. No court anywhere has found that the Algerian army carried out a massacre.
So the honest position is narrower and harder than the one that sells. Most of the killing was done by the insurgency, some by state-armed militias. The watching was done by the state. It is the second fact that has no established explanation. The ICG put it harder: the authorities were well aware of the massacres in progress and deliberately failed to intervene, and the reasons have never been established.
Every Mechanism That Could Have Answered It
The demand for an independent inquiry predates the massacres by two and a half years. The Rome Platform, signed at the Community of Sant'Egidio on 13 January 1995 by figures from the FLN, the FFS, the FIS, the Workers' Party and others, asked for the constitution of an independent commission to investigate the violence. Nothing came of it.
In November 1997, weeks after Bentalha, Amnesty International called for an international investigation into the massacres by name. Algeria refused. Human Rights Watch took a different line, pressing for a credible independent body inside the country plus access for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and recorded that the government "adamantly rejected widespread calls for an international inquiry" on the ground that the crisis was an internal matter. HRW last visited Algeria in April 1997. It requested permission formally in January 1998 and was, in its own words, "effectively barred from entering the country." Algeria did build one body, a 2003 ad hoc mechanism on the disappeared, which Bouteflika said "must not be seen as a commission of inquiry."
What the UN did send was a panel, and the panel's own account of itself is the most useful sentence in this file. Kofi Annan announced it on 29 June 1998. Its six members were Mario Soares, who chaired it, I. K. Gujral, Abdel Karim Kabariti, Donald McHenry, Simone Veil and Amos Wako. Its remit was not inquiry but information gathering: a panel appointed to gather information on the situation in Algeria in order to provide the international community with greater clarity on it. It was in the country from 22 July to 4 August 1998. It visited Beni Messous, Serkadji prison, Ain Khalil near Tlemcen, Oran, Tizi Ouzou, Bejaia, Ghardaia and a self-defence group in Kabylie.
It was refused access to the Blida massacre site. It did not go to Bentalha. It did not go to Rais. Neither place is named in its report.
On the question everything turned on, it wrote: "We had neither the means nor the mandate to conduct investigations of our own." Human Rights Watch, writing in August 1998 before the report appeared, said the visit "should not be seen as a substitute for an in-country investigation by U.N. human rights experts." It was not one.
The Statute That Closed the File
The war was ended by legislation rather than by verdict. Law 99-08 of 13 July 1999 created the Civil Concord, approved by referendum on 16 September 1999 on official figures of 85 per cent turnout and 98.63 per cent in favour. Amnesty International, citing government sources, counted about 5,500 fighters surrendered between July 1999 and January 2000.
Then came the closure proper. The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation went to a referendum on 29 September 2005 and passed on official figures of 79.76 per cent turnout and 97.38 per cent in favour. Rights groups called the turnout overstated. Turnout in Tizi Ouzou was about 11 per cent.
Its implementing instrument, Ordinance 06-01 of 27 February 2006, contains two articles that matter.
Article 45 bars any proceedings, individual or collective, against members of the defence and security forces for actions taken to protect persons and property, safeguard the nation or preserve the institutions of the Republic. Its second sentence does the work: any report or complaint, it says, must be declared inadmissible by the competent judicial authority.
Article 46 reaches past the answering to the asking. It punishes with three to five years in prison and a fine of 250,000 to 500,000 dinars anyone who, by declaration, writing or any other act, uses or instrumentalises the wounds of the national tragedy in order to harm the institutions of the Republic, to weaken the state, to injure the honour of its agents who served it with dignity, or to tarnish the image of Algeria abroad.
The strong objection belongs here rather than in a footnote. Algeria was a sovereign state fighting an insurgency that was killing civilians by the hundreds. The GIA claimed the massacres in writing. An international inquiry into a live internal conflict would have been close to unprecedented in 1997, and most states in that position have refused the same thing. Both the Concord and the Charter were put to a vote and carried. Thousands of fighters came in, and the killing largely stopped. Stronger still: if those posts were small, weakly manned and facing a mobile enemy at night, the non-intervention is a military fact, not a political one.
A Law That Works Without a Courtroom
What it does not answer is why the asking had to be criminalised, and this is where the file holds.
Algeria has told the United Nations twice that Article 46 is barely used. In 2007 its delegation assured the Human Rights Committee that no proceedings had been brought under it at all. In 2018 the Committee recorded "the delegation's assertion that convictions under article 46 of Ordinance No. 06-01 are extremely rare or even non-existent."
The best documented operation of Article 46 is therefore not a prosecution. On 12 May 2006, at the 39th session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, a member of the Algerian delegation approached the lawyer Amine Sidhoum Abderrahman, of the disappeared families' group SOS Disparus, before his scheduled oral statement and warned him that he faced three to five years on his return. The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders recorded that the threats referred specifically to Article 46. He withdrew his statement the next day.
The Committee named the mechanism itself: "the chilling effect and the climate of self-censorship created by such a provision." In 2018 it told Algeria to repeal Article 46 and to ensure that no prosecutions were undertaken or threatened under it. In Guezout v. Algeria in 2012 it had already found that the ordinance, unamended, "appears to promote impunity and therefore cannot ... be considered compatible with the Covenant," and that Algeria may not invoke the Charter against people who bring cases to the Committee. The Committee records that a large number of its findings against Algeria remain unimplemented.
The wider memory file is still being policed in October 2026, by ordinary offences rather than Article 46. On 16 March 2026 the authorities sealed the premises of SOS Disparus in Algiers. On 9 April the Sidi M'Hamed court sentenced a coordinator, Slimane Hamitouche, to six months for incitement to an unarmed gathering. On 13 May seven UN experts, citing the incommunicado detention of Hamitouche, Samia Bekouche and her son Hamza Tellaa, warned that concealing a detainee's fate is "enforced disappearance, even if only for a short time."
The only case that ever named a general did so in Switzerland, where Khaled Nezzar was charged on 28 August 2023 with complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity. His trial dates were published on 28 December 2023. He died in Algiers days later. The proceedings closed in June 2024, and on 16 October 2025 the European Court of Human Rights declared the plaintiffs' complaint inadmissible, with no appeal available.
How many died in Algeria is still an open argument. Who watched is not. That one was closed in writing, by a statute that has barely had to be used.
Sources consulted:
Amnesty International, Algeria: A human rights crisis, MDE 28/36/97
Human Rights Watch, Algeria's Human Rights Crisis, 1998
Human Rights Watch, briefing to the UN Human Rights Committee, 1998
Community of Sant'Egidio, Rome Platform, January 1995
UN Panel on Algeria, report to the Secretary-General, 1998
Kalyvas, Wanton and Senseless?, Rationality and Society 11(3), 1999
International Crisis Group, Islamism, Violence and Reform in Algeria, 2004
Roberts, interview on Algeria, Middle East Report, June 1998
Yous and Mellah, Qui a tue a Bentalha?, La Decouverte, 2000
Souaidia, La sale guerre, 2001, and Paris TGI, 17th chamber, 2002
Samraoui, Chronique des annees de sang, Denoel, 2003
Law 99-08 of 13 July 1999 on the Civil Concord
Ordonnance 06-01 of 2006 implementing the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation
Amnesty, HRW, ICTJ and FIDH, joint statement on Ordinance 06-01, 2006
UN Human Rights Committee, concluding observations on Algeria, 2007 and 2018
UN Human Rights Committee, Guezout v. Algeria, Communication 1753/2008, 2012
Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, annual report, 2006
OHCHR, UN experts on Algeria's disappeared, May 2026
TRIAL International, Khaled Nezzar case file
NEXT FILE: The Netherlands spent fifteen years investigating its own role at Srebrenica, and its courts eventually found the state partly liable. Cold Files 020 looks at what a state reckoning with itself actually produces, and what it still cannot reach.
More Cold Files: Halabja Chemical Attack and If Proven Before A Competent Court.
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