Justice

Fact Sheet

By MikeM / 29 December 2006

By Mike Mawson : Wednesday 1st January 2003

FACT SHEET – AHMED ZAOUI

Ahmed Zaoui is a democratically-elected member of parliament of Algeria. In 1991, as the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) candidate for Cheraga, he was elected to parliament during the first multi-partly parliamentary elections ever held in Algeria. He was unable to take up his new position however, as in January 1992 the Algerian military regime launched a coup de tat, re-installed the former government and declared the FIS an ‘illegal’ party.

Since then, Mr Zaoui has been trying to find a safe and free country to live in, to enable his wife and children to live in safety and to continue his tireless efforts to restore peace and democracy in Algeria.

Mr Zaoui is an intellectual and a peaceful political activist, striving for the right of his people to self-determination and basic freedom. A moderate who favours dialogue and condemns violence, he was instrumental in organising and drafting – together with the Catholic Sant’ Egidio Community in Italy – a format for the Rome Colloqium. The Colloqium sought to bring together all of the Algerian political parties and concerned countries and led to the drafting of the 1995 Rome Platform, which until today remains the only political document for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Algeria.

CHRONOLOGY OF FACTS

Algeria

· Mr Ahmed Zaoui is a religious scholar and until 1992 he was an Associate Professor of Theology and Comparative Religious Studies at the University of Algiers.

· In 1989 Mr Zaoui joined the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), a peaceful, non-violent Islamic political movement that became the unanimous voice of the majority of the Algerian people against the excesses and corruption of one-party rule, which had prevailed in Algeria for some decades. During the first round of the 1991 elections in Algeria, the only free parliamentary elections to ever be held there, Mr Zaoui stood as the FIS candidate for Cheraga. He won his seat and on a national level the FIS captured the majority of seats in a landslide victory.

· Within weeks however, the election results were rejected by the military regime which swiftly moved to ban the FIS and arrest and imprison its founding leaders, Dr Abbassi Madani and Mr Ali Belhadj. In the months that followed, thousands of FIS members and supporters were murdered or disappeared. The crackdown on the FIS led to a bloody civil war that continues today and that has claimed the lives of over 200,000 victims, mainly civilians.

· After the coup, Mr Zaoui fled Algeria with many thousands of intellectuals, doctors, university Professors and religious Imams. He reached Europe.

Belgium and France

· In late 1993, Mr Zaoui reached Belgium where he sought refugee status and was initially permitted to remain.

· While in Belgium in 1994, Mr Zaoui was the first FIS leader to be approached by the Christian St Egidio Community in Rome to help organise and participate in the “Rome Colloqium”, Algerian multi-party negotiations held in Rome, Italy in 1994 and 1995. He was instrumental in organising and drafting a format for an international Colloqium in Rome that resulted in the Rome “Platform for a Political and Peaceful Solution to the Algerian Crisis”, signed in Rome on 13 January 1995 by the main Algerian political parties (both secular and Islamic). Both the Algerian and French Governments refused to attend the Colloqium.

· While in Europe Mr Zaoui also wrote many articles and issued numerous communiques, favouring a peaceful political solution to the Algerian crisis and condemning the violence that was unfolding there.

· In Europe in the mid-nineties, the FIS leadership in exile became fragmented and divided. These internal divisions were widely reported in the press, alongside reports about armed Algerian extremist groups operating within Europe. In the “media toxification” that followed, Mr Zaoui was wrongly labelled as being a member of the GIA (Islamic Armed Group), a violent extremist organisation. Mr Zaoui categorically rejects such an accusation. Indeed, the views and workings of the GIA are entirely anathema to the principles of the FIS, and the GIA have actually issued a death sentence against Mr Zaoui and other FIS leaders.

· In March 1994, following terrorist bombings in France and during a visit to Belgium by the Algerian Foreign Minister, Mr Zaoui was suddenly arrested and charged under antiquated Belgian laws with being the “head of a criminal association”. While the media claimed that the “association” was allegedly the GIA, a report from the Belgian BSR (Special Investigative Brigade) found that there was no conclusive evidence linking Mr Zaoui to this group. He was acquitted by the lower court in Brussels but the acquittal was later overturned by the Belgium Court of Appeal. Interestingly, he was given a four-year suspended sentence for being the “head” of the alleged association, while a co-defendant convicted of being a “member” of the group was sentenced to four years imprisonment. Later, in 1996, Mr Zaoui was vindicated in a decision of the Belgian Aliens Consultative Committee, which affirmed his membership of the FIS and acknowledged that there was nothing to suggest he belonged to the GIA.

· Later, in September 2001, Mr Zaoui was also to be convicted in absentia by a French Court on similar charges and was given a light suspended sentence. France’s anti-terrorism laws, pre-trial detention provisions and judicial procedures have been lambasted by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in a fifty page report released in 1999 entitled, “France: Paving the Way for Arbitrary Justice”.

· There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that neither France nor Belgium seriously believe that Mr Zaoui was guilty of the crimes for which he has been convicted. There is also a large body of evidence to suggest that the convictions against Mr Zaoui were politically-motivated due to the exceptionally-close political, diplomatic and economic relationship between the Algerian, French and Belgian Governments. Significantly, no international police warrant in respect of Mr Zaoui has ever emanated from France or Belgium. A number of international arrest warrants against Mr Zaoui have however emanated from Algeria, where he has received in absentia a number of death sentences and several sentences of life-imprisonment.

· In November 2002, a French television channel released a documentary uncovering the Algerian Government’s infiltration and manipulation of the GIA, the very terrorist group blamed for massacres in Algeria and attacks in Europe, and the very group which Mr Zaoui was alleged to have joined. The regime’s motive for seizing control of the GIA was to generate confusion amongst the Algerian population and the European community as to the motives of Algeria’s banned Islamic parties, thereby maligning the FIS and galvanising international opinion into support for the regime. In a shocking revelation, the documentary also exposed the French Intelligence Service’s dealings with Algerian intelligence officials and its actual complicity in alleged GIA attacks on France.

Switzerland – Burkina Faso

· In 1997, Mr Zaoui and his family moved to Switzerland where they claimed asylum. The manner in which the Swiss authorities dealt with them is further proof that the accusations levelled against Mr Zaoui are baseless and politically-motivated. Rather than allow its legal system to process him, the Swiss Government secretly kidnapped Mr Zaoui and his family from their home in the middle of the night, put them on a helicopter to the airport and then flew them to Burkina Faso, one of the most underdeveloped nations in Africa. Media reports indicated that the Burkina Faso authorities had agreed to accept the Zaoui family in exchange for development aid.

· While in Burkina Faso, Mr Zaoui was secretly contacted by telephone on three separate occasions by the Algerian President Bouteflika.

· In Burkina Faso Mr Zaoui was banned from being reported in the visual media and was unable to make political announcements or declarations. Unable to tolerate such restrictions, and growing increasingly fearful for his physical safety there, he left Burkina Faso and travelled to Malaysia, where he spent some time before travelling on to New Zealand.