Dr. Salah-Eddine Sidhoum: Open letter to world public opinion
Open letter to world public opinion
Dr. Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
Algeria
‘Today truth and justice need witnesses, witnesses able to suffer martyrdom if need be.’
Robert Barrat
Nine years ago the secret police of the regime tried to silence me by accusing me of «subversive activities» on the basis of false confessions extorted by torture from two academic friends. The secret police fabricated against me a case that brings to mind Stalinist trials. The plot was so crude that the judiciary initially refused to be an accessory of the secret police, and it withdrew the case.
This very secret police then proceeded to mobilize the press it handles against me and threw me to the death squads. As if that was not enough, it sent a few months later three of its contract killers to my home to assassinate me, in vain though. The hour of my final fate had not yet struck. At that moment I decided that, in front of this unbridled state terrorism, the only option left to me was to go underground. Friends here in Algeria and in Europe advised me to leave the country but I refused to do so categorically because I considered, in my heart and conscience, that the political struggle for human rights and the right of self-determination of the Algerian people must be carried out in Algeria, whatever the price may be.
With God’s help, I have continued the struggle for dignity and truth despite huge risks and constraints.
In 1996 the secret police trumped up again a new case against me, accusing me of ‘subversion, involvement in a rebellious movements, plotting against the security of the state, and attempting a coup against the regime’. These charges call to mind the sinister ‘revolutionary courts’ and the ‘state security courts’ of the 1970s and 1980s which used to hatch the same accusations to condemn genuine patriots, opposed to the dictatorship of the colonel-presidents. In 1997 the secret police activated its judiciary to condemn me for 20 years of imprisonment.
Thus, my political activities and work for human rights were criminalised under the cover of the state of emergency and special laws.
That was the time of all out eradication in camera, the time of selective indignation when denouncing state terrorism which plunged the country into an infernal cycle of violence was politically incorrect and considered a ‘complicity with the terrorists’.
That was the era of ‘specifically Algerian democracy’ in which criticising the January 1992 pronunciamiento and calling for a political solution to the crisis was equated with ‘complicity with the slaughterers’.
Before such dramatic events in my country, my beliefs and values challenged me to face up to my responsibilities. I opted for an ethical resistance against the totalitarian regime which had decided to wage an insane war against part of its own people.
The atrocities perpetrated against the people and the veil of lies and disinformation that covered them made it my duty to contribute to restoring the truth. It was my duty to struggle, with other human rights activists, against one of the most crude myths of the century by publishing hundreds of testimonies and thousands of names of citizens who fell victim of ‘eradication’.
Against the impressive propaganda machine of the regime, we only had the truth of the facts and a will to see through its bringing out into the open.
We denounced the violation of the sovereignty of the people, when tanks were sweeping ballot boxes aside, while the fashion of the many was to shelter behind the tanks and insult the people.
We condemned the serious violations of human rights and the policy of ‘eradication’ that underlay them when some kept silent, others engaged in selective denouncing, while some others approved and applauded the violations and the policy.
We were the dogged witnesses of the errors and horrors of this regime. And we did witness!
With time and the iron will of many human rights activists, intellectuals and officers, the wall of disinformation finally cracked and the world was able to see another side of the Algerian tragedy. Damning testimonies and irrefutable evidence have been piling up on the desks of international institutions, organisations and lawyers.
Today the whole world knows that those who have claimed to ‘save Algeria from fundamentalist barbarity’ are more barbaric than those they say they are fighting. The world knows now exactly the nature of the Algerian regime, a regime which did not think twice about executing monstruous and criminal plots to polarise the people and pit Algerian against Algerian.
Today the world knows that those who projected themselves as the last bastion against ‘terrorism’ are in fact criminals against humanity.
Today, after nine years of struggling, besides other Algerian men and women, for the ideals of truth and human dignity, I have decided to end my journey underground, and to challenge the unjust condemnation sentencing me to twenty years of prison. In my heart and conscience, I believe that I only carried out my duty, and nothing but my duty: to be a witness of the Algerian reality.
It is with a peace of mind that I am ending my life underground to face the repressive apparatus of this regime the free world knows well today.
I will probably be arrested and imprisoned. That’s a small price to pay for any free man in a country where there is no rule of law. Yesterday our elders paid it for independence, today we have to pay it for freedom and justice.
I shall pursue my struggle in prison to obtain the status of political prisoner and guarantees of a fair trial in the presence of international observers.
I shall continue in prison, with God’s assistance, my struggle for the self-determination of the Algerian people, for the respect of human dignity, for an inclusive Algeria equal in rights and opportunities to all, for justice, and for a democracy rooted in the civilisationnal values of Algeria yet wide open to the universal.
God is Witness of my words and my acts.
Algiers, the 29 September 2003
Dr Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
Campagne Internationale pour la Libération de Salah-Eddine Sidhoum
