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ABSTRACT
Some estimates indicate that as many as 7000 people have been reported missing in Algeria since 1992. While Islamists are responsible for some of these abductions, the majority can be attributed to the Algerian state. Human rights organisations have since called for the investigation of ‘enforced disappearances’ or the denial of individual freedoms in the form of state-sanctioned abductions, detentions, or executions. To put pressure on a government favourable to national reconciliation and the concealment of collective trauma, women continue to gather in front of the capital's administrative offices with photos of their missing so as to demand the identification of bodies and the restitution of memory. Yet, to state officials, the recurrence of this symbolic, pacifist act constitutes a threat to the Algerian republic, as it attempts to re-emerge unscathed from the ashes of a civil war without confronting its tumultuous past. Aware of the dangers inherent to such policies, Omar D (photographer) and Kamel Khélif (graphic artist) have joined the women's plight deploying similar arms. Their work re-appropriates identity photos of the missing and engages in the struggle against amnesia and the pursuit of justice. This article analyses the significance and impact of commemorative art practices that use identity photographs to liberate the word, to denounce mass disappearances and the effacement of a new democratic Algerian identity. For artists and families, identity photographs surface as a powerful political space where individual memories become collective and where citizens can hold the state accountable for its actions.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Professors Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa for editing this issue and for organising and hosting the National Endowment for the Humanities 2014 Summer Institute at Oregon State University, ‘Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema since Independence’. The author would also like to thank Mr Kamel Khélif and Mr Khalif Yekhlef of SOS Disappeared who allowed her to reproduce their images.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Determining the exact dates of the Algerian civil war is a difficult undertaking given the multitude of historical markers from which to choose including the Berber Spring in 1980, the 1988 October revolt, the cancelation of the 1991 legislative elections, the 1992 military coup, Bouteflika's civil concord initiative in 1999, and the 2005 general amnesty. For the purposes of the current analysis, the war starts with the 1992 military coup, which irreversibly pitted Islamists against the state (le pouvoir), and ends with the 2005 referendum in favour of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Algerians commonly refer to the government and, therefore, Algeria's military-industrial complex as le pouvoir, which ‘operates behind closed doors’ and whose actions remain ‘opaque and unknown to the overwhelming majority of Algerians’ (Entelis Citation2011, 676). Finally, readers should note that nations including France and Algeria have disputed the conflict's designation as a ‘civil war’. Historian James D. Le Sueur comments that if the French have used this term ‘to describe an ongoing, armed conflict between militant Islamists and the state’, Algerian officials favour qualifying the conflict ‘as a “war on civilians” and as one between the forces of order and the terrorist organizations committed to a jihad’ (Citation2010, 6). Le Sueur concludes, stating, ‘because this struggle and its interpretations involve an important Muslim-majority state located at the very crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, [ … ] careers, reputations, lives, revolutionary dreams, and political power itself hang in the balance’ (Citation2010, 6).
2. ‘War without a face’; unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
3. According to Article 46 of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation (translated here by Human Rights Watch (Citation2006)),
[a]nyone who, by speech, writing, or any other act, uses or exploits the wounds of the National Tragedy to harm the institutions of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, to weaken the state, or to undermine the good reputation of its agents who honorably served it, or to tarnish the image of Algeria internationally, shall be punished by three to five years in prison and a fine of 250,000 to 500,000 dinars.
4. Collective of the Families of the Disappeared in Algeria and SOS Disappeared also have strong followings on Facebook.
5. Le Sueur argues that prior to the 1992 military coup, ‘[t]he fear that a meddling media could undermine the authority of the state caused the state to turn against Algerian journalists, well before terrorists began to single out those in the liberal media for assassination’ (Citation2010, 172–173). He adds that the state's early identification of journalists, intellectuals, and other cultural figures as political targets, would later encourage their assassination at the hands of Islamists (Le Sueur Citation2010, 174).
6. Memorial of the Disappeared in Algeria
7. See Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) for a presentation of the spectral quality inherent in photography.
8. See the first volume of Pierre Nora's seminal work, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), for a definition and detailed discussion of sites of memory.
9. ‘Madonna of Bentalha'.
10. According to Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, iconic images frequently become ‘a site where collective memory crystallises once organic sociality has been swept away amidst the “acceleration of history” produced by modern civilization’ (Citation2003, 62). They have more recently defined iconic images as
those [ … ] appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics. (Hariman and Lucaites Citation2007, 27, original emphasis)
11. There is No More Amine.
12. ‘He existed, he exists, he exists, my son!’
13. See also Paul Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
14. Algeria is also exceptional regarding the extent to which both le pouvoir and insurgents participated in enforced disappearances. According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch report, the number of disappearances that have taken place in Algeria since 1992 far ‘exceeds the number of “disappearances” known to have been carried out in any other country, except wartime Bosnia, over the past decade’.
15. This Country That's Yours; I also analyse Khélif's work in the sixth chapter of my book, The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity.
16. In France, garde-à-vue refers to the indefinite detention of a suspect prior to being charged with a crime.
17. ‘In the jumble of lines, he deciphered marks in angular writing, dates … Then, he closed his eyes after having seen and read the long list of names spewed onto the wall by misfortune.’
18. For Azoulay,
[t]he civil contract of photography assumes that, at least in principle, the governed possess a certain power to suspend the gesture of the sovereign power seeking to totally dominate the relations between us, dividing us as governed into citizens and noncitizens thus making disappear the violation of our citizenship. (Citation2008, 23, original emphasis)
19. ‘That all she had to do was walk in front of the immense pit while listening to her heart, and when it started to beat faster, she would have found the place where her son's body lay.’
20. National Centre for Population and Development Research and Analysis.