Mourad Dhina: a brief history of Algeria’s future

Opposition to the coup

The interruption of the democratic transition shattered those dreams, and disrupted the life of Mourad Dhina as it did for millions of Algerians. On 11 January 1992 the army carried out a coup. The first free and fair parliamentary elections since independence had given the majority to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and this did not fit with the democratic facade the army had planned for. The army cancelled the elections, removed President Chadli from office and replaced him with a High Council of State, and then began the destruction of the FIS. Thousands of FIS leaders and members, and real or imagined supporters were arrested, deported and detained without charges and court indictments in camps in the Sahara desert. Many of them were tortured. Scattered and radicalized fragments of the party responded to state violence by counter-violence and started killing policemen, soldiers and officials. Thus, Algeria plunged into a spiral of violence which got worse and worse and would lead, a decade later, to the death of at least 200,000 person [29] (500,000 according to the president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, Me Abdennour Ali-Yahia [30]), hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and almost as many victims of torture [31], between 12 000 and 20 000 disappeared [32], tens of thousands of injured, 1.5 million of internally displaced persons [33], and hundreds of thousands of exiles.

Despite not being a member of the FIS by that time, Mourad Dhina condemned the military coup and resolved to oppose it. The cost of political integrity under dictatorship is often death, prison, exile or isolation. Even living abroad such a stand carried risks, as the coup was supported by the French State and Western powers, and a massive propaganda aimed at demonising those who opposed the generals’ putsch started. Mourad Dhina got first involved in a campaign to raise international awareness about human rights violations in Algeria and he organised several demonstrations. When the generals dissolved the FIS in March 1992, Mourad Dhina decided, in response to this injustice, to join the party. He joined the FIS in Europe as an activist and soon achieved a prominent status through his competence, discipline, consensual approach and dedication. He became a respected voice and influential figure among the leaders of the party.

On the first anniversary of the coup in January 1993, he organised a meeting with Abdennour Ali-Yahia in Geneva, to raise awareness and discuss arbitrary detention, internment camps in the Sahara and the systematic torture of political detainees.

In 1994, Mourad Dhina and a small group of friends set up the ‘Hoggar Print’ publishing house, which issued many reports on the human rights situation in Algeria, and would become later the ‘Hoggar Institute’. He learnt the offset operating technique and printed himself the first publications of Hoggar, including the three volumes of the Livre blanc sur la répression en Algérie [34], a publication banned in France when it was released [35].