By Elaine Ganley
The Associated Press
Algiers, Algeria – Algerians overwhelmingly approved a peace plan that provides a broad amnesty for Islamic extremists but which critics denounced as a whitewash of crimes committed during a bloody internal war, official referendum results showed Friday.
The plan, called the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, got more than 97 percent of Thursday’s vote – a giant win that could further strengthen President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, said Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni.
Nearly 80 percent of the more than 18 million eligible voters cast ballots, the minister said.
In Khenchla, a town in the east 60 miles from Algeria’s border with Tunisia, 99.95 percent turned out.
But the turnout rate was far lower – just over 11 percent – in the main towns of Tizi-Ouzou and Bejaia in Kabylie, a restive Berber region east of the capital Algiers where there had been calls to boycott the vote.
The interior minister said the results “reflect Algerians’ desire to live in peace and to turn the page of the tragedy that our country has lived through for 15 years.”
Critics of Bouteflika’s charter, from opposition groups to the families of people who disappeared in Algeria’s bloody Islamic insurgency, had predicted it would easily pass, especially given the lack of real debate.
The popular Bouteflika also won a landslide re-election victory in 2004, five years after taking office following an election tarnished by allegations of fraud.
The president said the plan will help close wounds from the violence and atrocities that gripped the North African nation for more than a decade, leaving an estimated 150,000 dead. The insurgency erupted in 1992 after the army canceled a second round of voting in Algeria’s first multiparty legislative elections to thwart a likely victory by the now-banned fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front.
Some opposition politicians and human rights groups accused the president of using the charter to consolidate his power in the gas-rich nation of nearly 33 million. Critics also lamented a lack of public debate and accused Bouteflika of trying to whitewash years of agony.
The lengthy but vaguely worded charter offers something for everyone, from Islamic rebels to families whose loved ones joined the insurgency, or simply vanished. It would end judicial proceedings for a broad span of Islamists, including those who lay down arms, those sought at home or abroad for allegedly supporting terrorism and those convicted in absentia.
