"WOMEN AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN ALGERIA" Salima Ghezali, Editor of Algerian weekly "La Nation" at Amnesty International UK Section 1996 Conference on Women and uman Rights This is a copy of the speech about the situation of women in Algeria given by Salima Ghezali at the 1996 Amnesty UK Annual Conference on Women. The speech was translated from French and it should be realised that for that reason in places the language may be a little unclear. L'Thank you very much. I am very honoured to be here. Unfortunately, I cannot speak English, so I will need a translation.... I came here to talk about a very painful and difficult problem today. The problem is that of how to defend - in a country like Algeria, a country at war - how to defend simultaneously women' s rights and human rights more generally, and how to do that within a context where women have been instrumentalised by the government and by other groups. I am first going to give you a short historical overview of my country. From 1830-1862, Algeria W2.. colonized by France, and between 1954-1962, there was a liberation war against the colonial power. It was an extremely violent war which took all sectors of the society. Women were major actors in this war and they participated as military fighters. Af'ter the war, an image of the woman fighter was cultivated by the women themselves, and it is very important to point out that women have been constructed as military fighters rather than as fighters for democracy or fighters for peace. Between 1962-1988, women have been celebrated on regular occasions. Now it is on the 8th of March. What is very important to point out is that on all of those occasions for ears when women have been celebrated on television or in expositions - they have always . u celebrated as .'' hters - fighters for the nation. At the same time, and parallelled with his : are of the woman fighter, there has been a discourse, a much more conservative vision, whic' ' - s emphasised the woman as the guardian of the tradition - the woman as mother, the woman .l. sister, and the woman as wife. In 1963 when the Family Code s enacted, it was based very clearly on an inequality between man and woman. When the gl ernment attempted to codify this family relationship, it failed because the woman fighter re. !ted and said the government had no right to do that. The government also attempted on se . eral occasions to put into place those codifications - it tried in 1963, it tried in 1973, and again the woman revolted. It tried again in 1979 and the next generation - not necessarily women who participated in the war, also revolted against the attempt by the government. In 1979. the government attempted to forbid women to get out of the Algerian territory without the agreement and the presence of a male relative who could be either the husband, father, brother, or even a son if above the age of 5 years old. It should be emphasised that while the government was trying to implement all of those codifications and law, the Algerian model at that time was the socialist model which had three major implications. In regards to education, there was a major attempt at educating both boys and girls, and girls benefitted a great deal from the socialist emphasis on education. The work legislation was very beneficial to women as well, at least in theory. There was the theory that for the same work you should have the sarne salary as the male worker. The same thing with health. All ofthe judicial structure gislation were among the most advanced in the world from the woman's perspective. T ialist model and its priorities allowed the Algerian woman to succeed to a lot of thin cation, work and good health. More than 50% of teachers are women, and more than 50% of people employed in medical and information sectors are women. However, it is necessary to point out that while improvement in education has been very important and you find a lot of women and young girls being very well educated, in the workforce the situation is very different. Overall, only 8% of the workforce in Algeria are women, and only 5% of Algerian women are actually engaged in the workforce. Even though education has allowed for a lot of improvement, it is not something that is as widespread as it could seem. There is still a very high rate of illiteracy among women, and especially among older women. 46% of women are still illiterate, most of them being older women. Also, in the rural areas, young girls who reach a certain age are taken out of school to be marrie(l. Another issue of importance to women is related to contraception. Following the war, and the disappearance and the death of a large number of young persons, the Algerian government embraced a very high natality policy pushing for women to have children. At the same time, there was an informal consciousness-raising program led by sociologist, demographists, people in education etc., and therefore, from he middle of 1970 up to the n id-1980's, Algeria eventually entered into what is called a demographic transition, which mean a very high preventative rate of the use of contraception by women. Unfortunately, by the mid-1980's, at the time when Algeria was entering this demographic transition, the country was hit hard by the economic crisis. One of the implications of this was that access to contraception which used to be free, started to cost a lot of money, and it became quite impossible for atl average women to purchase contraception - it would cost her one weeks' food to buy one F ack of the pill. Unfortunately, women who live in rural areas do not have access to all the necessary health care and health care centres, and they have to go to the cities in order to have access o the forms of contraception that would be cheaper, which means in eect that they won't have acce ss to it and that the natality rate is probably going to increase dramatically. If we can mitigate a picture as far as education, health and work are concerned, it becomes very disastrous when we deal with the family relationship. The Family Code, which was finally adopted by the single party in 1984 is a major blow to women. Even in the West it is always considered an open thing that Islam is considered a source o f inequality for women, but the Algerian Family Code has taken the most abusive and reactior,ary elements not only from the religion, but om the Mediterranean southern culture of machi..mo as well. I am going to read you some articles from the Family Code, and I want to emphasise l hat the people who wrote them are not fundamentalist Islamists, but that they are issued from a socialist party. The woman is always in opposition vis-a vis the man and the manls family. The Algerian woman cannot decide by herself when she wants to marry and who she wants to mar y,. She cannot sign a marriage contract without the presence and the agreement of a male relative who could even be a son if we are dealing with a second marriage. If there is no male relatiie available to sign the marriage contract, then it could be up to a judge to do it. It does not matter who this woman is - she can be the most educated woman in Algeria, or a rural woman wol-king in the fields, it is the same. As far as the divorce law is concemed, divorce can only be grant, d on the request ofthe husband, except for under a few conditions where the woman can ask for divorce. But those conditions are very difficult to demonstrate. The first is that the husband rnust be away from home form a year. The second possibility is that the husband has not engaged I nto any sexual relationship with his wife for four months. And the third possibility is that if the h,sband has been condemned for any infamous or immoral reason, then the woman can ask for a divorce. However, how to interpret this infamous clause has been open to many discussions. There have been men who have been imprisoned for murder and the judge still did not see that as "infamous" and the woman's request for divorce has been rejected The end product is what Algerian women call being "in limbo.". They cannot remarry and while the husband is in prison, the woman is left "in limbo." While the man, the husband, can go away, go abroad, go engage in another lifestyle, get another girlfriend, as far as the woman is concerned, she has very few options. She cannot remarry and if she engages into a relationship with another man, it is considered as adultery and forbidden and punished by jail. In the case of a divorce, the children are usually placed under the care of the mother. However, there are limits. At the age of 11 years old for the boy, the father can take the child, and at 16 years old, marriage can be arranged for a girl child. However, although the children are under the care of the mother, the legal tutor remains the father, which means that the mother cannot undertake any important decisions regarding the children, be it opening a bank account for them, changing schools, etc. without the agreement from the father. Also, the Koran, which allows for polygamy, does not advise that it should take place, and therefore the Algerian government has chosen the most oppressive interpretation of the Koran. There are two other aspects of the Family Code. The first one is that if the woman wants to work this has to be agreed upon by her husband. Any woman's work is submitted to the husband for authorisation - this is one of the articles of the Family Code. And the other is that not only is the woman obligated to obey her husband, she is obligated to obey her husband's family, and it is very hard for women in general, and especially for the well-educated woman, to submit to this type of relationship. What has been the reaction of the Algerian woman? There was a single party government in Algeria up unil 1989, which means that there was no freedom of expression, no freedom of association. Women's groups, secular and Islamist, came together but within this very hard context of oppression. The secular women's organisations privileged activities of a more elitist nature based especially within universities. The Islamists women's organisations, which did not necessarily agree with the Family Code and want women to remain at home, not at all, privileged actions of a more charity-based nature. In 1988 there were riots in Algeria which were repressed very strongly by the Algerian government. But, from the end ofthe riots at 1988 until 1991, freedom of speech was finally implemented. Women were the first ones to mobilise against torture, to mobilise for freedom of association and expression and during those three years, civil society exploded in different groups and all started associating and speaking - the groups could be Islamist or also secular. During those three years, about ten women's organisation emerged on the scene as well as three independent journals, one of which was a feminist journal and two of which were the more traditional women's magazines - but even those took on the status of woman as a major issue to be covered. In December 1991, there was the first legislative election in the country. The elections were eventually interrupted and violence began right away in 1992. With the return of violence, the space of freedom and the space of speech which women had grabbed for a little while decreased very much. On top of this context of armed conflict, there were no changes being made to the Family Code. By 1993 women became the victims of very, very serious violations. There had been about 50,000 total deaths in the war. About 1,000 were women, and on top of that women were raped, kidnapped, and received major threats of rape and kidnapping. These acts were committed by Islamist armed groups and also by the activities of bandits, not necessarily of a political nature. Since the beginning of the violence, women have buried their sons, their husbands and their fathers. Mothers have buried their sons who have been forcibly involved in the military, and at the same time mothers have also buried their sons who have joined the armed groups. Every day you may find a woman who is desperately looking for her relatives, for her disappeared one throughout the country. It is the product of a very dirty and hidden war with a disastrous situation not only because of the presence of the armed groups, but because of the overall atmosphere of constant and hidden violence."