Omar Belhouchet, Algeria
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
Omar Belhouchet’s story is emblematic of the horrendous conditions under which Algeria’s journalists have been operating during his country’s bloody civil war. Since the conflict’s beginning in 1992, Belhouchet, who directs the daily El Watan (The Nation), has faced the wrath of both the government and militant Islamic fundamentalists. He has been repeatedly harassed by authorities who have attempted to silence his paper’s independent reporting. He narrowly escaped assassination by religious extremists. His paper has been deprived of official advertising, censored and closed down on several occasions under a state of emergency decree that allows authorities to suspend or close any institution whose “activities endanger public order and security.”
Omar Belhouchet was born on Feb. 9, 1954, in Sétif, Algeria. After studying economics at the University of Algiers, he began his journalism career with the regional daily La République in Oran and worked successively for the news agency Algérie Presse Service, the weekly Unité and the government journal El Moudjahid. In 1990 he co-founded the independent French-language daily El Watan.
Belhouchet’s ordeal began in January 1993, shortly after the army cancelled parliamentary elections to prevent a victory by the ultra-conservative Islamic Salvation Front. El Watan was suspended, and Belhouchet was detained for a week for “publishing false information that harms the security of the state and the unity of the country.” The charges stemmed from El Watan’s publication of a report about the murder of five policemen at a police station by Islamic fundamentalists. An Algerian court later passed a suspended six-month jail sentence on Belhouchet for “prematurely” reporting the killing of the five gendarmes.
Since then, Belhouchet has been fined, arrested, jailed and forbidden to leave the country by government authorities. He has received more than 100 death threats from militant fundamentalists. He estimates that between 1993 and 1997, the authorities initiated 30 prosecutions against him. Several pending cases force him to appear in court two to three times a week.
In April 1993 proceedings were brought against Belhouchet for “harming national unity, inciting violence and conspiring against the security of the state.” He had published an interview with the secretary general of the leftist Ettahaddi movement that was harshly critical of the Algerian government and judiciary. In May an Algiers court banned Belhouchet from “exercising any journalistic activity or making statements to other press organs” due to pending charges against him. The ban was lifted in June, and he received a two-month suspended sentence for “insulting the judiciary and attacking a state institution.”
On May 17, 1993, armed fundamentalist groups fighting the secular regime began to deliberately target journalists because of their profession, killing nine journalists between May and December 1993 alone. Belhouchet narrowly escaped death when unidentified assailants machine-gunned his car as he was driving his children to school. Islamic fundamentalists were the suspected attackers.
Belhouchet was sentenced to one year in prison in October 1993 for defaming the judiciary in an article in El Watan about public reaction to the acquittal of a suspected terrorist. His sentence was suspended pending appeal.
In 1996, the state-run printing press refused to print the April 24 and May 7 editions of El Watan. No explanations were given, but Belhouchet attributed the censorship to his paper’s coverage of government counterinsurgency operations. State-owned printers forced the month-long closure of El Watan in October 1998 under the pretext of outstanding debts after the paper published articles critical of both a former adviser to President Liamine Zeroual and the former minister of justice. It had accused them of corruption and abuse of power. The printer’s action came despite a verbal agreement reached in August for staggered payment of the debts.
Today, the assassination campaign against Algeria’s journalists, which claimed the lives of 60 journalists between 1993 and 1996, has apparently ceased. No members of the media have been murdered since August 1996, but the country remains one of the most isolated and difficult environments for journalists. Belhouchet and his colleagues still live in constant fear for their lives and are forced to walk a thin line between the wrath of militant Islamic groups and persecution by the state. Although he could have joined the more than 200 journalists who have fled Algeria since the civil war began, Belhouchet decided to remain in his country to fight for press freedom. To this end, Belhouchet founded the Algerian Committee for the Defense of Press Freedom in 1997. He remains president of the group.