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VOL. 23, NO. 6	OCTOBER 10, 1997

SIPA Dean Testifies before Senate on Algerian Conflict

Anderson. Record Photo by Amy Callahan.

By Fred Knubel

isa Anderson, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Oct. 1 on the heightened civil conflict in Algeria, where brutal massacres of hundreds of men, women and children have been reported.

Anderson told the committee that if the United States wants to help end the six-year-old war that has claimed more than 60,000 lives, "it must be willing to abandon the old thinking that divided the world into mutually exclusive ideological camps," democracy versus Islam.

"On both sides of this dispute are people of good will and individuals of remarkable viciousness," she said. She said the U.S. must seek to support liberal factions in both the Algerian government and the Islamist opposition who "are haltingly moving towards dialogue, even in the fact of opposition from their ostensible ideological allies."

She urged the senators, "We must not be so concerned to assign responsibility for the murders or so appalled by their brutality that we lose sight of the need to identify and support the proponents of peace talks" begun in Rome in 1995.