E/CN.4/2003/66/Add.1 page 6 votes in the first round of legislative elections. The National People’s Assembly was dissolved by presidential decree on 4 January 1992, and President Chadli was forced to resign on 11 January. 16. A High Council of State was set up on 14 January 1992, and Mohamed Boudiaf, one of the original FLN leaders, was chosen to head it. A state of emergency was decreed and FIS was dissolved in March 1992. Boudiaf’s assassination on 29 June 1992 signalled the outbreak of civil war. The Government pursued a policy of systematic action against the Islamists, who formed into armed groups and mounted terrorist attacks which gradually spread into all parts of the country. 17. After FIS was dissolved, a number of factions sprang up within its armed wing, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), and a ferocious struggle for power and influence broke out between AIS and the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) although their aims and methods were virtually identical. Continual divisions within the Armed Islamic Groups gradually reduced the situation to one of impenetrable violence. 18. Violence by these groups, initially directed against the security forces, spread to include reporters, intellectuals generally, political militants who opposed the groups’ views and foreigners, before being directed at the population at large. The whole of society was exposed to mindless terror sustained by agents claiming to be inspired by Islam who included common criminals and highway robbers. 19. Since fighting broke out, non-governmental organizations and United Nations human rights bodies have voiced grave concern at the way the country has become over-militarized, at the indiscriminate use of firepower by the security forces, at arbitrary arrests, detentions and disappearance, at persistent reports of summary executions, torture and ill-treatment, at the lack of timely preventive action by the police and military authorities to protect victims, at the growing lack of security resulting from the actions of the self-defence forces legalized by a 1997 law and, above all, at the fact that the security forces continue, according to reports, to act with impunity. 20. Fighting in Algeria has claimed the lives of 100,000 people according to the Algerian authorities, or 200,000 according to certain Algerian political parties and other non-governmental sources. The number of disappeared persons is put at between 4,000 and 7,000. 21. Despite the Civil Concord Act of 13 July 1999 and the decree of 10 January 2000 granting “clemency” to former organization members who decided to renounce violence, it must be said that terrorism has persisted and perhaps even risen again in spite of official statements claiming that the security situation is 95 per cent under control. Over 700 Algerians are said to have been killed since the beginning of 2002, some amnestied members of armed groups are thought to have gone back underground, and communiqués calling for massacres continue to circulate from certain European capitals: it will be recalled that many extremists have taken refuge, and sometimes been given protection, in European countries and elsewhere.