The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, yesterday condemned the recent massacres in Algeria as "heinous murders" and said they were totally unjustifiable. His statement followed that of the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, who called on the international community to speak out about the atrocities even if the Algerian government objected.
Mr Annan and Mrs Robinson were referring to armed Islamic groups killing 40 villagers, including 10 children, on Sunday in Bilda province, south of Algiers. Among the reported dead was an eight-month-old baby, whose head was found on the roof of the family home and his body in the kitchen oven.
Mrs Robinson, the former President of Ireland, who recently took up her UN post, on Monday met Algeria's Foreign Minister, Mr Ahmed Attaf, who is attending the UN General Assembly session. She said she realised Algeria had "different views" about international interference.
"One of the things that has been an important experience of the international community is that human rights don't have those kind of borders," she said yesterday. "And when there are serious violations of civilians' rights and when the situation is as bad as in Algeria, I do not and cannot consider that to be an internal situation," she said.
Joe Carroll adds from New York:
Mrs Robinson was publicly rebuked by the Algerian mission to the UN. A sharp communique from the Algerian mission said it was "inadmissible that a senior official of the UN should exceed her powers by making a valuejudgment on the sovereign position of a member-state, especially when that concerns the refusal of outside interference, a fundamental principle of the United Nations."
Meanwhile, shortly before her first press conference at UN headquarters here yesterday, Mrs Robinson found herself plunged into a crisis over the fate of the team investigating alleged abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She was informed that President Laurent Kabila was reported to have called on the UN human rights team to leave the country.
Mrs Robinson said if the report was confirmed it would make the situation of the investigative team "untenable". But that would not mean the end of concern over human rights in the Congo.
At the news conference, Mrs Robinson also took issue with a comment from the Argentine ambassador to the UN in an article in Newsweek about her new post entitled, "Here's to you, Mrs R. Ireland's ex-president takes on global thugs".
The Ambassador, Mr Fernando Enrique Petrella, said: "How can she convince the rest of the international community that Western human rights is what's best for everybody?"
Mrs Robinson said she wanted to "confront" the comment.
Asked by The Irish Times if the presence of four women candidates in the Irish presidential election meant that the women's rights situation had improved in Ireland, Mrs Robinson said: "I welcome women candidates for all high positions. I am not going to give a more direct answer. That's one question I'll pass on," she said, laughing.
But she said the women candidates "reflect that sense of not only women taking responsibility but making changes".
Algeria's Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) is to begin a ceasefire today which, it says, will expose a rival militant group it blames for "extreme barbarity" against civilians.
Just hours before the ceasefire was due to start, Algerian newspapers said more than 60 civilians were killed in new massacres in Algeria and that government troops had killed 40 Muslim rebels.