Socialist Front battles reaction in Algeria
By G.
Dunkel
For two weeks at the end of April, Algerian police fired
on youths demanding jobs, decent housing, a future and
respect. Then, even though 60 people had been killed and 600
severely injured, tens of thousands marched down the main
street in Algiers on May 3 to demand an end to police
violence in the Berber area of the country known as the
Kabyle.
Press commentators in France and Algeria remarked that
tension had not been as high since protests over the price of
bread in 1988, when the national police and army killed 500
people in a few days.
The march, which stretched for over a mile, lasted for
three hours and gathered and dispersed in perfect calm. The
Front of Socialist Forces (FFS), which called the march
without a permit from the police, estimated that 150,000
people marched; the French press gave a figure of 20,000 to
30,000; the cops 10,000.
The main banners in the march read "No to a police state,
no to a fundamentalist republic." The chants ranged from "The
government, generals, police, president are murderers" to
"How much do you charge?"--a reference to the deputies' habit
of taking bribesthe march reached the National Assembly.
The Berbers are a North African people culturally and
linguistically different from the Arabs. Arabs make up the
majority of the 30 million Algerians; Berbers constitute 20
to 30 percent. The capital of the Kabyle is the city of Tizi
Ouzou, but the largest concentration of Berbers lives in
Algiers.
Uprising followed police attack
A police attack on a poetry festival and seminar held
every spring since 1980 had sparked the uprising. But more
pressing issues--jobs, housing, education, respect--quickly
came out, especially when a young student, Guermah Mssinissa,
was killed in a national police barracks at Beni Doula.
In 1991 the army had dissolved elections when it realized
that a fundamentalist Islamic group, the Front for Islamic
Salvation, was on the brink of winning. A bloody civil war
has dragged on since then between the army and fundamentalist
groups.
Since Abdelaziz Bouteflika took over as president two
years ago, some Islamic groups have given up the armed
struggle and joined the government. The daily death tolls
have declined but there is still a serious level of
violence.
Up to 150,000 people have lost their lives in this
conflict between two reactionary bourgeois groups. One uses
its position in the army and the upper reaches of the state
to appropriate the vast oil wealth of Algeria. The other is
based on elements of the traditional Algerian ruling class
and wants its share. It is fueled by Saudi money and recruits
trained in Afghanistan.
While the conflict between these two groups has been
bloody and real, at times they cooperated. When a village or
small town--often but not always Berber--was attacked by
fundamentalists, the army would often refrain from responding
until after they had left. Few Berbers support fundamentalist
groups because they are proud of their language, Tamazigh.
The fundamentalists think that all Algerians should speak
Arabic. Berber women have never worn veils.
Algeria fought a heroic war to gain independence from
French colonial rule. But independence did not bring economic
liberation. Imperialist banks and oil companies continued to
hold the strings of the economy, and so many Algerians wound
up being forced to migrate. Today over 2 million Algerians
live in France.
Oil wealth pays 'debt'
to imperialist banks
Algeria has real wealth. According to the French newspaper
Le Monde of May 5, Algeria saw the value of its gross
national product, 98 percent of which comes from natural gas
or oil, grow by 30 percent in 2000. It ran a trade surplus of
$6 billion--but almost all of it went to payments on its
foreign debt of $25 billion. Nevertheless, the crumbs of this
surplus were enough to make the elite rich by any
standards.
Because of this debt, more money flowed out of than into
Algeria. Since 1990, roughly the start of the civil war, the
income of the individual Algerian has been cut in half.
Almost none of its oil and gas wealth has gone to productive
economic investments. Industrial output has declined. Two out
of three young people old enough to work are unemployed.
Public housing, when it is built, goes only to those with
connections.
This ferocious attack on the living standards of all
Algerians, particularly aimed at the youth, finally drew a
response, particularly among the Berber youths. Around Tizi
Ouzou, they set up barricades of burning cars, rammed buses
into the barracks of the national police, and effectively
controlled many small towns.
Djamel Amrouche, correspondent of Le Soir d'Algerie in
Tizi Ouzou, wrote: "At Azazga, Tiqobain, Larbaâ Nath
Irathen, Mekla, ... the national police fired directly on the
crowd. Tear gas seems to be a weapon of the Middle Ages. ...
A number of the wounded lost part of their limbs, leg
muscles, calves ... ripped away by explosive or plastic
bullets. ... 'Give your blood to save a life,' medical
personnel kept on saying. 'We need blood.' ... At the morgue,
the medical examiner still had not signed the authorization
to remove the body ... but the parents waiting there didn't
have the energy to complain. To whom?"
On April 28, the day Amrouche describes, 28 people were
killed in and around Tizi Ouzou and 125 people seriously
wounded.
This protest in the Kabyle touched off a "ground-swell of
support among ordinary Algerians," according to Le Soir. The
Daily of Oran, a city in western Algeria about 200 miles from
Algiers, said that "corruption, marginalization, denial of
rights and justice are the common lot and widely shared among
all Algerian citizens."
There is talk about neighborhoods and towns setting up
"popular committees" to extend and organize this Berber
"intifada" along with calls for general strikes and other
forms of struggle.
The Berbers were a mainstay in the eight-year war to free
Algeria from French colonialism. They are proud of their
culture and well aware of oppression. The struggle there is
by no means over.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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