In Algeria's Berber region
Thousands join struggle against gov't terror
By G.
Dunkel
Since mid-April, severe police and army repression against
student protesters in the Berber region of Algeria called the
Kabylie has aroused broad, mass demonstrations. The Berber
people are also demanding more recognition for their language
and culture within a unified Algeria.
On May 21, 500,000 to 1 million people marched in Tizi
Ouzou, the capital of Kabylie. The Algerian press said the
number was impossible to estimate more precisely since
protesters filled all the city's streets. The Kabylie is home
to about 4 million of Algeria's 31 million people.
Four days later, 20,000 women marched in Tizi Ouzou in a
demonstration called and organized by women. An immense black
banner led the march as a sign of mourning. A woman named
Farida cried out: "Those who are dead are our children, our
brothers, our husbands. When a man of Kabylie falls, it is a
woman who suffers."
Some of his classmates carried portraits of Guermah
Massinissa edged with mourn ing black. On April 18, cops had
arrested Massinissa in a protest over a banned reading of
Berber poetry. They beat him to death in a police barracks.
In protest, students and youths came out first, then
teachers and other workers. Village councils and farmers,
lawyers, women, and doctors and medical personnel have all
marched.
Police have attacked the medical caregivers for treating the
1,000 or so seriously injured by the cops. Between 60 and 90 of
those injured have died.
The revolt has deepened, strengthened and broadened as it
moved from students protesting unemployment--two-thirds of all
young people of an age to work are unemployed--to demands for
respect for Berber language and culture. About 30 percent of
Algeria's 30 million people are Berber.
The women marching May 25 showed not only grief but
political anger. According to the May 26 Algerian newspaper
Liberté, each contingent carried banners reading, "The
authorities are murderers," "Tamazight [the Berber language]
must be an official national language," and "Down with
injustice and repression."
The book "The Berbers" by Michael Brett and Elizabeth
Fentress (1996) explains that while the Berbers of Kabylie
participated heavily in the national leadership and fighting
forces in the struggle against French colonialism, they always
fought for the independence and unity of Algeria. For them,
Algeria is and was both Arab and Berber.
This helps explain why when the women's march reached the
office of the governor of Tizi Ouzou, the women chanted:
"Correct your history! Algeria is not [exclusively] Arab,"
while waving an Algerian flag.
Algerian president's reaction
Other than appointing a commission in late April to
investigate the events in Kabylie, Algeria's President
Abdelaziz Bouteflika did not comment on what was happening in
Kabylie until May 27, when he spoke at an Islamic
Conference.
According to a BBC transcript of his talk, which was carried
on Algerian radio, Bouteflika said this "report will be
published in detail so that all judicial and legal measures
could be taken against those who ignited the fire of sedition
and kindled the ember of division. Severe penalties are
inevitable."
He went on to say that Algeria "is subjected to conspiracies
from inside and outside targeting the stability of all the
Algerian people."
Bouteflika was selected by the army, which is the real
authority in Algeria. He was elected president in 1999 in a
process all his opponents considered so rigged that they
refused to run.
In January 1992 the masses of the population were so
disillusioned with the governing party that Islamic
fundamentalists captured enough votes to win office. The army
then annulled the elections.
Since then, a civil war has raged that has cost at least
100,000 lives. During that same period, the average per capita
income has been cut in half.
Algeria's civil war
U.S. and French imperialism have continually wrangled over
which will have greater control of North Africa and its oil.
Each power is on the lookout for internal struggles to turn to
its advantage. This competition has spurred on the contending
forces in Algeria's civil war.
The Algerian army and political establishment have
proclaimed they are leading an irreconcilable struggle against
the right-wing fundamentalists.
But the Free Officers Movement of Algeria (MAOL) claims that
the army has used French mercenaries, a U.S. citizen and
apartheid-era veterans of the South African army to train its
special forces and to improve its communications and data
processing.
MAOL also claims that the Algerian army infiltrated and used
a fundamentalist group called the Armed Islamic Group to attack
Berber villages or communities that were opposed to the
government.
Souaidia Habib, a former officer in the Algerian army,
defended his book "The Dirty War," making the same charge in
the April 17 Le Monde.
Libération, a major national French newspaper,
reported May 17 that an anonymous cabinet minister claimed that
the French mercenaries named by MAOL "had left Algeria several
months ago" but denied neither their existence nor that they
had been replaced.
Support for the Kabylie struggle
Bouteflika, the official French press agency AFP and other
major news sources prefer to characterize the struggle in the
Kabylie as a struggle between Berbers and Arabs. But all the
Berber demands are directed at the national government, for
linguistic and cultural civil rights and against police
violence.
Many of the demands made in the Kabylie appeal to all
Algerians who are not part of the establishment. There have
been solidarity actions with the Kabylie involving progressive
sectors of the entire population.
On May 3 in Algiers, the capital, the opposition Socialist
Front called out 25,000 people in solidarity with the people of
Kabylie against government repression.
Algeria is a former colony whose oil, natural gas and
markets are a significant component of the French economy.
There are many Algerian emigrants in France.
Around 5 percent of France's population--2 million to 3
million inhabitants--are Algerian. Another million or so are
from other North African countries.
In early May, Algerian communities in most major cities in
France held demonstrations of 2,000 to 5,000 people in
solidarity with Kabylie.
Students at a number of Algerian universities have also
shown their solidarity. On May 19, according to Le Soir, some
2,000 students gathered at Bouzaréah University in
Algiers and attempted to take the streets to show their
opposition to the murders of Algerian youths in the Kabylie.
The cops pushed them back.
In Oran, the major city in western Algeria, there have been
a number of university-based solidarity actions. Lawyers there
initiated a national petition campaign against changes in the
criminal code that would make it easier to prosecute
demonstrators in the Kabylie. (Libération, May 25)
This article is copyright under a Creative
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