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The Kabyle
Riots Repression and Alienation in Algeria
Heba Saleh
(Heba Saleh is a freelance
journalist who has covered Algeria since 1993.)
PIN 56
May 11, 2001
Ten days of
rioting, beginning in late April, in the Algerian Berber-speaking region
of Kabylia have led to the death of scores of demonstrators -- all killed
by the security forces' gunfire. As ever in Algeria, there are no
definitive figures. The military-backed authorities put the death toll at
42, but reports in the local press say that between 60 and 80 people were
killed, as riot police and the gendarmerie fired live ammunition at crowds
of young men who ransacked government buildings, cut off streets with
burning tires and set vehicles on fire. The riots quickly spread across
the five provinces which make up the Kabyle heartland in northeastern
Algeria, and turned the streets of the two main provincial capitals, Tizi
Ouzou and Bejaia, into battle zones. Day after day, youths clashed with
the security forces, ignoring appeals for calm from local associations and
political parties as well as government officials. The length and severity
of the riots highlights deep political crises in Algeria beyond the
ongoing conflict between the government and Islamist rebels.
The
youths' anger was sparked by the death in custody of Massinissa Guermah, a
Kabyle youth who had been arrested in the village of Beni Douala by the
gendarmerie, the force responsible for keeping order in the countryside.
Guermah died from his injuries after he was reportedly hit by 12 shots
from a machine gun. It is not clear why he was killed. In a tardy
explanation which clearly failed to convince Kabyle public opinion, the
Algerian authorities said a machine gun had accidentally gone off after
slipping out of a gendarme's hands. They promised to punish the man
responsible.
Shortly after Guermah's killing, the gendarmes
arrested and mistreated three youths at Amizour, to the east of Beni
Douala. These two incidents were enough to ignite the wrath of the
Kabyles, who have long harbored deep resentment of the gendarmerie. The
soldiers are considered arrogant and abusive towards the local people,
helping themselves to goods in shops without paying and extorting money
from local businessmen. The withdrawal of the gendarmerie from Kabylia was
one of the main demands of the rioters.
DEEPER
CAUSES
But the Kabyle riots were not just about the
gendarmerie, nor were they, as some media tried to portray them, about
Berber calls for official recognition of their language, even if that was
one of many themes of the demonstrations. The anger of Kabyle youth was
essentially targeted at the entire military-backed regime, which they
perceive as repressive and oblivious to their interests. Demonstrators
chanted familiar slogans of "pouvoir assassin" and "gouvernement
terroriste, corrompu" -- the authorities are assassins, terrorists and
corrupt. These slogans are more than mere rhetoric in Algeria, where
inexplicable massacres and suspicious assassinations of political
opponents are routinely blamed on Islamist rebels without any open
investigations.
The rioters also called for an end to hogra, an
Algerian expression which means being excluded and held in contempt. In
recent years, the term has been often used to refer to the attitude of the
ruling elite towards the majority of Algerians, who find themselves
deprived of the wherewithal for a dignified life, and whose destiny lies
in the hands of the secretive clique of military officers controlling the
country. Like Algerians everywhere, the Kabyles are angered by a range of
political and social ills: soaring unemployment, a severe shortage of
affordable housing and despair of a better future.
The
demonstrators' invocation of hogra was underlined by the slow official
reaction to the events in Kabylia. When President Abdelaziz Bouteflika
finally spoke, it was a full week after the start of the riots. He
promised a fair and transparent investigation, and declared that the issue
of Berber language would be addressed in a forthcoming revision of the
constitution. Bouteflika also accused unnamed forces inside and outside
the country of trying to sow discord among Algerians and warned that they
would be unmasked. Apart from the commission of inquiry, there was nothing
concrete in the presidential address. Algerian observers point out the
dismal government record with past commissions of inquiry. Some reports
are never made public; some are simply a whitewash.
POLITICIZED
REGION
Kabylia is the most politicized region in Algeria, with
a heightened awareness of its distinct identity. The region has a history
of agitation against the central government dating back to the 1960s, soon
after Algeria became independent from France. In the 1980s, young Kabyles
led a movement for official recognition of the Berber language and culture
which drew a repressive regime reaction lasting for many years. The recent
riots occurred around the twenty-first anniversary of the 1980 "Berber
Spring," which marked the start of overt activism for recognition of the
Berber identity. Every year the region celebrates this occasion with
marches in which demonstrators chant anti-regime slogans and call for the
elevation of the Berber language, Tamazight, to the status of an official
and national language on a par with Arabic.
Although most Algerians
are descended from the Berbers, the original inhabitants of North Africa,
agitation for recognition of Berber culture has been mainly a Kabyle
affair. The inhabitants of Kabylia along with pockets of other Berbers
living in remote, mostly desert or mountain areas -- the Shawiyya in the
east, the Mzabis in the northern Sahara and the Tuareg in the far south --
were never fully Arabized and have retained their language. But it is the
Kabyles, living close to the capital and strongly represented in the urban
population and in the emigre community in France as well as in their
densely settled mountains, who have given rise to an active Berberist
movement that contests the regime for imposing an Arab identity on what it
argues is essentially a Berber country.
In recent years, the
repression of Kabyle cultural demands which marked the period before 1989
gave way to manipulation of the language issue by the regime, which was
determined to play the Berberists off against the Islamist challenge.
Analysts surmise that the regime was also concerned to neutralize the
democratic implications of developments in Kabylia for the rest of the
country.
POPULAR ALIENATION
Two political parties,
Hocine Ait Ahmed's Socialist Forces Front (FFS) and the Rally for Culture
and Democracy (RCD), draw their support from Kabylia. Both champion the
cause of the Berber language, though they take diametrically opposed
positions on most other important national issues. But, in what observers
regard as a worrying sign of popular alienation, the FFS and RCD appear to
have been completely overtaken by events during the riots. Demonstrators
burnt several local offices of both parties and paid little heed to their
calls for calm. Critics of the regime say alienation is the natural
outcome of the blocked political situation in place since the army
cancelled elections in 1992 to prevent the FIS -- an Islamist party --
from winning. The army's intervention plunged the country into a low-level
civil war from which it has yet to emerge. All of the country's political
parties lost credibility as the military rigged a series of elections
aimed at building a democratic facade behind which the army commanders
continue to monopolize power.
As Algerians came to lose faith in
politics, the two Kabyle-based parties have lost much influence in the
region. The virulently anti-Islamist RCD, which joined the government
coalition last year, is widely seen as a puppet of the hated regime. There
were even allegations last year that prominent RCD figures conspired with
military security in June 1998 to assassinate a leading Berber singer,
Lounes Matoub, whose killing was initially blamed on the armed Islamic
groups. The killing sparked a wave of demonstrations across the region,
and some analysts saw the unrest as having been deliberately provoked as
part of a factional fight between the army and then-President Liamine
Zeroual, who was forced to stand down shortly afterwards. The FFS has been
unsuccessfully calling for democratization and dialogue with the
Islamists, and is regarded by many as ineffective.
In an effort to
limit the damage to itself following the riots, the RCD has now withdrawn
from the coalition, saying that a government which fires on its people
could not be supported. For its part, the FFS has been organizing peaceful
marches to try to channel public anger away from violence and presumably
to regain some of the ground it had lost. FFS leaders have also alleged
that at least some of the rioting was provoked by forces within the regime
engaged in a power struggle.
FACTIONAL POLITICS AND
MANIPULATIONS
Conspiracy theories are never long to be invoked
when there is a significant political development in Algeria. The regime
is so opaque, and there are so many credible reports of factional
struggles within the ruling military security establishment, that it is
difficult to discount the possibility that the events in Kabylia were
manipulated to serve the interests of one faction or another. Some
observers think the excessive force used by the gendarmes to put down the
riots was intended to provoke and then prolong the unrest, in order to
undermine political opponents within ruling military
circles.
Recently there have been more signs of discord at the top,
with newspapers reporting that the all-powerful military security chief
Mohamed Mediene was about to be forced out by colleagues. Although this
has been denied, some speculate that the regime may be planning to
sacrifice the general as way of easing pressures within top military
circles. There is already a power struggle going on between President
Bouteflika -- who has been seeking to assert his authority -- and the
generals who brought him into office to improve the regime's image, which
was being tarnished by allegations of serious human rights violations.
Bouteflika has proven less docile than expected, while his vaunted peace
initiative, the law on "civil concord," has failed to bring peace to the
country. At the same time, the regime has come under mounting pressure
from human rights groups over its conduct during the last ten years.
Allegations of horrific abuses have been rekindled with the recent
phenomenal success in France of a book called "La Sale Guerre" ("The Dirty
War"), written by a former Algerian officer who testifies to the army's
involvement in torturing and massacring civilians.
Efforts to
counteract the negative publicity backfired when a retired Algerian
general and former defense minister, Khaled Nezzar, went to Paris to
launch his own memoirs. Algerian torture victims living in France filed
charges against Nezzar, forcing him to rush back to Algiers on a private
plane with the help of the French authorities. This development is likely
to open the door to similar actions by victims in other European
countries, adding yet more pressures on a regime which, while still
powerful, is increasingly perceived as fragmented and isolated.
(When quoting from this PIN, please cite MERIP Press Information
Note 56, "The Kabyle Riots: Repression and Alienation in Algeria," by Heba
Saleh, May 11, 2001. The author can be contacted at hebams@link.net.)
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Paul Silverstein's article, "The Rebel is Dead. Long
Live the Martyr!" in Middle East Report 208 (Fall 1998), examines the
disturbances in Kabylia following the killing of Lounes Matoub. The
article is accessible online at: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer208/silver.htm
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