Does Algeria practice an anti-Amazigh apartheid policy?
By Rachid RAHA (President of the World Amazigh Assembly)
On this November 1st, which marks the 70th anniversary of the Algerian revolution’s uprising and the 62nd anniversary of Algeria’s independence, we would like to draw the international public’s attention to the Amazigh question and the state of human rights regarding its indigenous populations.
Despite Algeria being a pioneer in recognizing Amazigh identity and the rights of Amazighs following the Amazigh Spring of 1980, the introduction of the Amazigh language in schools in 1995 following the school bag strike, its recognition as a national language in 2002, and as an official language in the constitutional reform of 2016, the Algerian state deliberately practices an anti-Amazigh apartheid policy.
The Algerian generals, who hold true power in Algeria, are responsible for various crimes committed against the indigenous Amazigh communities.
Let us mention the case of the bloody repression of the “Black Spring,” where the Algerian gendarmerie impudently killed 127 young people and injured more than 10,000 in the Kabylie region in April 2001. Our friend Belaid Abrika, a leader of the Aarchs, who is currently and unjustly sentenced to three years for daring to remember the Berber Spring of April 20, 1980, had the merit of accompanying me to the European Parliament in November 2009 and providing a complete file on these serious human rights violations to the Vice-President Ms. Isabelle Durant. And to this day, no officer has been brought before military or civilian courts!
Starting in 2013 and during the years 2014 and 2015, it was the turn of the riots in the Mzab region, populated by more than 200,000 people of Ibadi religious rite. These Amazigh Mozabites were threatened by the community that calls itself “Arab” from the Chaâmbas, who began to burn their businesses and homes, and found themselves abandoned by the authorities. Instead of rescuing them, the authorities unleashed themselves against these victims of the Mozabites, whose riots resulted in the deaths of young people, destruction, and looting. This was followed by the imprisonment and persecution of their leaders, as well as the death by hunger strike of their leader, the late Dr. Kameleddine Fekhar, during the “Hirak of Algeria.” Other leaders, Khodir Sekkouti and Salah Abbouna, who managed to escape and reach Spain, were pursued and imprisoned by the Spanish authorities because the Algerian authorities labeled them as terrorists! Fortunately, our NGO’s lawyer in Madrid managed to stop the former government president Mariano Rajoy’s decision regarding their extraditions in October 2017 and secured their status as political refugees in Spain!
The Algerian generals continue their racial discrimination policy against Amazigh activists, who are subjected to arbitrary arrests, judicial prosecutions, and summary judgments. Thus, the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), chaired by our friend the singer Ferhat Mehenni, a movement of a peaceful essence, is treated as a terrorist movement, without any material evidence or incitement to murder, in order to persecute and incarcerate dozens of Kabyle activists like Bouaziz Ait Chebib or Kamira Nait Sid, who just spent three years in prison. The latter is again threatened with returning to prison under the threat of new political trials. Similarly, Mohand Taferka, 75 years old, a defender of Amazigh culture and a prominent figure in the Kabyle diaspora in France, who was supposed to leave Koléa prison on November 15, has just been sentenced again to an additional year of prison due to this false accusation of “harming the integrity of national territory.” Recently, they attempted an extradition request against his spokesperson Aksel Bellabbaci, which the French justice is currently processing!
Journalist and Chaoui writer Hichem Aboud, a member of our NGO, who had the merit and courage to denounce the massacres and bloody crimes against civilian populations during the black decade of the 1990s in his bestseller “The Generals’ Mafia,” where they caused the deaths of more than 200,000 victims and tens of thousands of missing persons, just miraculously escaped from an abduction attempt by the Algerian military intelligence services in Spain, without any respect for the sovereignty of this European country. He was abducted in Barcelona on October 17 and miraculously freed by the Spanish Civil Guard in Lebrija the next day.
Why do the Algerian authorities practice such an anti-Amazigh apartheid policy?
To try to provide some explanation, it is that the “senior officers,” many of whom are from the French colonial army, known as the DAF, who were deserters from the French Army and managed to infiltrate and lead the FLN, suffer from a deep inferiority complex as colonized individuals. As the famous anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, fully committed to the Algerian revolution, stated in his immortal study “Black Skin, White Masks,” we can easily substitute “Amazigh Skin, Arab Masks.” Fanon said: “Any colonized people—meaning any people within whom an inferiority complex has arisen due to the entombment of local cultural originality—stands in relation to the language of the civilizing nation, that is, metropolitan culture. The colonized person will have escaped from their jungle to the extent that they have made the cultural values of the metropolis their own. They will be whiter to the extent that they have rejected their blackness, their jungle.” This is precisely how the “Algerian generals” of Amazigh origin behave; by repressing their counterparts as much and as violently as possible, they believe they will please their supposed “Arab” master or leader, who is supposedly from the Near East or Arabia or has maraboutic origins linking them genealogically to the prophet!
Additionally, let us recall that on the day after Algeria’s independence, President Ahmed Ben Bella declared in his speech on October 5, 1962: “We are Arabs, Arabs, ten million Arabs!” He added on July 5, 1963, that: “There is no future for this country other than in Arabism,” considering the indigenous Amazigh identity as a germ of division threatening national unity!
All the Algerian presidents who succeeded him have insisted on displaying and reaffirming their supposed “Arabness,” whether it was Houari Boumediene, Chadli Bendjedid, Liamine Zeroual, Aziz Bouteflika, or Abdelmadjid Tebboune, whereas in reality, they are merely Arabized Amazighs, identity-aliens Africans!
On the other hand, it is no coincidence that a large portion of Algerian officers are of Amazigh origin, such as the late General Gaïd Saleh, Generals Taoufik Medienne, M’henna Djebbar, Said Chengriha…! They distinguish themselves by their ruthless repression and persecution of their fellow countrymen! For example, it seems highly probable that the bloody Kabyle general Tewfik Mediene ordered the assassination of our famous rebellious singer Lounès Matoub on June 25, 1998!
During the era of President Aziz Bouteflika, his Kabyle minister at the time, Khalida Toumi Messaoudi, whom we had the opportunity to meet in the city of Granada, was behind the illegal imprisonment for 38 hours at Houari Boumediene International Airport of about fifty Amazigh activists coming from Morocco, who had accompanied us to participate in the fifth general assembly of the World Amazigh Congress, preventing the Moroccan delegation from accessing Tizi-Ouzou on October 29, 2008!
In conclusion, the Algerian generals, who have seized power, have betrayed the ideals of the martyrs of the November 1, 1954 revolution, behaving as “neo-colonialists” practicing an openly “anti-Amazigh apartheid” policy, continuing to wield “state terrorism” in order to persecute Amazigh citizens as internal enemies of the Algerian homeland! Because of their unforgettable and bloody crimes and political assassinations, we are obliged, now more than ever, to bring them before the International Criminal Court in The Hague! Any assistance in this regard would be welcome.
