------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 7, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- IN ALGERIA'S BERBER REGION: THOUSANDS JOIN AGAINST GOV'T 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) - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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