Algerian governing powers has, for the umpteenth time, attacked Kabyles of Christian belief. In less than two months, six churches have been closed despite the opposition of the Christians.
A touching video, dated 14/10/2019, shows the violent evacuation of the church of Makouda and the affixing of seals on its door by the police. This anti-Christian policy of successive Algerian governing powers is primarily an anti-Kabyle policy.
It results in widespread repression against the values of Kabylia, made of freedom of worship, tolerance, and democracy. Faced with the Kabyle-Algerian protest of the regime in place, the response was the ban on the Kabyle flag, the wearing of Kabyle dresses and jerseys of the JSK (Youth Sports Kabylie).
This offensive now extends to the Christian faith. In short, it is forbidden to be Kabyle. Even the twenty or so “personalities”, headed by Taleb Ahmed, former minister of Boumediene and Chadli, who signed this 14/10/2019, a miserable statement proposing a way out of crisis to the military group, insist on the need to evacuate any Kabyle sign of weekly demonstrations in Algiers because “detrimental to national unity”. Hide these Kabyles so I don’t have to see them!
These ridiculous gestures will not change anything to the Kabyle question which remains posed in a more and more haunting way. Political problems are never solved by repression. It is not by forbidding a faith that it will be abandoned by its faithful, it is not by prohibiting, a flag that it will cease to be loved, on the contrary! The Kabyle interim government in exile is making a vehement protest to the international organs to which it asks to question the Algerian government on these attacks on the rights of the citizen. Particularly to the countries that sponsor the military dictatorship and the Algerian colonialist.
Faced with these incessant assaults on Kabylia, the Kabyle people and their values, there is only one solution: the dissolution of the colonial ties between Algeria and Kabylia. Independent Kabylia will make secularism prevail at home as freedom of worship, in the private sphere, equality in law among all citizens, respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy.
The Anavad gives its total support to the Kabyle Christians, as well as to all its citizens imprisoned by the Algerian colonial power, for the crime of Kabylity.
Ferhat Mehheni
Exile, the 18/10/2019