The Algerian state and Kabylia: what relationship?
ALGERIA AND KABYLIE:
FROM RELATIONS OF FILIATION TO RELATIONS OF DEFIANCE
I know a woman who sacrificed her whole life to bring up her son. She had to endure a thousand and one hardships so that her child could grow up with dignity. But when he grew up, and as his supreme reward, he began to suspect her, to hit her, to humiliate her, to tyrannise her so as to lock her up at home, to veil her and hide her from the eyes of others, like a shameful disease. She, who for his sake had confronted the dictates of tradition and the laws of infamy, finds herself subjected by her own son to what she has always refused from others: chains. This story, however naïve and distressing it may seem from a moral point of view, is no less close to the subject at hand, which is the relationship between the Algerian state and Kabylia.
For the sake of convenience, we will deliberately confuse the Algerian State and power, Kabylia, Kabyles and the Kabyle people. In theory, the State is a set of institutions that concentrate a country’s decision-making centres and its political organisation. It is a set of levers and instruments at the service of a power that gives it its true nature, whether despotic or democratic. She is a territory: the homeland of the Kabyles, one of the peoples denied by Algeria within its own borders.
PARENTAGE: THE SURROGATE MOTHER AND INGRATITUDE
Kabylia predates the Algerian state. It existed separately from the environment into which French colonisation forced it when it had to create Algeria. The Algerian State was originally French and it was the decolonisation struggle, in which Kabylia was involved body and soul, that changed its ‘nationality’, not its nature.
She carried it in her belly for a long time like a precious being, protecting it with all her strength and nourishing it with her flesh, blood and tears. From the North African Star (ENA) of 1926 to the National Liberation Front (FLN) of 1954, via the Algerian People’s Party (PPA) of 1936 and the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD) of 1946, which began the organisation of the armed struggle, the bulk of the troops and the leadership were Kabyle. She nourished it so much with her own hope of freedom and dignity that tens of thousands of Kabyles ended up in prison, tortured and killed, right up until her birth. This was a very difficult period, which took place in three stages: The outbreak of the so-called ‘war of independence’ on 1 November 1954, the declaration of which was made in a Kabyle village, then the Soummam Congress on 20 August 1956 and finally the Evian Agreements negotiated and signed by another Kabyle, Krim Belkacem, putting an end to more than seven years of war. She nurtured this fledgling state so well that she gave it all her best children. Let us not be afraid to say that Kabylia is the mother of independent Algeria. While the latter was being sold off by the Islamists, who were then known as the Oulémas and who did not want independence as long as France did not harm Islam, She organised and fed the national liberation movement with men, equipment and ideas until 19 March 1962. Of all the regions of Algeria, none equalled Kabylia in militancy and sacrifice. [Let us digress for a moment: the scandal of hundreds of thousands of bogus ex-servicemen receiving pensions from the Ministry of ‘Anciens Moudjahidines’, which has been in the news recently in the Algerian National Assembly, is not just a matter of corruption, individuals or money. She is essentially due to a desire to stuff the lists of veterans; the Algerian authorities have always been concerned not to reveal official statistics showing that the Algerian war was fought (almost) exclusively by the Kabyles. These forgeries are therefore the result of a deliberate official policy that has been pursued, repeated and reinforced for decades since 1962].
But once independence was achieved, this State, which was the child of Kabylia, turned against it. She realised the hard way that, at best, she had only been its surrogate mother. The Algerian State was a sort of cuckoo baby in the Kabyle nest from which it expelled the authentic child of hope. Once up and running, this usurping State has turned out to be the State of Arab-Islamism and has joined its adopted family, of which Kabylia is the whipping boy.
RELATIONS OF MISTRUST: COLONIAL RELATIONS, IMPERIALIST RELATIONS
The relations established between the Algerian State and Kabylia in the immediate aftermath of Algeria’s independence were those which prolonged the domination of the Kabyle people and immediately plunged them back into the struggle against the relentless policy aimed at depersonalising them. Even before the new state had sketched out a policy towards them, the Kabyles had instinctively taken up arms against it from September 1963 to April 1964. Even if, even today, the main players at the time deny this with all their might, our reading of history in the light of these 45 years of ‘independence’, whatever the tawdry ‘nationalists’ may think, shows that the war of the Front des Forces de l’Afrique (FFAA) was a war of the Kabyles, shows that the war waged by the Front des Forces Socialistes against the Algerian government was a war to decolonise Kabylia, the unfortunate outcome of which condemned so many generations to fight for Kabyle dignity, as they had done in the aftermath of the defeats against French colonisation (1857 and 1871). It was clear that the ‘separatism’ of which the FFS was unjustly accused was nothing more than the demonisation of its noble enterprise against this new colonialism. Once again, another language, another history and another culture were being imposed on the Kabyle people. After their children were taught ‘Our Ancestors the Gauls’ in the French colonial school, since 1962 they have been required to recite ‘Our Ancestors the Arabs’ in the Algerian neo-colonial school. These new relationships, which we have struggled to name for over 45 years, are finally coming to light: when someone bans your language, your culture and your identity from your home, and tramples on your collective dignity as a people, that is what is called colonialism and imperialism. This automatically establishes a permanent relationship of mutual distrust, at least until the situation of domination prevailing between the two parties comes to an end. So they provoke each other, they grapple, they test each other at every turn, gauging each other’s strength, vigilance and degree of endurance. The tug-of-war goes on and on, even if, in theory, the physical balance of power is heavily skewed in favour of the State. In appearance only. In truth, the only loser at the end of the day is none other than the colonialist state whose objective, however shameful and unavowable, is an imperative beyond its means, a matter of life and death which, as is its nature and destiny, condemns it to perish, sooner or later, from its atrocities on others. People, on the other hand, never die. I recently saw a short film made by the Algonquin Indians of Quebec, showing how Canada had tried to get rid of these last of the Mohicans in a ‘civilised’ way. The 1923 report advocating the assimilation of the Indians noted that ‘as long as they speak their language, they will be a people apart’. And it was not without such an ulterior motive that the French colonial authorities decided as early as 1880 to open French schools, primarily in Kabylia, where the identity factor was undoubtedly the strongest. Today, some of Geronimo’s descendants are in the process of building Nunavut, one of the largest states in the world in terms of surface area. It’s one of those fortunate twists of history that give unscrupulous powers everywhere a stiff neck.
So the territorial dismemberment of Kabylia, the burning of its olive groves and forests, the relentless Arabisation, the military encirclement and occupation of its territory, the recruitment of Islamist terrorist recruits to inculcate fundamentalism in our children, the secret agreement between the authorities and the Islamists to make Kabylia a training ground for unleashing violence and insecurity, with rackets, kidnappings, false roadblocks, encouraging drugs and prostitution there, to sabotage the economy by encouraging relocation and disinvestment, to increase unemployment, to humiliate people through ‘Arab-African festivals’ of anything and everything in its major cities, to refuse to have Kabyle television and to refuse to have a radio station that does not broadcast in Arabic, the banning of Berber and Kabyle first names, of associations working for Kabyle identity or to bring Kabylia closer to other peoples of the world (even a Kabyle donkey festival was banned in Vgayet! ), the rigging of proportional elections, the lack of will to satisfy our demand for regional autonomy, which is not only beneficial for Kabylia, the censorship of the MAK, the pressure on its activists…. All this will serve the government no purpose. Nothing at all, except to reinforce Kabylian national consciousness and cohesion, and at the same time to further strengthen their already great mistrust of the government. Contrary to appearances and to what the sceptics among us think, time is working for us. If, at times, the Kabyle people give the image of sleeping water, it’s all to the good. This is always the case from time to time, during certain privileged periods when some think of the establishment of charming relations between the two adversaries.
CHARMING RELATIONSHIPS: DUPES OR SNAKES?
On at least two occasions, charming relationships were attempted on both sides. Having adopted a low profile following its defeat in the FFS war, Kabylia in 1969 welcomed Boumediene, the dictator, almost as a hero, with all the honours, adorning him with a burnous, the supreme symbol of Kabyle respect. In fact, She had just validated her saying that it is advisable to kiss the enemy’s hand as long as you can’t bite it. Especially as the foreigner had in his suitcases DA100 billion with which to build the ENIEM household electrical appliance factory at Oued Aissi, near Tizi-Ouzou. While the elites of the time were those legitimised by the war of independence, aspiring to share in the spoils of war in terms of positions and material comfort, those in power needed to show the outside world that the hatchet had finally been buried between them and Kabylia, that the latter had been definitively ‘pacified’. It was a time when the single party had woven a network of FLN cells in every Kabyle village and neighbourhood. Never before had the Algerian authorities so mastered and charmed Kabylia as they did in the early 1970s. It was during this phase of mutual fascination that Kabyle radio, inherited from the colonial era, opened up to politicised presenters, the figurehead of which is undoubtedly the man we still affectionately call ‘Ben’ or ben Mohamed, while at the same time allowing a modernised Kabyle song to break through in the wake of ‘Vava Inouva’. It was a short time. Behind the charm, everyone was preparing their weapons for the coming battles. At the same time as the Military Security was recruiting almost exclusively Kabyles to keep an eye on their brothers’ movements, the Arabisation policy was in full swing. All education, the environment, place names and first names were Arabicised. The Kabyles, for their part, were awakening their youth to their forbidden identity, language and culture. The Berber Academy, based in Paris, of which Mohand Arav Bessaoud was the charismatic figure, published magazines that were passed on under the cloak to secondary school students in Kabylia. Clearly, it was a snake charmer’s market on both sides, and nobody was fooled. At the end of 1975, the Kabyles organised an attack on the only official daily newspaper, El-Moudjahid, read by them because it was French-speaking. In 1977, they defied Boumediene in person by showing irreverence towards him and the Algerian national anthem, which they heckled at a match of the Kabyle fetish team, J.S. Kabylie. In retaliation, the club’s name was changed and it was not until ‘democratisation’ in 1989 that the club’s acronym was restored. But it wasn’t long before the divorce was finalized on both sides: it was the ‘Berber Spring’ of April 1980. It should be remembered that Algeria had been independent for a generation and that the Kabyle elites who had fought the war against colonisation had been largely discredited by their corruption and compromise with the regime in power. It was relatively easy for a new generation emerging from the Berber identity struggle to take over the Kabyle struggle. The entire period of President Chadli’s single party (1979-1988) was a daily tug-of-war between intractable Kabyles and a government ulcerated by so much resistance and aplomb on the part of an intrepid Kabyle youth. October 1988 ushered in a new era in which another phase of seduction would begin. Paradoxically, this was the moment that proved fatal for Kabylia, where two political parties, for which I bear my share of responsibility, were at war. Each of them was trying to be the only Kabyle interlocutor with the Algerian authorities. They were fighting for a folding seat. Kabylia is blinded by fratricidal and clownish hatreds. The FFS recruited from the FLN and the dignitaries in power, while the RCD took refuge with the regime’s patrons. There were ministers from both camps. For a moment, those in power thought they had finally found a way to gain time. But having entered the democratisation phase, they could not fail to offer their new allies a few crumbs to legitimise their position and the ambivalent nature of their relations with them. Half fig, half grape. On both sides of the Kabyle partisan divide, there was the idea, which persists to this day, that ‘if I play the regime’s game, I might one day accede to supreme power, and then I would make amends with my own people who might have thought that I had betrayed them’. This is why the leader of the RCD, but not only the FFS (1999, October 2002), keeps pledging to the government by legitimising its rigged elections and constitutions. Thus, on 12 November 2008, by voting against the constitutional revision, the RCD validated its content by the law of the majority which resulted from it. To take part in a vote is to accept the result. If it had boycotted this farce, it would have shown that it was not the ‘democratic’ and Kabyle guarantor of the regime in power.
Despite everything, this phase of our history saw some concrete achievements, such as the opening of Amazigh language departments in Tizi-Ouzou and then in Vgayet, a 7 p.m. Tamazight news bulletin on television, the start of primary Tamazight teaching and the establishment of a higher institution attached to the Presidency of the Republic responsible for Amazighness, following the 1994-95 school boycott.
But as the situation became a little stale and internal quarrels took precedence over the common Kabyle cause, the ‘Black Spring’ of 2001 swept them away and replaced them with the ‘Archs’. Following a call from the latter, the march of 14 June 2001 drew more than a million Kabyles into the streets of Algiers, taking the Kabyles to a new level. They finally felt they had a national consciousness as a people. For three years, no minister had been able to set foot on Kabyle territory; for three years, the gendarmerie had been persona non grata in Kabylia; for three years, there had been a Kabyle government as in the old days, with no police, army or prison. For three years, there was no more crime than before or than elsewhere. It is the authorities who are going to play on the players in the Arch Movement to break them up, while fuelling acts of banditry and insecurity to discredit them.
CALL FOR A BOYCOTT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
We are still at the stage where Kabylia, more aware than ever of its rightful place, is loudly asserting its right to self-determination in relation to the authorities in Algiers. Arm wrestling is now the rule between the two intractable parties. The government will once again try to give itself a few more clients, to have one or two more ministers of Kabyle origin, like the current Prime Minister, to validate the forthcoming presidential elections.
Faithful to the Kabyle tradition of struggle, to the line of conduct of our elders, to the higher interests of the Kabyle people, in the name of the MAK and of my absolute duty as a militant, I call on the Kabyle people, in their totality and wherever they may be, to boycott the Algerian presidential elections. This is the only peaceful and civilised way we have to win our rights as a people.
Ferhat Mehenni
The Algerian state and Kabylia: what relationship?
