A view of the marches from Brest to Geneva and from Montreal to Ottawa
The march is a strong sign of the resilience of the Kabyle people; of Kabylia on the road to liberation; an imprint of the strength of the idea of independence. With this movement, Kabylia has crossed another threshold; it is taking the political initiative to move beyond the sole framework of replying to the nefarious designs of the Algerian authorities. The enemy is only as strong as its opponent. United Kabylia is an impregnable stronghold, as it has always been throughout the centuries, whatever the domination that has temporarily weighed on it. Strengthened by the resilience of its people, it maintains the fire of resistance beneath the core of its values.
It has never submitted to the power of the coloniser, wherever he may have come from. Defeated militarily, expropriated, sequestered, placed under the eye of the storm by one of the world’s greatest powers, its people have not succumbed to ‘voluntary servitude’.
How can we explain their situation today? Why has tyranny become so entrenched that it has stifled the Kabyle voice? To the point of reducing its history to the official written history, as if its people were not part of the continuity of the great epic of humanity, as if the socio-cultural foundation were only fictitious, as if this people had no existence of its own, as if it had lived outside time, as if the history of this part of humanity was reduced in a discriminatory way to a few facts of princes from elsewhere.
The question takes us back to the thoughts of La Boétie, who wondered why so many men, so many nations, bow down to a single tyrant who, in the end, has no power other than that which he is given. In the circle of ‘voluntary servitude’, everything happens as if the tyrannised mass prefers to submit rather than assume, against all odds, its freedom. The reasons generally cited are :
Violence, lies, deception, distraction and dumbing down of the people through games, shows, and offers of sweets, all of which are the lures of servitude.
Tyrannical rulers use tricks to place themselves high in the hierarchy of intelligence and importance, notably by indoctrinating society to give them legitimacy.
The mediocrity and cowardice of a section of the people who become the servants of tyranny, some more than others going so far as to participate in the crime against their people. The relays, these servants of power, act for their own personal interests to the detriment of collective emancipation, in defiance of human dignity. They take no account of other people’s freedom of thought and being, tend to give orders, and believe that their situation is untouchable. They act as if these people were outside them.
Arthur Schopenhauer said: ‘It is intellectually simpler to believe than to think, for belief takes over where knowledge leaves off’.
The community, through its passivity, through the habit of accepting domination, i.e. the habit of obeying, participates in submission and allows tyranny to take hold. In this context, silence is often synonymous with cowardice.
It is in this sense that the ‘diaspora’ (a misnomer that I only use to designate the Kabyle community abroad, because it is not organised as such) must become more involved in the fight for the liberation of Kabylia. We have not seen it marvelling en masse at the great march and forming a sounding board. The facts, the government’s desire to wipe out Kabylia, to annihilate Kabylia, have been proven. No one is supposed to play down the tragedies that have already taken place, and will probably continue to do so. Let us not wait for the ‘flight of Minerva’s owl, which takes place only at nightfall’ (Friedrich Hegel). In other words, let us not be deaf and blind to historical events and only react once they are over. Let us rediscover the passion for freedom so dearly defended by our elders by participating actively in the dialectical process by which the Kabyle people are progressing towards a growing awareness of the imperative need to liberate themselves from the yoke of the most pernicious colonialism of a state/system that has openly put into practice a genocidal programme against the Kabyle people. Admittedly, this process involves conflicts, contradictions, and pain: our ancestral land has been burnt, its children, fauna, and flora charred, its children massively imprisoned and exiled, but it is moving towards the resolution of these contradictions and therefore towards the achievement of freedom and liberation for Kabylia.
This ‘march of the brave’, this fine political initiative, breaks the silence surrounding the Kabyle question and resounds like thunder in the skies over Kabylia. It will break the straitjacket of violence; it will reduce ‘the excessive desire for security’ that taints true freedom (La Fontaine); it will reawaken the passion for freedom.
Let us pay tribute to the marchers, whose only viatique is their convictions, their humanity, and their love of Kabylia, of Kabylian identity and of freedom (I apologise to those who are not in the photo).
Thanks to Quebec radio, because the French media, to their shame, have adopted an omerta in the face of the genocidal policy practised against the Kabyle people.
Raveh Urahmun, exiled on 26/09/2024