The government of Algeria reached out this week to the country’s Amazigh community, in an unexpected speech by Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia to Parliament on May 31. Calling for an end to the unrest in the Kabylie region that was sparked two years ago by the death of an Amazigh youth in the custody of security forces, Ouyahia spoke of the need for a renewed dialogue between the government and Amazigh leaders.
In the wake of the recent earthquake that killed 2,300 Algerians, public anger over the perceived weak response and regulatory negligence of the government has boiled over. With its already meager support waning further, the administration of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika seems interested in trying to put out at least one political fire, in the largely Amazigh region of Kabylie. “In agreement with the president of the republic, from this respected rostrum of the National People's Assembly and before the Algerian people who pin great hopes on us, I extend a friendly invitation to the Arouch movement for a dialogue on El Kseur Platform and on ways of bringing calm and security back to the hearts of people,” Ouyahia said. The call, he said, had nothing to do with “political calculation.”
According to Algerian Radio, while fielding questions from deputies of the National Assembly on June 3, the Prime Minister acknowledged that the government had no new proposals to bring to the table, beyond the call for renewed talks. He suggested that the government had learned from previous mistakes in the negotiation process, and again called on Arouch (village council) leaders to designate representatives for a new round of dialogue.
The set of 15 demands put forth by Amazigh leaders in June 2001 – collectively known as the El Kseur Platform – includes calls for the confirmation of their cultural and linguistic rights, the withdrawal of security forces from the region, trials of those responsible for the violence that resulted in over 100 deaths in the spring of 2001, and a comprehensive plan for social and economic development in the region. Amazigh leaders have derided the government’s previous efforts at negotiation, pointing out that it has made no concrete progress towards meeting the demands, while its gendarmes continue to detain and harass Amazigh activists and protestors. The president has maintained that the presence of the gendarmes in the area is non-negotiable, citing as a reason the need to monitor the very unrest that they seem to instigate.
Whether Ouyahia’s statements reflect a sincere, renewed commitment from the government to resolving the conflict in Kabylie is a matter of debate. The newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran detected new resolve in the announcement, and attributed it to the disastrous fallout of the earthquake. But a revealing statement on another issue made by the Prime Minister during the same question-and-answer session on June 3 suggests deep and fundamental obstacles to rapprochement, in the form of hard-line governmental attitudes towards Algerian identity. Ouyahia spoke briefly about school reform, one of the government’s core initiatives, emphasizing the importance of the “Arabic and Islamic character of the education system”, according to Algerian Radio.
Such deeply ingrained views among those in power – that any expression of Amazigh identity constitutes a threat to national unity – date back to Algeria’s struggle for independence from France, when Arabism served as a rallying point Algerians. But they ignore the fact that millions of Algerian citizens in the Kabylie and Aures regions speak Tamazight before Arabic, and many don’t speak Arabic at all. Unless and until the government recognizes the rights of the Amazigh to educate their children in their own distinct language and culture, substantive progress toward implementing the demands of the El Kseur Platform, and thereby quelling the conflict in Kabylie, will be impossible.
