I don’t really know Germany and Germany doesn’t particularly know Kabylia. It’s therefore difficult for me to draw a portrayal of my first homeland without risking to be banal for the Kabylian audience present here, on the one hand, and too much distant from the interest which the Germans whose friendship allow us to be listened could express to it, on the other hand. I hope that the pertinence of our account would only be equalized by the courtesy with which you take all the time to hear us. We will begin by introducing Kabylia and its people before relating the historical causes at the origin of the denials to which it’s subdued since 1962.

Today, Kabylia is a region in Algeria situated on the central Mediterranean coast. Though it doesn’t have precise geographic frontiers, it covers a surface of 35,000 m2. Country of mountains and of a temperate climate, our region lends itself to tourism because of the beauty of its coastal sites and its landscape if only there is not the traditional opposition of the Algerian authorities to its economic development. It has three big urban centers of more than 100,000 inhabitants, Vgayet, Tizi-Wezzu and Tuvirett. Its economy relies on the few plains that it has and on the mood of the Algerian leaders who sabotage it since 40 years at least. The valve of security against unemployment has always been immigration whose destination of predilection is France, because of a colonial past which brought them together during a century (1857-1962).

Kabylians are Berbers, like all the inhabitants of North Africa that Hegel proposed to link to Europe. Nowadays, they are still shocked that the Europeans give them identities in which they refuse to recognize themselves. Thus, when they are assimilated to the “Arabic community” or to the “Muslim community”, contemporary Kabylians are appalled. They aspire to be respected in their own Kabylian reality.

For us, Europe wrongly considers that North Africa is Arabic. Even if the North African states allege to be “Arabic” authorities for power and racism reasons induced by the a longstanding cultural alienation, they remain profoundly Amazighs (Berbers) in their historical, human, and cultural realities. These last years, Kabylians have become conscious of their specificity vis-à-vis the other Amazighs, beginning with their language which, even if it has the same origin with the spoken languages of these Berbers, is largely differentiated. It’s the same for the religious and cultural traits. Kabylians are secular, contrary to other Berber people who voluntarily are more religious.

To understand this situation and guess why we are in such a stand, let’s look at contemporary history. Our generation, doing its rereading of the events at the origin of the political cul-de-sac in which it found itself became aware today that all has started in 1926 with a serious mistake, a strategic error by which Kabylians, as a people, entrusted their destiny to others.

Kabylia was a confederation at the moment of its colonization by France in 1857. Its ultimate revolt of 1871 ended with a bloody defeat that left the political elites of that period traumatized to an extant that made them believe that it was impossible to defeat the French colonial power with the only Kabylian military forces. They thus moved to establish alliances with their immediate environment, indigenous and non Kabylian.

And so, in 1926, wanting to build a large North African coalition against the invader, they created an independentist movement called “The North African Star” and put at its head, voluntarily, a non Kabyle, Messali Hadj. This act was the result of strategic options meant to enlarge the liberation front, but at the expense of giving up the leadership of this organisation to their new friends, was the starting point of an uninterrupted process of strategic errors of self-exclusion from power and of identity self-denial that we hardly begin to contain. Our grand-parents would not have known to conciliate their eagerness for liberty and their duty of Kabylianess. They scarified their identity and their rights on the altar of their dream of the moment, yet no one forced them.

The vicissitudes of history, with notably the shooting pain of their humiliating defeat by France, don’t allow them to perceive the complementarity. We are still paying the price. The deaths of 2001 are therefore directly related with this strategic option of 1926; it’s the same for the undertaking of the FFS (Front of Socialist Forces) and the RCD (Rally for Culture and Democracy) [Two political parties whose leaders are Kabylians] consisting in being the brilliant seconds of a political system in which they could, in the best case, get a minority flap seat. The Kabylian aspiration to liberty is so powerful that once it’s channeled for the independence of Algeria, Kabylia was involved so deeply to such an extant that made it forget the existence of a Kabylian people. Its blending relationship with Algeria worsens its identity alienation in the first place and its self-declassification from a country to a region in the second place. In spite of the serious political crisis of 1949 within the single independentist organization of that era, the Algerian People Party (APP), the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTDL), and which would have alerted them on the forthcoming dangers for their identity and their status of an “ethnic” or “regional” minority, the Kabylians frenzied by the nationalist move forgot to question their approach and their convictions in favor of Algeria. While the Arabic-speaking Algerians didn’t hesitate at all to thwart the independentist movement to avoid the rebirth of a “Berberian” Algeria, Kabylians, themselves, preferred to move towards an Arabian Algeria instead of giving up the independence of this latter. Hard was the wake up in 1963.

After the independence of Algeria, Kabylians, like someone who sobers up or coming down back to earth, began to open their eyes and lose a few of their big Algerianist illusions. Under the leadership of the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS) of Hocine Ait Ahmed, they took arms against the Arabic-Islamic power which followed French colonialism. Too late. Kabylia, already exhausted by a liberation war of more than seven years, didn’t have strength to fight against a newly arrived army from the other side of the Algerian frontiers where it (this new army) was never involved in a battle against the French troops.

Even with this level of awareness about their former monumental political distraction, the Kabylians are unable to formulate their own nationalistic problematic. Ideology, once again, is at the origin of their historical stammering. The national movement that they carried out from 1926 to 1962 is, on the one hand, tied up by the democratic centralism, a characteristic of the European labour movements which inspired it, and the Jacobin centralism in which its founders are to be swivelling all their life, on the other hand. Here again, without the concepts and the theoretical arms that they don’t possess, they couldn’t avoid to be betrayed once again, fearing to be looked upon as “separatists”. Separatists, are not they regarded as such by their enemies?

Taking advantage of its victory over Kabylia, the Arabic-Islamic power launched, in vain, since 1965, a policy of arabization of the Kabylian children in order to end up with the seed of the local identity irredentism. To protect themselves, Kabylians spoke out about the concept of Berber identity instead of Kabylian identity believing that-as this latter would be regarded as a secessionist yearn-it would be cruelly molested, even in 1980, during the “Berber” spring. Following in our ancestors’ footsteps, we are, when it’s our turn, incapable to accept ourselves as Kabylians. By advocating Amazighness (Berberness) allows us to hide behind a political curtain against our arabization, our depersonalization. As we have always done, we devote ourselves in the Berber demands without thinking of the impasse in which we may found ourselves. Up to now, even after the Black Spring of 2001, most of our fellow citizens still ask for “the Amazigh language, as national and official language,” as a central demand, without thinking of the impact it may have on our future and towards which kind of new cul-de-sac it would lead us.

The massacre of 120 Kabyle youths on April 2001, during what would be known as “Black Spring”, witnessed the reemergence of the Kabylian traditional state structures: the Archs. Their primary manuscript, “the El-Kseur Plat-form” doesn’t mention the existence of the Kabylian people even after the historical march of June 14th, 2001, which gathered more than three million Kabyles who marched on Algiers. No people in the world, excepting ours, have succeeded to get one third of its population in the street.

Even so, the Arch movement has always defined itself as national but never Kabylian, regional. The reticences still have tough skin. However, a beginning of awareness concerning the Kabylian specificity emerges through the 15 demands contained in the plat-form. We notice a historical bound to put back the river in its bed-abandoned since 75 years ago. In fact, for the first time, there were not only Algerian demands. The document asks for the departure of military police forces from Kabylia and for an urgent socioeconomic project for the region. We even notice that there is a non-implicit autonomist demand when claiming “the transfer of the State executive prerogatives to the elected democratic authorities.” The autonomist movement was born a week before the El-Kseur plat-form. On June 5th, 2001, for the first time, we advocated regional autonomy as well as the existence of a Kabylian people who should be entitled to the official recognition of the Algerian state.

In 2007, the double commemoration of the Berber Spring of 1980 and the 2001 Black Spring mark a break with the resistance strategy of Kabylia since 1926. For the first time, only the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia (MAK) called for marches in favour of regional autonomy. The slogan, Tamazight (Berber) official national language, is put aside in support of a Kabylian regional State. The torch of the Kabylian struggle lights up, at last, a net and clear future. Despite the repression of our militants, the murder of my son, the causing of bankruptcy for political reasons to one of the first leaders of the MAK; in spite of being victims of disinformation and censorship from Kabylian political parties and organizations which play into the government hands, we have succeeded the feat of strength of redirecting the wind of history in favour of the Kabylian people’s freedom.

Munich le, 02/05/2007

Ferhat Mehenni

(Translated from French into English by Jugurtha)