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Salem Chaker, noted linguist, considers it is time to
raise the question of the necessity of autonomy, a heretofore
taboo subject. "There is no doubt," he says, "that
there exists a Kabyle people with its collective identity, its
culture, its language, and its terrority. It is time to prescribe
this evidence." Following is Professor Chaker's discussion
on the subject.
en français
Even if the politico-legal solutions are organized in close
geographical contexts, as in Catalonia or in the Basque country
in Spain, which could be extremely interesting and enlightening,
the idea of autonomy for Kabylia does not result from the mechanical
importation of an outside model. Autonomy imposes itself from
itself, on the sole basis of internal historic, sociological and
cultural fundamentals in Kabylia.
Their own language, a (collective) memory and specific historical
references, widely attested in the oral tradition as in the contemporary
culture and collective discourses - including, in regards to the
national movement and Algeria's fight of independence; a specific
cultural and literary tradition, a collective value system, continuously
reaffirmed, forms of organization and traditional solidarities,
still quite alive, such as the recall phenomenon "village
committees" and "arouche," a territory,
perfectly interiorized in the Kabyle culture and collective consciousness,
and even a form of specific religiosity, quite present among non-acculturated
segments of the society.
To call a spade a spade, there is no doubt that there is
a Kabyle people, with its collective identity, its culture, its
language, and its territory. It is time to prescribe this evidence,
this reality lived daily but always repressed and taboo in the
fields of political debate and projects.
The idea of autonomy is based on an entire cluster of objective
data, which are self-sufficient to themselves. It is also legitimized,
even if on the foundation, it appears secondary, by the absolute
defeat of the centralized Algerian nation-state, founded since
1962.
The centralized Algerian State totally failed in all the
missions and prerogatives that it assigned itself since Independence.
Extreme centralization, authoritarianism, bureaucracy, incompetence,
generalized nepotism, structural misappropriation of the system
for purposes of self- or group-interest made a foreign monster
of the State, hostile to its society.
General failure of the State, which scoffs at the most basic
rights of the population and which, for a long time, has not secured
any more her fundamental responsibilities: first, the right to
life and security, the right to equal justice, the right to health
and a decent level of life, the right to education and culture,
the right to work, which raises the inevitable question: what
use is the Algerian State? And the reply is rather clearly given
by the demonstrators of Kabylia: strictly none, in any case, nothing
positive. This finding goes for all of Algeria; it has become
so blatant that even the Islamist boogeyman is no longer enough
to mask this reality.
For its part, Kabylia has been submitted more, since the
Independence of the country, to the structural denial of its identity,
its language, and its culture. How can the Kabyles, other than
the auxiliaries of the central pouvoir, recognize a State whose
Constitution affirms that the sole national and official language
is Arabic? A State, which offers them, as their only prospect,
a slow death as berberophones and assimilation by arabization
with, at the most--after twenty years of open fighting--a graphic
museum and folkloric recognition. And to refer to "our ancestors,
the Berbers," while an ultrarepressive law of generalization
of the Arabic language is promulgated, does not constitute recognition,
but a careful burial.
In fact, since independence the Algerian political system
has steadily taken over the discourse and practices of the French
colonial State: extreme centralization, authoritarianism, externalization
of the society, reinforced by a total contempt of the people,
considered immature, and a culture profoundly anchored in force
and violence as instruments of political management. The power-holders
are comfortably established within the structures of the colonial
Administration: the prefects became walis, the departments
became wilayas, the gendarmerie became the National Gendarmerie
(Darak El Watani), but the name-changing did not induce
any change in its nature, and relations between the administration
and the administered remained the same. They have, without doubt,
even worsened because in the basic illegality of the pouvoir,
added to it, since Independence, are: the absence of any tradition
of service of the State; the absence of any form of appeal; unanimity;
and the appropriation of the national wealth for the benefit of
individuals and groups that control a state apparatus, which has
become the instrument of levy for an oligarchy that owes an accounting
to no one. On this plan, let us be clear, the state of exception,
the state of dispossession, does not date to 1988 or 1992; it
is structural and goes back to the same beginnings as independent
Algeria.
But beyond the direct responsibilities of the politico-military
oligarchy that governs Algeria since 1962, it is necessary to
stress that all of the Algerian political culture is limited by
the nationalist horizon and its unipolar and centralized conception
of the State and the nation. In all current politics, both the
opposition and those who cooperate with the pouvoir, the
ideology of the central State is so deep, they cannot conceive
another model of the State other than "a Republic, one and
indivisible" and a nation formed by a single people, with
its common language, culture, and history. As if the other configurations
did not exist, as if national unity inevitably implied linguistic,
cultural, and administrative uniformity.
In fact, to all, the weight of the French model of the nation-state
is all the more crushing as it was forcibly strengthened since
the beginning of Algerian nationalism, by arabist (the "Arab
nation") and islamist (the oumma) references, which,
themselves, are violently hostile to the internal diversity and
developed a discourse of oneness. All these impeding determinations
prevent the political actors from seeing the multiple experiences
of the world, the numerous multilingual, multi-ethnic States,
the federalist systems, the innumerable cases of regional autonomies,
in which the different constituents do not inevitably disembowel
each other every morning and can live together in harmony.
In this respect, the case of "Kabyle" political
parties is particularly revealing, almost caricatural: by refusing
stubbornly to place themselves as representative forces of the
region that supports them, and by asserting themselves, against
any evidence, to be "national parties," they eventually
lost a large part of their support from their real social base,
which does not recognize them any more. In fact, the Kabyle parties,
each with a specific approach, have, be they aware of it or not
and whether it is their will or not, agreed to play the role,
which was assigned to them by the pouvoir: to prevent,
in the name of a national unity conceived on the Jacobian model
of purest French tradition, the emergence of a real political
Kabyle force, capable of balancing the national chessboard. The
Kabyle political elite are frightened to the point of paralysis
by the idea of assuming as much as they should, that is to
say, representing the particular interests of their region.
One could believe that Amazigh Spring and the popular struggle
for Tamazight of the 1980's would have brought the Kabyle political
forces to reposition itself; nothing happened: as soon as these
"Kabyle" parties were legalized (1989), they yielded
to their tropism and, despite the snubs and denials brought many
times by electoral tests, they persevered in their claim of "national
parties." As for the Berber Cultural Movement, which nevertheless
enjoyed a quasi-hegemony in the region before 1989, it was exhausted
by divisions and fratricidal fights, led by the alignment with
the positions of both Kabyle parties, where it had accepted quarrels
and competitions, the modes of functioning and, especially, the
idea of the relation between society and the State. For Kabyle
organizations, failure seems consummate. Either they quickly redefine
themselves adequately with their sociological base, or they will
be condemned to disappear as insignificant.
The break with the idea centralized by the State and the
homogeneous nation is a historic necessity and political absolute
for the whole of Algeria, because it is one of the engines of
dispossession of society; it justifies the State-nation-people
confusion, which allows an oligarchy to appropriate the legitimacy
and to dictate the identity, culture, and language and to practice,
without sharing and without control, its arbitrary power, on the
people, in the name of the people. This break is the indispensable
condition in any overtaking of the multiple contradictions, which
Algeria experiences, and a return to a real exercise in popular
legitimacy. To defend the autonomy of Kabylia is not to call up
hatred among Algerians; it is simply to admit the political implications
of the sociocultural realities and to draw the consequences of
failure of the centralized and authoritarian State. It proposes
a new, peaceful course to try and resolve contradictions, which
the successive regimes since 1962 were incapable of handling other
than with repression, manipulation, and anathema. We speak, indeed,
of autonomy because we each know that the historic, social, and
human links between Kabylia and the rest of Algeria are broad
and deep: nobody thinks of denying this reality and of lauding
secession and independence. The majority of Kabyles live henceforth
outside Kabylia, and it cannot be a question of cutting the region
off from the comprehensive whole of which it is a part.
It is advisable here to specifically refute the pulsating
argument, emanating from "democratic" circles, according
to whom the Amazigh question is nothing more than a problem of
democracy, which would naturally find its solution within the
framework of a national democratic alternative, and that it need
not isolate itself from the democratic struggle. The Kabyles should,
as a consequence, mobilize only for democracy in Algeria. There
is here a staggering naiveté or a crude political manipulation.
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