en New riots broke out Monday in Algeria’s northeast Kabylie region
ALGIERS, April 23 (AFP) –
New riots broke out Monday in Algeria’s northeast Kabylie region, after hundreds flocked to the burial of a teenager shot dead by a gendarme, amid tense commemorations of a 1980 crackdown on minority Berbers.
The burial of Mohamed Guermah, who was accidentally shot Wednesday by a gendarme, according to officials, went ahead calmly in the village of Ait-Mahmoud on Monday afternoon.
But in neighboring Beni Douala, a group of youths unleashed riots, throwing stones and burning tires, witnesses said.
Newspapers reported that more than 30 people were injured in violent demonstrations near Tizi Ouzou, the main city of the Kabylie region, in the aftermath of Guermah’s death.
Authorities said the youth was killed by rounds from a machine gun that had fired after slipping from the hands of a gendarme in Beni Douala.
On Sunday the gendarmerie issued a communique stating that the youth was a member of a « group of aggressors » who had been arrested after committing a violent robbery.
The boy’s family and area residents rejected the official version of events and claimed he was murdered, demanding the gendarme be punished.
While tensions remained high Sunday in Beni Douala, fresh rioting broke out in Amizour, also in the northeast, 250 kilometres (155 miles) east of Algiers.
Several people were injured in the unrest, which broke out after gendarmes arrested two high school students and allegedly mistreated them.
The unrest coincided with the 21st anniversary of the « Berber Spring » of 1980 when authorities cracked down on demonstrations in Kabylie demanding formal recognition of the Berber language and culture.
The Berbers of Kabylie were in the forefront of Algeria’s liberation struggle against France, but a colonial divide-and-rule policy continued after independence in 1962, heightening antagonism between Arabs and Berbers, who charge systematic discrimination.
In Amizour on Sunday, demonstrators torched the gendarmerie and the town hall, looted the courthouse and vandalized lampposts. They also torched two police vehicles.
The demonstrators threw stones while police used teargas to quell the unrest, the reports said.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, an Algerian opposition leader on Monday urged the UN Human Rights Commission to « break the wall of silence » on rights violations in his country.
In an open letter to the commission, Hocine Ait-Ahmed, head of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), called for an international investigation into the human rights situation in Algeria.
Ait-Ahmed, who has been in exile in Switzerland since Algeria’s flawed presidential elections two years ago, alleged that the government had « activated different networks of political militia to create a climate of terror in Kabylie in order to discourage non- violent demonstrations to commemorate the ‘Berber Spring’. »
Algeria has been in the throes of a civil war waged by Islamic extremists since 1992, when the army prevented the now-outlawed fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) from taking power by calling off the second round of general elections it was poised to win.
The bloodshed has since claimed more than 100,000 mainly civilian lives
