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Bouteflika To Face Algeria Over Riots
ALGIERS, April 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika will address the nation Monday, amid threats to his governing coalition over a bloody security crackdown on riots among the minority Berber people.
Some 80 rioters, mainly youths, have been killed in a week of police clampdowns in the northeastern region of Kabylie, where clashes have gripped the main towns of Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia, the press reported on Monday.
The impoverished, mountainous region is traditionally a hotbed of opposition in Algeria, already reeling from nearly a decade of civil war with Islamists.
On Monday, El Watan and Authentic newspapers said 80 people have been killed since April 18th in unrest pitting youths against police following the shooting death of a teenager in police custody.
Faced with mounting opposition to his rule, Bouteflika was scheduled to make a broadcast on Monday.
Already under pressure from a restive military and critics unhappy with his handling of the Islamic insurgency, Bouteflika was dealt a further blow at the weekend when a coalition partner supporting Berbers in Kabylie threatened to leave the government.
Berber youths unleashed riots a week ago after one of their comrades was shot in police detention, and police manhandled three students shouting anti-government slogans.
The violence has been fueled by longstanding grievances among Berbers, who were at the forefront of Algeria's liberation struggle against France, about systemic discrimination, unemployment and overcrowding, conditions affecting all Algerians regardless of ethnic affiliation.
On Sunday, the leader of the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), a secular party that draws its support from Berbers, threatened to quit the government. The RCD, however, has itself received criticism for participating in violence independent of defending Berber rights.
The Berbers, an indigenous people in north Africa who prefer to call themselves the Imazighen, make up about a third of Algeria's population. Many resent the imposition of Arabic language and culture upon their society.
"A government that fires on the people does not deserve to be supported and should not receive backing from democrats," Said Sadi, a well-known human rights activist said.
The RCD has two ministers in Bouteflika's coalition government.
On Monday, a French newspaper quoted a senior RCD official as saying the party would officially announce its decision on Tuesday.
"We condemn the repressive treatment by the government and we are drawing political conclusions from this," Rafik Hassani, the party's secretary general, told Le Parisien newspaper.
"This is a break-up. The decision will be made official tomorrow, after a meeting of our national council," Hassani said.
Also Monday, French radio, citing an official from another political party with backing in the region, said that youth groups in Kabylie had become increasingly radical due to poverty and a clampdown on political and human rights.
"Their radical transformation is the result of an absence of political life in Algeria, and the strangling of public freedoms," Hocine Ait-Ahmed, the head of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), said in an interview on France Inter.
Ait-Ahmed said the Algerian people were "living under increasing poverty" and that young people no longer believed in political change.
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.
Algeria has been in the throes of a civil war with Islamic extremists since 1992, when the army prevented the now-outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) from taking power by calling off a second round of general elections.
The bloodshed has since claimed more than 100,000 lives, most of them civilians.
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