|
Fresh Riots in Algeria, Bouteflika Blamed
ALGIERS, June 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Fresh anti-government riots broke out in Kabylie and elsewhere in Algeria's northeast while an Islamic radical leader called on protesters to join his armed movement, Algerian press reports said Sunday.
Riot police and protesters clashed violently Saturday in Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou, the two main cities in the ethnic Berber region of Kabylie, where resentment over social conditions has boiled over into rage against the central government.
Anti-government unrest, which began spreading beyond Kabylie a week ago, also hit the far northeastern port of Annaba, some 600 kilometers (360 miles) east of the capital Algiers, where a young demonstrator was killed during the looting of a shop, the El Watan daily reported.
Meanwhile, the head of the Islamic Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) on Saturday urged Berbers to join its armed fight against the government, the daily Al-Fadjr (Dawn) reported.
GSPC leader Hassan Hattab, using his nom de guerre Abou Hamza, made the call in posters that appeared in the Kabylie capital Tizi Ouzou, Al-Fadjir said.
The GSPC, which is active in the Kabylie region, and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), with strongholds in mountains near Algiers, have both refused to lay down their arms in a civil war that has claimed some 100,000 lives since 1992, according to Western estimates.
The GSPC appeared to be taking advantage of the unrest that has engulfed Kabylie since mid-April, when a young Berber was killed in police custody.
In Bejaia on Saturday, fierce clashes surrounded the burial of a motorcyclist killed when he was struck by an unmarked police car.
In Tizi Ouzou, about 15 people were injured in riots, while elsewhere in Kabylie, clashes broke out in Azazga, where the Liberte daily said some 60 people had been hurt, and in Maatkas, Mekla and Tigzirt.
In the Setif region which borders Kabylie and where many people speak the Berber language Tamazight, rioting was reported in Ain Kebira, Tizi N'Bechar and Amoucha. Berbers are said by Western sources to make up some 30% of the total population.
The protest snowballed into a massive demonstration in Algiers on Thursday, when nearly a million people -- minority Berbers and mainstream Arabs alike -- filled the streets of the capital.
The largest demonstration in Algeria since independence degenerated into rioting and looting, claiming four lives, including those of two journalists, while about 1,000 people were injured.
The government and Kabylie leaders Saturday traded accusations of responsibility for the unrest in Algiers.
Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni told a press conference Saturday that the organizers had allowed the march to be infiltrated by armed vandals, adding that demonstrators had been caught "red-handed" while looting shops.
But the organizers of the march charged that the authorities fomented the rioting.
A "coordination" group made up of village and tribal elders told Sunday newspapers that the government had "panicked and responded with repression," leading to the "degeneration" of the protest.
One elder was quoted as saying that police should not have prevented marchers from proceeding to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's office in the heights of Algiers.
"We would have submitted our platform of demands and returned calmly to our buses," he said.
The Berbers have a 15-point list of demands calling for the withdrawal of paramilitary gendarmerie troops from Kabylie and an end to punitive police raids against the population.
They have also called for the recognition of the Berber language Tamazight as an official language and an emergency economic program to ease social frustration in the region.
Diplomats said the Berber unrest has sparked a wave of protests throughout Algeria by people who are tired of government corruption and rampant unemployment.
But a senior diplomat who wished to remain unidentified told an IslamOnline correspondent in Cairo that he expected Boutefilka to be " a new scapegoat" that the military will offer to justify the current state of chaos and security disorder in the Muslim Arab country.
Some key Algerian political and military figures later said they held Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika responsible for the unrest that broke out in the ethnic Berber region and spread recently to other parts.
The accusation was made in a joint statement sent to IslamOnline by Algerian Foreign Minister and former presidential candidate, Ahmed Taleb El Ebrahimi, the former secretary general of the Ministry of Defense, General Rashid Ben Yels, and Head of the Algerian Association for Defending Human Rights, Ali Yehya Abdel Nour.
"The president in particular is fully responsible for the human losses and the spread of anarchy because he was unable to understand the reasons behind his people's anger and for his failure to take the obvious necessary measures under the current circumstances," the statement said. "Instead, he (Boutaflika) stuck to his dubious silence, preferring not to take action and allowing the situation to worsen everyday."
The army under Bouteflika continues to draw criticism from human rights campaigners for alleged executions and for failing to prevent massacres.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected in April 1999 on a promise to restore national harmony and end years of bloodshed. The one-time foreign minister released thousands of armed activists from prison and won national backing for a civil concord offering amnesty to armed so-called Islamists. Hundreds of rebels have taken up the offer but violence has continued.
Algeria, a gateway between Africa and Europe, has been battered by violence over the past half-century and remains at war with itself. More than a million Algerians were killed in the fight for independence from France in 1962 and an estimated 100,000 have died in the current power struggle, according to the BBC online service.
With Additional Reporting by Mohamed Mosadek Yousifi
|
