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Algeria Says Neo-Colonialism Behind Riots
ALGIERS, June 26 (News Agencies) - Algerian Prime Minister Ali Benflis blamed Tuesday foreign "destabilization campaigns" for two months of bloody unrest in the northeast Kabylie region of the Muslim Arab country.
Benflis told parliament in Algiers that the "events in some districts" were the outcome of "destabilization campaigns using all possible means, such as books, 'eyewitness accounts', special broadcasts ... waged from abroad."
The regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been shaken by mounting anti-government protests since mid-April, in which officials say 57 people have been killed and 2,300 injured.
Opposition parties and the local press put the death toll at up to 100 and say 3,000 people have been wounded, mainly in clashes between young demonstrators and paramilitary police.
"These campaigns are nourished by issues such as human rights, disappeared people, atrocities carried out by security forces, the question of who is killing whom, and now, that of ethnic minorities to protect," Benflis said.
Unrest broke out among the ethnic Berbers in Kabylie after a youth was shot dead in police custody on April 18, in what authorities said was an accident for which a policeman was arrested.
Riots in and around the main Berber towns, Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia, have since mushroomed into major demonstrations of anti-government feeling over issues such as unemployment, poor housing and perceived endemic corruption.
The protests have spread from Berbers to many disaffected people in the Arabic-speaking majority.
Faced with demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Algiers as well as in Kabylie towns, Bouteflika's military-backed regime has done little but pledge talks with unspecified interlocutors to discuss what the president acknowledged last week to be a "crisis".
Benflis clearly targeted the former colonial power, France, when he said the alleged foreign interference campaigns "increasingly show that neo-colonialism has not abdicated and abandoned its pretensions to control Algeria by any means, including dividing the people, the better to rule them."
The prime minister also commended "the people of Kabylie who have today categorically rejected, as they did before, this approach ... and shown loud and clear that there is only one people, an Algerian people, rich in its diversity and history."
Benflis was referring to revived Berber tribal committees and local authorities, which have rejected demands for autonomy made by members of the Berber Cultural Movement.
Nevertheless on Monday, a rally drew some 20,000 people in Tizi Ouzou, the provincial capital, to remember popular Berber protest singer Lounes Matoub, who was gunned down on August 25, 1998.
Organizers managed to prevent it from degenerating into more than isolated incidents of violence, including damage to the law courts, but anti-government feeling was running very high.
The Algiers regime has said Matoub was killed by suspected extremists who have waged a guerrilla war against it -- at the cost of 100,000 lives -- since 1992, but many of Matoub's supporters believe he was assassinated by government agents.
His death came shortly before legislation made Arabic the sole national language.
Demonstrators whose faces were painted with the Berber cross on Monday yelled anti-government slogans. Matoub lampooned both the Algiers regime and the Muslim activists in his songs.
Another target of the Algiers regime is the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), a party with Kabylie roots whose leader, Hocine Ait Ahmed, on Tuesday said that he had asked Belgium to draw Algeria to the attention of the U.N. Security Council.
Ait Ahmed, a veteran politician who now lives in Geneva, told journalists he had turned to Belgium as the country, which will take the presidency of the European Union in July.
"The Belgian authorities agreed to raise this possibility with their European partners," he said.
Ait Ahmed, 75, has already drawn strong criticism from Algiers for previous suggestions of U.N. involvement or setting up a transitional government. He said he would go back to the country if a nine-year-old state of emergency was lifted and freedom of expression granted.
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