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Algeria Says France Behind Deadly Kabylie Riots
ALGIERS, June 28 (News Agencies) - Algerian parliamentarians said Thursday that France, the former colonial power, was behind two months of bloody unrest that mushroomed into wider anti-government unrest in the northeast Kabylie region of the Muslim Arab country, news agencies reported.
Several MPs from Algeria's ruling coalition said Wednesday and Thursday that Paris was "responsible" for violence and riots since mid-April that have left at least 60 people dead and some 2,300 others wounded, mainly in Kabylie, a Berber region in northeastern Algeria.
The MPs have demanded that Algeria break diplomatic ties with France.
MPs making the demand are from Islamic and nationalist wings of the coalition, and include members of the National Liberation Front (FLN), for long the sole ruling party in Algeria, the National Democratic Rally (RND), and two moderate Islamic parties, the Nahdah renaissance movement and the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP), led by Cheikh Mahfoud Nahnah.
Mustapha Bouguera of Nahdah, one of the smaller members of the governing coalition, said France, in complicity with "pro-westerners and Algerian activists", was at the root of the "disagreement and riots".
Blaming foreign "destabilization campaigns" for the wave of unrest in Kabylie, Algerian Prime Minister Ali Benflis said Tuesday to parliament 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."
He also blamed foreign multi-national companies for paying bribes to corrupt officials in developing countries, including Algeria.
Although he did not name France, he said the alleged 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."
Unrest broke out among Berbers in Kabylie after a youth was shot dead in police custody on April 18th, in what authorities said was an accident for which a policeman was arrested.
Riots in and around the main Berber towns of Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia have evolved into major anti-government demonstrations over issues such as unemployment, declining living standards, housing shortages and perceived endemic corruption in the political and military establishment.
Berbers, indigenous North Africans who make up about a third of Algeria's population, launched the protests but many disaffected people from the Arab-speaking majority have joined the demonstrations against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's government.
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