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Berber Protestors Clash with Police, 17 Killed in Algeria
ALGIERS, Dec 7 (News Agencies) - A group of unidentified assailants killed 17 people and injured four others in Algeria's Ain Defla region west of the capital, the official press agency said Friday, a day after a massacre and after Berber activists clashed with police during protests elsewhere.
The attack occurred late Thursday in Aarib, some 100 miles west of Algiers, the APS agency reported, citing local security sources who blamed the attack on Muslims.
The agency said security forces had launched "a vast operation to look for the criminals," but gave no details on the identity of the victims.
The violence brought to 48 the number of people killed in Algeria during the holy month of Ramadan, which began on November 16. More than 150,000 people have been killed in Algeria's civil war which erupted in 1992 when the army called off a second round of general elections the opposition Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win.
Earlier violence on Thursday saw thousands of young Berber protesters in Tizi Ouzou clashing with police outside the headquarters of the gendarmerie in this Berber town. Hardline members of Algeria's large Berber ethnic minority are protesting against moderates in their community who have agreed to dialogue with the Algerian government following Berber unrest earlier this year.
Pro-dialogue Berbers were scheduled later Thursday to meet Algerian Prime Minister Ali Benflis in Algiers to discuss demands for better social, economic and cultural conditions in the impoverished Kabylie region.
Police hurled tear gas grenades at the mainly young protesters, who hurled stones and chanted: "No to dialogue!"
They insisted the Berbers attending the Algiers talks had not been authorized to speak on behalf of the ethnic minority, whose grievances erupted into riots and bloodshed claiming some 60 lives and injuring about 2,000 between April and June.
"These people have no mandate from the people to negotiate the blood of our martyrs," Berber activist Belaid Aberkane said of the group in Algiers.
Thursday's clashes occurred outside the gendarmerie - the headquarters of the police wing of the army - in the Berber provincial capital of Tizi Ouzou.
"We fear bloody repression and we wanted to organize a peaceful sit-in but the gendarmes provoked us by throwing tear gas grenades from their building before emerging to face the militants," Aberkane said.
The Algiers government has called for dialogue with the "aarchs," the ancient Berber tribal and village councils that have assumed a key role in the protest movement. But that call was rejected.
Now, however, many Berbers are getting tired of the aarchs' intransigence and the resulting stagnation in the situation in Kabylie.
A group calling for dialogue with Algiers sprung up within the aarchs, and representatives from the dialogue group met on October 3 with Benflis. But members of the group were dubbed traitors for talking to the government and "banished" for forty days by the core of the aarch movement, which up to now has constituted the movement's majority.
Berber activists say a 15-point list of demands agreed in June in the village of El-Kseur, and called the "El-Kseur Platform" is non-negotiable.
Among Berber demands are the official recognition of their language Tamazight, an economic recovery plan for Kabylie, decent unemployment benefits, the departure of gendarmes from their communities, and compensation for victims and their families injured in police-related violence.
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