INSURRECTION IN ALGERIA
It�s not at all surprising that news of the insurrection that has been
going on in Algeria since April 2001 has not been reported in US media. I
learned about it through an Italian anarchist website: www.guerrasociale.org.
The uprising was provoked when police murdered a high school boy. On April
18, 2001, riots began in Beni-Douala, an area of Tizi Ouzou in the region
of Kabylia about 70 miles east of Algiers. Riots and demonstrations quickly
spread to other villages in the region. Rioters attacked police stations
and troop detachments with stones, molotov cocktails and burning tires, and
set fire to police vehicles, government offices and courts. Government
attempts to quell the uprising failed. From the beginning, the rebels
showed an unwillingness to negotiate and refused all representation. By the
end of April, targets of collective rage broadened to include tax offices,
all sorts of government offices and the offices of political parties.
Rebels blockaded the main roads and looted government buildings and other
property of the rulers. By the end of a week the entire region of Kabylia
was in open insurrection. The state sent in its guard dogs to repress the
revolt, leading to open conflicts with deaths and injuries on both sides.
By the end of the first week of May, the insurgent movement began to
organize itself in village and neighborhood assemblies (the aarch) that
coordinate their activities through a system of apparently mandated and
revocable delegates who would be bound to a very interesting �code of
honor� a few months later. The only political movement that might have had
a chance of recuperating the revolt, the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS)
very quickly showed its true colors by offering to aid the president of
Algeria, Bouteflika, in organizing a �democratic transition�.
Since then the coordination of aarch has been organizing demonstrations,
general strikes, actions against the police and the elections.
By mid-June, the rebellion had spread beyond the borders of Kabylia, and in
Kabylia state control had been nearly completely routed. Offices of the
national police were thoroughly devastated, and the police themselves were
shunned. Because no one in the region would sell them food and other needs,
the government was forced to ship in supplies to them by helicopter and
heavily armed convoys.
At the end of June, the coordination of the aarch refused to meet with a
government representative, clearly expressing the attitude of the
insurgents. In mid-July the coordination of Tizi Ouzou adopted the �code of
honor� which required delegates to pledge themselves �not to carry forward
any activities or affairs that aim to create direct or indirect links to
power and its collaborators�, �not to use the movement for partisan ends
nor to drag it into electoral competitions or any other possibility for the
conquest of power�, �not to accept any political appointments in the
institutions of power� among other things. This pledge was put to the test
almost immediately when unionists and partisans of the left tried to
infiltrate the movement for their own ends. The failure of this
opportunistic attempt to hijack the movement was made evident during a
general strike on July 26, when demonstrators chanted: �Out with the
traitors! Out with the unions!�
Huge demonstrations continued. In mid-August, the insurgents banned all
officials from the Soummam valley. This was not just due to a government
celebration that was to occur there, but also because government officials
had begun to contact certain unidentified delegates of the coordination who
supported the idea of negotiation. Rather than weakening the struggle this
government ploy led the insurgents to ban all government officials from
Kabylia. The minister of the Mujaheedin had to cancel a trip to Tiai Ouzou,
and the minister of the interior was greeted with a rain of stones when he
came to install a new prefect.
At the beginning of October, the government banned a demonstration that was
intended to present a list of demands called the Platform of El-Kseur to
president Bouteflika. A massive array of counter-insurgency detachments was
used to block the demonstrators. These demands mainly deal with relief of
the immediate effects of government repression against the uprising (end of
judicial action against insurgents, release of prisoners, etc.), but also
include the demand for the immediate departure of all police brigades from
the region. The ban of this demonstration provoked further conflicts
between insurgents and the forces of order. On October 11, the
inter-wilayas coordination (of the aarch and other self-organized
assemblies and committees) decided that they would no longer submit the
demands of their Platform to any state representative, that the demands
were absolutely non-negotiable and that anyone who chose to accept dialogue
with the government would be banished from the movement. Disobedience is
total: taxes and utility bills are not paid, calls to military service are
ignored, the upcoming elections are refused.
On December 6, some self-styled �delegates� claiming to represent the aarch
planned to meet with the head of government. In protest a general strike
was called in Kabylia. Sit-ins blockading police barracks turned into
violent conflicts throughout the region, some of which lasted for three
days. Offices of the gas company, of taxes and of the National Organization
of the Mujaheedin were burned in Amizour. In El Kseur, there were looting
raids On a court and a judge�s house.
The struggle continued throughout December and January with protests and
road blockades. It intensified when a delegation from the aarch was
arrested in front of the UN office in Algiers on February 7, 2002. On
February 12, a general strike was called throughout Kabylia to protest the
reappearance of police on the streets. The entire region was shut down.
People assembled in front of the police barracks and there were conflicts.
At the end of February, president Bouteflika announced that there would be
elections on May 30. The movement responded by confiscating and burning
ballot boxes and administrative documents. At the beginning of March it
called for a boycott of the elections throughout Algeria.
Bouteflika tried to appease the rebels by offering compromises which were
refused and by moving police forces out of two major cities, But he
followed this with mass arrests of delegates of the aarch. On March 25,
security forces attacked a theater in Tizi Ouzou that was being used as the
office of the citizen coordination and 21 delegates were arrested. After
police searches many other delegates went into hiding. Soon conflicts broke
out. The government issued 400 arrest warrants against delegates, leading
to further demonstrations. Conflicts continued throughout April.
Despite government repression, the anti-electoral campaign of the aarch
went forward in May with calls to action, marches and the destruction of
ballot boxes. Students demanding the release of prisoners greeted president
Bouteflika with a rain of stones when he went to the university of Algiers
on May 20. The next day the students occupied the university demanding the
release of their comrades.
On May 30, election day, the entire region of Kabylia had less than a 2%
voter turn-out. People showed their preference for direct action by
barricading the streets, occupying the offices of the prefectures and the
municipalities, and strewing the public ways with the remains of burned
ballot boxes. A general strike paralyzed the region. There were conflicts
with the police and election offices were attacked and destroyed. In the
whole of Algeria, voter turnout was less than 50%, showing that the refusal
of elections had spread beyond the borders of Kabylia.
All through June, rebellion and social conflict continued through out
Algeria. On June 19, the government again tried to derail the movement,
authorizing movement prisoners to meet to discuss a proposal of a
government emissary arranged through the mediation of two supposed
delegates. The movement disowned these delegates, and the prisoners refused
this government ruse to pressure the movement into negotiation over the
Platform of El Kseur in exchange for the provisional release of those
arrested. Instead the prisoners issued a communiqu� conforming their
confidence in the coordination and their unwillingness to negotiate the
demands of their Platform or their release and that of all the other
prisoners.
By August, violent conflicts and an ultimatum issued by the movement forced
Bouteflika to pardon all the arrested delegates of the aarch. Upon release,
the delegates declared that the struggle would continue.
In October another election was called. The movement met it with a general
strike and demonstrations. There were conflict with the police everywhere.
Once again, about half of the eligible Algerians boycotted the elections.
In Kabylia, in spite of the participation of the FFS in the elections, 90%
of those eligible refused to participate in the elections.
This insurrection is of great interest to anarchists. There are no leaders,
no parties, no charismatic spokespeople and no hierarchical or
representative organizations of any sort behind it. It has been
self-organized by those in struggle in a horizontal method and with
specific guidelines to prevent the possibility of recuperation by parties,
unions, politicians or other unscrupulous individuals, and these guidelines
have been actively reinforced by those in struggle. The movement is equally
against all of the contenders for power: the military, the government,
Islamic fundamentalist, the left, the unions. It has successfully kept
police �quarantined� to their barracks for long periods of time. It has
carried out two election boycotts. It has forced the government to release
arrested comrades. And it has carried out the daily tasks of an ongoing
insurrectionary struggle. All through autonomous direct action.
Here is a statement of solidarity issued by some Italian comrades:
�Insurgent Algerians,
�The struggle that you have been carrying forward against all society�s
rulers since April 2001 is an example for us and for all the exploited.
Your uninterrupted rebellion has shown that the terrorism of the state and
the integralist groups, allied for a decade in the slaughter of the poor to
the benefit of the rich, has not lessened your ferocity. You have
understood that faced with the infectious disease of military dictatorship
and the plague of Islamic fundamentalism, the only choice is open revolt.
In the union of two capitalisms, the liberal one that privatizes and fires
people in mass and the socialist-bureaucratic one that tortures and kills,
you have responded with the unity of a generalized struggle.
�We imagine what it means for a state and its police to find themselves
facing a mass of rebels whose posters warn: �You cannot kill us, we are
already dead� as occurred in June 2001.But we can barely imagine what it
means for a region with a few million inhabitants, like Kabylia, where the
police are barricaded in their barracks, �quarantined� by the insurgent
population; in which elections are deserted in mass, the ballot boxes ond
the offices of political parties set on fire; in which the city halls are
deserted and boarded up.
�The politicians who sit in the parliament with zero votes obtained have
revealed the lie of representative democracy and the arrogance of a power
that is increasingly mafia-like to all. You have managed to shatter the
plans of anyone who tried to give your struggle a regionalist or
particularist image.
�The universal content of your demands � such as that of the immediate and
non-negotiable withdrawal of the police � can no longer be hidden.
�The autonomy of your movement, organized horizontally in the aarch
(village assemblies), can only unite all the leaders of Algerian society
and their accomplices in other countries against you. A revolt without
leaders and without parties won�t even find favor among the professionals
of international solidarity who are deprived, in this case, of charismatic
figures or sub-commandantes to idealize. Up to now, you have only been able
to count on yourselves. And the repression presses hard, with hundreds of
deaths, thousands of injuries, people disabled for life, so many missing,
the torture and arrest of many delegates of the aarch and many
demonstrators. With prisoners on hunger strike and many insurgents forced
to go underground.
�Now the radicality of what you have already done finds other accomplices
in the world, in order to break the information embargo and the murderous
violence of the state. The bullets that strike are also given by the
Italian government and Italian industries, Eni in the lead. The weapons
that are used against your demonstrations are often of Italian manufacture.
�COMRADES, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. MAY YOUR REVOLT EXPLODE EVERYWHERE.
�Some friends of the Aarch�
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/12/30/5696349
http://geocities.com/cordobakaf/algeria.html Another critique of the
uprising from Class Against Class.
