History sometimes has an implacable sense of irony. After spending more than half a century supporting, funding, and instrumentalizing separatist movements against Morocco, the Algerian military regime is now confronted with a demand for self determination within its own borders: that of the Kabyle people.
Kabylie, a land of ancient culture, resistance, and dignity, is now openly demanding what the Algiers power structure has consistently denied its own citizens: the right to freedom, recognition, and sovereignty. A legitimate aspiration, born of decades of marginalization, political repression, and institutionalized contempt by a regime locked down by the generals.
Officially, Morocco respects the territorial integrity of Algeria, in accordance with the principles of international law and its constant diplomatic doctrine. But in Moroccan public opinion, as among many intellectual, media, and political figures, the Kabyle cause resonates as a stinging reminder of the contradictions of an Algerian power that preaches abroad what it refuses at home.
Since the Black Decade, Kabylie has paid a heavy price for state violence, arbitrary arrests, and the stifling of all autonomous political expression. The Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), qualified as “terrorist” by Algiers, is in reality only the symptom of a system incapable of offering anything other than force and fear to govern.
What the Algerian regime fears is not just Kabylie, but the example it embodies: that of a people who reject military order, the confiscation of popular sovereignty, and the transformation of the state into a security apparatus serving a caste. A regime that its own opponents describe as opaque, authoritarian, and cut off from any democratic legitimacy.
The calls launched by certain Kabyle activists to seek moral and political support from Morocco illustrate less interference than a profound despair in the face of a power deaf to any peaceful demand. Above all, they recall a truth disturbing to Algiers: one cannot eternally export instability without it eventually knocking on one’s own door.
Today, Kabylie holds up a mirror of its own practices to the Algerian military regime. And the message is clear: one cannot defend separatism in others and criminalize it at home. History, sooner or later, demands accountability.
Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv