Text of the conference by Ferhat Mehenni, President of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK) and the Kabyle Provisional Government in Exile (Anavad), hosted this Saturday, May 06, 2023 in the capital of the American state of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia :

Kabylie on the way to independence

The long march of Kabylia towards its independence reached its point of no return with the establishment of Anavad, on 06/01/2010.

Started the day after the battle of Icherriden (24/06/1857) at the end of which Kabylia lost its warlord Fadma N Summer and its sovereignty, it almost led to the insurrection of 1871, at the call of King Mokrani and his support Chikh Aheddad. The march of the Kabyle people towards their freedom had long been lost in dead ends: that of the independence of Algeria first, then those of the tenacious illusions of democratizing it, of berberizing it, even kabylize…

Kabylia only really got back on the right track from the Declaration of 05/06/2001. This will surely shock some minds frozen and mired in visions of at least 40 years ago, but the facts are stubborn and our conclusion on this recent past deserves to be made public. Neither the FFS war (1963-65), nor April 1980, nor even the school boycott (1994/95) had escaped the alienating ideological matrix of Algerian nationalism and Berberism of the 1940s which had given birth to them and which continue to produce devastating mirages among the Kabyle political elites.

From 2001, it was the MAK which, in small successive steps, patiently put Kabylia back on the road that leads to itself and to its own freedom. Once the Anavad has emerged, there is no going back. Now we can only move forward. All those who had not perceived the logic and the necessity of it learned it at their expense. The period during which the MAK claimed autonomy was only a temporal parenthesis, a lapse of time which goes from lost Kabylia to that of Kabylia which has found its way back. Minimalist and timorous claims, however generous they may seem, are relegated to the past and unhooked from the locomotive of History while the strategic objective of independence by peaceful means is acclaimed.

With its powerful symbols such as the national anthem and the Kabyle flag, the Imni (parliament), the identity card and so many other attributes of sovereignty which it has endowed itself with, Kabylia is definitely committed to the way to its independence. Even better! The very idea of independence of Kabylia, anchored in the depths of the soul of each Kabyle, is likely to eternally reject the integration of Kabylia into another political entity than its own.

The dropout of Kabylia from the Algerian team is now consummated. It is due both to its aspiration and its own will to become independent again and to the whole of the colonial and criminal treatment that Algeria has opposed to it since 1963.

Among the major cultural traits that characterize each Kabyle we first find the love of freedom, the independence of his people, its language and land. The Kabyle people have never accepted being governed by foreigners. Since the last war in Kabylia (1963-65), the first being the one that opposed it to France (1954-62), the Kabyles have never really considered the Algerian government as their own. It is still foreign to them even if Kabyles have often been part of it, sometimes even as prime ministers. But what should be remembered is that, as soon as a Kabyle agrees to be an Algerian minister or general, he is classified as a renegade and rejected by the overwhelming majority of his people. Kabylia aspires to its own government and not to folding seats granted by Algiers to those of its people who agree to collaborate with the enemy.

The Kabyle people have therefore always lived on the fringes of Algeria. He refuses to integrate into it until he is accepted and recognized by it as such. However, Algeria, heir to Jacobinism and French colonialism, only accepts “Algerians” within its ranks and will never admit that there can exist on its territory any people other than the “Algerian people”. Hence the deadlock. Kabylia has turned its back on it for 60 years and the Algerian generals, mad with rage, use and abuse violence against an indomitable and haughty Kabylia.

The denial of existence opposed by Algeria to the Kabyle people has thus generated, in the latter, the refusal to recognize themselves in the former. As a result, out of defiance, the attitude of Kabylia has been refined and homogenized. Kabylia has been rejecting Algerian elections for at least 20 years. In the space of 18 months, it boycotted the presidential elections of 12/12/2019, the referendum for the constitutional revision of 11/01/2020 and the legislative elections of 12806/2021. Symbolically and institutionally, nothing links it to Algeria anymore. Only repression, an expression of state terrorism, keeps her captive, in the jails of Algerian colonialist violence.

We can even say that the history of so-called “independent” Algeria comes down to the sole obsession of its leaders to crush Kabylia, to reduce it to nothing, to erase its memory forever! All the Arabization policies carried out so far, banning expression, intensifying Islamist education, economic disinvestment and tax racketeering, scorched earth policy, banning the Kabyle language from school and in the media, of falsification of History, backed by military control and the perpetual reinforcement of police and gendarmerie personnel, rather than achieving the results expected by Algiers have in fact, only than highlighting a little more each day the feeling among the Kabyles of being a colonized people and arousing in them indignation and dull anger.

60 years of criminal assaults supposed to destroy the Kabyle people and silence them forever have, on the contrary, turned out to be super fuels that accelerate Kabylia’s march towards independence more than they slow it down. Their balance sheet is too heavy for Algeria to write off as profit and loss and act as if nothing had happened. The 497 dead of the FFS, the assassinations of Kabyle political actors, the 150 young people killed with explosive bullets in the Black Spring accompanied by 6,000 wounded, including 1,200 disabled for life, the some 1,600 Kabyles sentenced for two years for their love of freedom and of Kabylie, as well as the 430 current political prisoners are far from constituting factors of amnesia. Rather, they erect, on each of the hills of Kabylia, alarm sirens against oblivion.

Ultimately, so many of the crimes committed by the Algerian colonial state against Kabylia encourage solidarity among Kabyles more than they incite fear or backtracking. Corruption, the recruitment of renegades and campaigns to demonize Kabyles in general and their political activists in particular, are nothing but vain posturing that can in no way stop the winds of freedom blowing over Kabylia. So many cases similar to the one we are experiencing have already consummated their failure to want to integrate people by force and violence into entities in which they refuse to enter. On the contrary, they are there to prove to us that once a people has decided to wrest its independence, nothing can prevent it. Even subject to hell, they always end up seeing the sun of freedom rise over them.

The hatred and violence of Algeria against Kabylia only reinforces the aspiration of the Kabyle people for their independence.

The colossal work patiently provided by the MAK over the past 20 years, consisting in rebuilding our national consciousness and endowing Kabylia with lasting institutions, has ended up bearing fruit by giving undeniable visibility and legitimacy to the peaceful march of the Kabyle people towards its independence. It therefore made any backtracking impossible.

By Ferhat MEHENNI – Philadelphia, 06/05/2023

Translated by KabyliaBlog from SIWEL 062245 MAY 23