The Amazigh Resurgence – Happy Yennayer

Mustapha Ourrad, the murdered Charlie Hebdo editor, was an Amazigh Algerian but he never saw the arrival of the new year 2695, Yennayer. 

The Amazigh are generally known in western discourse as Berber (al-barbar in Arabic), but given that the term derives from the Greek barbarian, activists prefer the terms Amazigh (which means "free man") in Tamazight language. Amazigh language and culture in North Africa have been marginalised, if not outlawed, by regimes that have embraced Arabic as an official language, and pan-Arabism as a national identity and state-building strategy. This policy was the response of newly-independent states to French colonial policies that tried to divide and rule Berber and Arab. Tensions between Islamist and Berber activists have boiled over following the Arab Spring uprisings.

Yennayer - the first day of the Amazigh New Year, based on the Julian calendar - has long been celebrated in various parts of Morocco, Algeria and Libya. Flag-waving Amazigh activists, left Algiers and began a three-day tour of seven provinces of Algeria, under the slogan of "Yennayer, Feast of National Solidarity". Before departing, the "Yennayer caravan" was handed an Algerian flag and wished the best by Mounia Meslem, Algerian Minister of National Solidarity. In neighbouring Libya, the besieged western town of Zuwara declared a public holiday on January 13 in honour of Yennayer, the Amazigh new year. In Morocco, civic associations celebrated the day and circulated a petition calling on the government to recognise Yennayer as a national holiday. The political magazine Zamane ran a frontpage story, with the headline "Are we all Amazigh?" In Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Montreal and more than a dozen American cities - with significant North African populations - Amazigh communities are gathering this week to celebrate the start of the year 2695 at a tense, yet hopeful, political moment.

The Amazigh-speaking population of North Africa is estimated to be about 20 million-strong, scattered between Morocco (where an estimated 40 percent of the population is Amazigh-speaking), Algeria (roughly 20 percent Amazigh-speaking), Libya (10 percent Amazigh-speaking), and with smaller communities in Tunisia and the Siwa oasis in western Egypt. There are also approximately one million Touareg Amazighs who live in Niger and northern Mali. North African states defined themselves as Arab, repressing Amazigh culture and Sufi pratice. Yet over the last three decades, a cross-border Amazigh movement has emerged, that is forcefully challenging Arabisation policies and official narratives.

In 1980, a wave of protests and riots swept the region of Kabylia in Algeria - that would become known as the "Berber spring" ("Tafsut Imazighen") - followed by demands for recognition of Amazigh language and rights. And it was in 1980 that a Paris-based Algerian scholar, Ammar Negadi, a member of the Union of Amazigh People, developed the Amazigh calendar, honing in on 943 BC as the first year of Amazigh history; this was the year that the Amazigh warrior Shoshenq I - a member of the Meshwesh trive of Libya - defeated Ramses II, and made himself pharoah of Egypt.

By the late 1990s, as the Algerian civil war was winding down, leaders in the Maghreb had grown wary of the rising power of Islamist movements - and began to see Sufi brotherhoods and Amazigh nationalism as a political counterforce. When Mohammed VI assumed the thone in 1999, his (limited) cultural liberalisation brought to the fore a host of politicised Amazigh and pan-African music groups - Hoba Hoba Spirit, Darga, Amarg Fusion, Ribab Fusion - that insisted on singing in local vernacular and Amazigh, explicitly challenging the pan-Arab discourse that denied North Africa's ethnic diversity. Moroccan authorities, in the early 2000s, also introduced Tamazight instruction in primary schools, and began Amazigh-language programming on national television and radio. Amazigh activists would also press for a rewriting of history textbooks that claim all Moroccans came from Arabia. Ahmed Assid, a prominent Moroccan intellectual says that Amazigh have lived in North Africa for millennia, yet Moroccan history textbooks claim implausibly that that "the first inhabitants of Morocco were Berbers, came from Yemen and were therefore Arab". In Algeria, the protests and clashes between Amazigh activists and state authorities in 2001 would lead the Algerian government to recognise Tamazight as a "national" but not "official" language.

The upheavals of 2011 had a discernible impact on Amazigh politics. In June 2011, at the height of the Libyan uprising, a radio station appeared in Jado, in the country's western Nafusa Mountains, broadcasting in Tamzight, a language that Gaddafi had banned for decades. Across the Maghreb, Amazigh communities began demanding rights. In July 2011, the Tunisian Association for Amazigh Culture was established with full support from the new government - the first such organisation in modern Tunisan history. In Morocco, a new constitution presented in June 2011, would recognise Amazighite as an integral component of Moroccan national identity, and declare Tamazight an "official" state language.

Religious conservatives took particular exception to expressions of pre-Islamic identity. In Morocco, zealots would damage an 8,000-year-old Amazigh carving in the High Atlas called the Plaque of the Sun. In Libya, where Amazigh leaders are fearing an all-out assault from takfiri militias (as occurred to Yazidis in Iraq), are now pushing for an autonomous Amazigh region in western Libya. Yet it was the Libyan civil war and the Touareg mercenaries fleeing south who would found the short-lived Amazigh state of Azawad in northern Mali.

 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/01/an-unlikely-celebration-north-a-201511592116365141.html

No Silver Lining

Africa’s largest silver mine has been operating in the Atlas mountains since 1969, but the Berber people living in the surrounding villages remain among the most poverty-stricken people in Morocco. While Africa’s resources are historically usurped by international companies, the Imiter Mettalurgic Company operating the silver mine is mostly owned by Morocco’s royal family.

“The king forgot about us. He tours the country helping people, and he never comes to this region,” one woman told the New York Times. “He is our father, and he has forgotten about his children.”

Morocco’s Berbers are historically independent, organized and resilient, and once enjoyed a deeply entrenched system of water management that has been disrupted by international groups in recent years. The mine is said to have taken up to 66 percent of the water allocated in a special system to each village.

Since August, 2011, a group of activists from Imider, who call themselves Movement on the Road ’96, have been living in an occupation camp on Mount Alebban in order to protest the mine’s unreasonable water use and pollution. The group claims that the mine has used up more than their fair share of water, depleting aquifers that the agricultural communities in the area use for their terraced crops. Movement on the Road ’96 also claims that the toxic byproduct of the mining process, including cyanide and mercury used to treat the ore, has caused disease, killed livestock and exacerbated desertification. The group, which takes its name from a 1996 uprising that the government violently suppressed, is demanding that local employees should make up 75 percent of the total workforce.

“…even small plots at the foot of the mountain seem doomed to due to the shortage of water and poisons from the mine,” according to the Free Academy in Rome (LAR). LAR says that since operations began in 1969, very few infrastructural improvements have taken place. “At Imider there are no schools (except a small garrison basic), there is no electricity in most homes, the internet or even kiosks with newspapers, while the nearest hospital is located 200 km away (Ouarzazate).”

Libya's civil war - The Berber uprising

“In 2011, we Amazighs took up arms against a regime that had treated us like dogs for decades. But two years later we are still struggling for our rights against the new Libyan government,” laments Younis.

Also called Berbers, the Amazigh are indigenous inhabitants of North Africa with a population extending from Morocco´s Atlantic coast to the west bank of the Nile, in Egypt. Touareg tribes deep in the Sahara desert share the same common language.

The arrival of the Arabs in the region in the seventh century was the starting point of a gradual process of Arabisation that was sharply boosted during Muammar Gaddafi´s four-decade rule in Libya. Estimates put the number of Amazighs in this country at around 600,000 – about 10 percent of the total population.

“We are the true guardians of the revolution” reads a banner.“The government does not recognise us and we do not recognise the government,” reads another.

“We´re strongly against the committee in charge of writing the new constitution, as we have literally no chance to achieve our rights as a people through it,” says Ayub Sufian, another member of the rebel group controlling the port. He is referring to the 60-member constituent assembly set to work on the draft of Libya’s post-Gaddafi constitution. The crux of the matter seems to be the six-seat quota given to the country´s minorities. “Two for the Amazigh, two for the Touareg and two for the Tubu [a group living in the far south of the country],” the rebel tells IPS. “It is a system that will rule on majorities of two-thirds plus one, so you basically need 41 votes out of 60 to reach an agreement. What are our choices as non-Arab Libyans? We want our language to be co-official, and we want to be able to decide on key issues concerning the country,” says the rebel spokesman, who would favour an agreement “based on consensus, not on majorities.”

Africa: Kosovo Revives Hopes for Secession

The recognition of Kosovo by some of the West’s major powers is boosting the hopes of secessionist movements across Africa , according to this news item . In an article titled “Kosovo—the precedent that will enflame Africa,” a columnist for the Ivoirian newspaper Notre Voie predicts a revival of secessionist groups across the continent and doubts that the international community will be able to resolve the resulting crises.

“The world is about to witness… another political and diplomatic revolution which may give birth to some new nations," reads an opinion piece published on Somalilandnet.com, a website that caters to the autonomous region of the same name that seeks to secede from Somalia.

“Kidal will follow the example of Kosovo to become independent,” reads a forum entry on Kidal.info, a website named after a city in the northeastern part of Mali that is home to a Touareg rebellion that has clashed sporadically with governmental forces.

“This hard-won freedom by Kosovar citizens will serve as an example for the future autonomy of Kabylia,” wrote a contributor to Kabyle.com, a website committed to the affirmation of Algeria’s Kabyle Berbers, who resent the arabization of the country at the expense of the Amazigh culture.

At Rewmi.com, one of Senegal’s major news sites, one commentator wonders if the Senegal's government’s recognition of Kosovo will not reignite the separatist tendencies of MFDC, a rebel group that wants independence for the southern Casamance region.

Africa’s strongest case will likely come from Western Sahara, which has been recognized as an independent country by the African Union but whose sovereignty is not effective because of Morocco’s insistence that it is a province of its kingdom. A Saharawi blogger at Saharaopinions.blogspot.com, noted what he regards as the inconsistency of Western powers: “In Kosovo they imposed an independence that was not based on international legality, but in Western Sahara they’re opposed to self-determination that has been recommended multiple times by that same legality.”
Another wrote “Kosovo is an example of how we can effectively make our case,”

Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights affirms "the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination," but this has to be balanced against the inviolability of territorial boundaries that resulted from colonization (the so-called uti possidetis principle under Article 4 of the African Union’s Constitutive Act).