Amazighs call on South African president to take ‘Algerian generals’ to ICC
Mr Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, President of the Republic of South Africa
Subject: Request to bring the ‘Algerian generals’ before the International Criminal Court (ICC)
Dear Mr President,
On the occasion of World Africa Day, we have the honour to ask you to speak out on an issue of vital importance for peace in North Africa and the Sahel, which are plagued by armed conflicts in the Moroccan Western Sahara and the Central Sahara in the Azawad region.
The fact that some Algerian sports officials want their Algerian Football Federation (FAF) to leave the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to join the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) raises the pertinent and strange question of whether the Algerian officials are really ‘Africans’ or whether they consider themselves ‘Arabs’, originally from Arabia, in which case they are Asians who have the wrong continent!
Let us confess, first of all, that as Amazighs, as indigenous peoples of North Africa, we hardly understand the attitude of the leaders of the country of the late anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela with regard to their all-out defence of an ‘Arab’ republic within Afro-Moroccan Western Sahara, blindly defending the false theses of the ‘Algerian generals’, who show no political will to solve this regional problem.
As the Algerian journalist and opposition activist Hichem Aboud, author of the best-seller ‘LA MAFIA DES GENERAUX’, pointed out in one of his videos on 20 May, referring to these ‘unscrupulous generals’: ‘Algeria has no project. No economic project, no social project, nothing at all? The only project of the Algerian government is to stay at the head of power in order to continue plundering Algeria, to continue stealing and to continue repressing the Algerian people...’.
Before getting to the heart of the matter, we would like to commend your country, South Africa, for its commendable initiative in bringing a case against the State of Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing it of genocide and war crimes committed against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip on 26 January. This led ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan to declare that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel's leadership and senior Hamas officials were criminally responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Gaza, and to consider issuing arrest warrants against them.
In this regard, we would very much welcome a similar initiative against the ‘Algerian generals’ who continue to violate human rights, murder opponents and pursue a policy of anti-Amazigh apartheid, repressing the ‘Amazigh’ communities in Algeria for decades.
We have the feeling that certain Algerian politicians have misled you into believing that it was the FLN who offered precious aid to your leader Nelson Mandela, during the fifties and early sixties of the last century, when in fact it was the Amazighs of the Rif and the Moroccans who had the real merit of providing such aid to the ANC and the FLN, given that the Algerian revolutionaries found refuge and solidarity in our lands. The late Nelson Mandela confessed that he had learned to handle a pistol in the barracks of Segangan, in the province of Nador, and that he stayed at the Assalam hotel, which was provided to him by my maternal grandfather and his brothers. During his lifetime, our famous world hero of the struggle against apartheid, Nelson Mandela, declared and confessed that he had received substantial financial support from the King of Morocco. It was to his credit that he acknowledged this and paid a vibrant tribute to Morocco and Dr Abdelkrim el Khatib during his lifetime, as this historic video shows:
If we are asking you to bring the ‘Algerian generals’ before the ICC, it is not only because they practise ‘State terrorism’, through the creation of the Salafist group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as attested to in the study by François Gèze and Salima Mellah, and which we have just denounced, for the umpteenth time, in our recent correspondence to Mr. Mohamed Ould Cheikh El-Ghazouani, President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and President of the African Union, with the aim of destabilising the countries of the Sahel and contributing to the destabilisation of the Sahelian countries. Mohamed Ould Cheikh El-Ghazouani, President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and President of the African Union, with the aim of destabilising the countries of the Sahel and contributing directly or indirectly to the destruction of the region. Mohamed Ould Cheikh El-Ghazouani, President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and of the African Union, with the aim of destabilising the countries of the Sahel, and contributing directly or indirectly to the genocide of the Tuaregs of Azawad. Especially for the various crimes committed against their own indigenous ‘Amazigh’ communities. Think, for example, of the bloody repression of the ‘Black Spring’, when the Algerian gendarmerie murdered with impunity 127 young people from the Kabylia region in April 2001, without a single officer being brought to justice.
Since 2013 and throughout 2014 and 2015, it was the turn of unrest in the Mzab region, populated by more than 200,000 people of the Ibadite religious rite. These Amazigh Mozabites, threatened by the self-styled ‘Arab’ community of Chaâmbas, which set about burning their shops and homes, found themselves defenceless in the hands of the authorities. Instead of helping them, the authorities lashed out at these Mozabite victims, whose revolts were accompanied by the death of young people, destruction and looting, the imprisonment and persecution of their leaders, and the death by hunger strike of their leader, the late Dr. Kameleddine Fekhar, during the ‘Algerian Hirak’. A hirak that began in February 2019, when tens of thousands of Algerians spontaneously took to the country's streets to protest against the prospect of a fifth term for outgoing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the return of the military to the barracks, with the army subordinate to democratically elected civilians, rather than a largely falsified and rejected presidential election on 12 December 2019, which brought Abdelmadjid Tebboune to power, as a puppet of the generals, and who have never stopped imprisoning democrats, muzzling the press and persecuting human rights activists and pacifist political movements, such as the Movement for Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), which they have treated as terrorist movements, allowing them to continue to persecute and imprison Kabylie activists such as Belaid Abrika, leader of the Aarchs, Bouaziz Ait Chebib of the MAK, . ... And trying to assassinate in France Chaoui Hichem Aboud and MAK president Ferhat Mehenni ...
These criminal generals were responsible for several political assassinations through the creation of terrorist groups, such as Jamal Zitouni's GIA, and for massacres of the population during the Black Decade of the 1990s, when they violated the electoral process and its results in favour of the Islamists of the FIS, and caused more than 200,000 victims and tens of thousands of disappeared! They even dared to assassinate a president who was going to turn Algeria around, in this case Mohamed Boudiaf.
Mr President,
If we are asking them to be brought before the Hague Tribunal, it is to stop tolerating the continuation of this mafia system of Algerian power in its murderous madness against the indigenous Afro-Amazigh populations. To explain what is happening in Algeria, the ‘senior officers’ of the French colonial army have a deep-rooted colonial inferiority complex. As the famous anti-colonialist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who participated in the Algerian revolution, put it in his immortal study ‘Peau noir masques blancs’ (Black skin, white masks), in Algeria we could easily replace it with ‘Peau Amazighe masques Arabes’ (Amazigh skin, Arab masks). Fanon said that: ‘all colonised peoples - that is to say, all peoples in whom an inferiority complex has arisen as a consequence of the burial of local cultural originality - are situated in relation to the language of the civilising nation, that is to say, the metropolitan culture. The colonised will have escaped the bush all the more because they have adopted the cultural values of the metropolis. He will be all the whiter for having rejected his blackness, his bush’. This is how the ‘Algerian generals’ of Amazigh origin behave: by repressing their Amazigh compatriots as much as possible, they believe they will please their supposed ‘Arab’ master or leader, who is supposed to come from the Near East or Arabia or to have Marabou origins.
Let us not forget that the day after Algerian independence, President Ahmed Ben Bella declared in his speech of 5 October 1962: ‘We are Arabs, Arabs, ten million Arabs’. He added on 5 July 1963 that ‘there is no future for this country but Arabism’, considering the indigenous Amazigh identity as a seed of division threatening national unity! All Algerian presidents who succeeded him, whether Houari Boumediene, Chadli Benjedid, Liamine Zeroual, Aziz Bouteflika or Abelmajid Tebboune, have boasted and stubbornly reaffirmed their supposed ‘Arabness’, when in reality they are nothing but Arabised Amazighs, Africans alienated from their identity!
And it is no coincidence that the current head of the secret services (DDSE), General M'henna Djebbar, the head of the gendarmerie and internal security and the head of Said Chengriha's cabinet, Mr. Jouadi Mohand Arezki, are all Amazigh Kabyles, who are known for their ruthless repression and persecution of their own compatriots! It also seems very likely that the bloodthirsty Kabyle general Tewfik Médienne was behind the murder of the famous singer Lounès Matoub on 25 June 1998 [9], with the aim of provoking an uprising of the masses of young Kabyles, not to confront the danger of the Islamists, but only to put pressure on the supposedly ‘Arab’ president Chadli Benjedid!
But if the Algerian mafia generals always attack the Moroccans as their worst enemies, it is because they consider them all ‘Amazigh’, since Morocco is the country with the highest proportion of indigenous people who have preserved their millenary African language, Amazigh - this is because Morocco is the North African country with the most mountain ranges (Rif, Middle Atlas, High Atlas and Anti-Atlas), which have proved to be formidable bulwarks against linguistic and ideological Arabisation! And it is no coincidence that President Aziz Bouteflika and his then Kabyle minister, Khalida Toumi Messaoudi, imprisoned more than fifty Moroccan Amazigh activists for 38 hours at Houari Boumediene airport, preventing them from attending the fifth general assembly of the World Amazigh Congress in Tizi-Ouzou on 29 October 2008! Moreover, and as a consequence, they continue to block any regional union of North African states, including Morocco, as we denounced in our letter of 13 March to the European Union.
If our friend Hichem Aboud claims that the Algerian generals have no plan, we can affirm the opposite. These generals, deeply imbued with the obsolete theses of the ‘Baathist pan-Arab nationalism’ of the late Jamal Abdenasser and the dictatorships of the Middle East, have always had a plan: to make war on the Moroccans! And they started by using the weapons that the Moroccans had managed to smuggle into the provinces of Nador and Oujda to fight French colonialism, but which they seized only a year after their independence, provoking the War of the Sands in 1963, as well as the overthrow of their president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), Ferhat Abbas, who had signed agreements with the late King Mohammed V for the settlement of borders and the return of the territories that the French colonists had amputated from Morocco! Their bitter defeat in the so-called Sand War, despite Egyptian and Russian aid, only served to exacerbate their hatred of their Moroccan neighbours, who did nothing but offer them hospitality, express solidarity and provide them with aid of all kinds during the eight years of the war of liberation! A war maintained by their support for certain socialist leaders of the USFP to overthrow the monarchical order during 71 and 72, and continued, afterwards, by their military and financial support for the separatist group Polisario, which aspires to install an ‘Arab’ republic, the SADR, on ‘Amazigh-African’ soil since 1976! This is unacceptable for all the Amazigh of Tamazgha, given that the Great Sahara, which stretches from the Moroccan Sahara to the Libyan Sahara, is the cradle of the millenary Amazigh civilisation, which gave birth to the Pharaonic civilisation and to the Mediterranean civilisations!
Not forgetting the dramatic expulsion of more than 45,000 families, which affected at least 400,000 Moroccan citizens, by forcibly separating mixed families on 8 December 1975 by Colonel Houari Boumediene, mobilising all his security services (army, secret services, police and gendarmerie) and which constitutes, according to several NGOs, a real criminal act that falls into the category of international crimes against humanity.
Finally, we ask you to do your utmost to bring charges against these ‘Algerian general criminals’ before the International Court of Justice (ICC) in The Hague, in an attempt to free Algeria (and Tamazgha/North Africa) from these supposedly ‘Arabist’ neo-colonialists, who are deeply imbued with a policy of ‘anti-Amazigh apartheid’, and who seized power by force of arms and blood, erecting ‘state terrorism’ as the only means of perpetuating themselves in this illegitimate and anti-democratic power.
Thank you for listening to us. Yours sincerely
Rachid Raha, President of the Amazigh World Assembly (AMA)