ALGIERS (SIWEL) – Algeria is sinking deeper into injustice and arbitrariness. While peaceful Kabyle activists and citizens are hunted down, imprisoned, and even sentenced to death for their political opinions, the Algerian regime warmly welcomes former leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a party dissolved for its role in the “Black Decade” and implicated in deadly terrorist acts.
The return to Algeria of Anouar Haddam, a former FIS leader who took refuge in the United States in 1992, illustrates this double-standard policy. Haddam, who publicly justified the car bombing on Amirouche Boulevard in January 1995—a tragic attack that claimed the lives of 42 innocent people and injured more than 260 others—is now being discreetly welcomed back. At the time, he cynically downplayed the horror of the attack, claiming that “bad luck” was responsible for the high number of victims.
While peaceful Kabyle activists are silenced through summary trials and arbitrary prison sentences, the Algerian state appears to favor the rehabilitation of those who spread terror in the 1990s. Meanwhile, thousands of Kabyle exiles, forced to flee repression, are banned from returning to their homeland, deprived of the fundamental right to reunite with their families and reclaim their lands.
This blatant double standard speaks volumes about the nature of the Algerian regime: a dictatorship that criminalizes freedom of expression while reintegrating figures linked to Islamist terrorism. Democrats, human rights defenders, the oppressed Kabyle people, and other peoples in Algeria can only strongly denounce this glaring injustice. The impunity granted to those with blood on their hands and the repression of dissenting voices reflect the total collapse of the rule of law in a country where the regime manipulates justice to serve its own interests.
Now more than ever, it is urgent to demand an end to these authoritarian practices, the release of Kabyle political prisoners, and the safe and free return of all exiles banned from coming home. It is also time for the Algerian regime to finally recognize the right of the Kabyle people to take control of their own destiny, to govern themselves, and to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination.
It is time to end the colonial domination of the Algerian state in Kabylia!
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