13 | Guerrilla of pop: Matoub Lounès and the struggle for Berber identity in Algeria ANDY MORGAN ‘Silence is death and yet if you speak you die. If you keep quiet you die. So then speak and die.’ Tahar Djaout ‘I want to speak and I don’t want to die.’ Matoub Lounès A grave between an olive and a cherry tree Death finally caught up with him on the lonely bend of a mountain road. The bullet-strafed car was still smoking and the pools of blood on the asphalt were still warm when the news broke. Telephones lines crackled and the Internet came alive. ‘They’ve killed him.’ ‘He was with his wife and two sisters- in-law.’ ‘They were hit too.’ ‘It happened just after 1 p.m.’ ‘On the Tizi Ouzou road.’ ‘It was a false roadblock.’ ‘It was an ambush.’ ‘It was the GIA.’ ‘It was Chenoui’s men.’ ‘It was the government.’ ‘He’s dead.’ ‘He’s gone.’ ‘Matoub has gone.’ Some even whispered, ‘It had to happen.’ Within hours angry mourners in their thousands had gathered around the Mohammed Nedir hospital in Tizi Ouzou, where Matoub Lounès’s bloodied remains were taken after the attack. Their shouts boomed like mixed-shot salvoes of anger, desperation and grief. ‘Government … Assassin!’ ‘Zéroual … Assassin!’ ‘Islamists … Assassins!’ ‘The generals … Assassins!’ Over the next few days youths took to the streets of Tizi Ouzou, Akbou, Sidi Aïch, Bejaia, Aïn el Hammam and Tizi Guénif and unleashed their rage on government buildings, party offices, banks and shops. The police and security forces re- taliated nervously with water cannon, tear gas and bullets. Three protesters were killed. Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia appealed feebly for calm. Kabylia was burning. In Paris, thousands gathered in Place de la République, in front of an im- mense black-and-white portrait of Matoub. Actors, politicians, community leaders, writers and musicians took to the stage to say a few words or sing a song. The great Berber singer Idir denounced the new Arabization law which pop of Guerrilla was due to be passed on 5 July, making Arabic the compulsory language of almost every official or semi-official transaction in Algeria. The crowd stood smouldering under the fluttering yellow, blue and green flags of Kabylia, arms raised to the skies, chanting his songs. ‘Matoub was the Bard of Kabylia. They wanted to shut him up so they killed him,’ said one mourner. ‘He sang for 106 107 freedom, our freedom, Berber freedom,’ said another. ‘He was our Che Gue- vara,’ said a third. The Berber Cultural Movement (MCB) called for a general strike and the response was overwhelming. Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Kabylia, was enveloped in a sepulchral silence on Sunday, 28 June 1998, three days after Matoub’s murder. Boarded-up shops and businesses looked like mausoleums lining the paths of a huge cemetery. Many of the city’s inhabitants had left before dawn and made their way up the mountain to Taourirt Moussa, the village where Ma- toub was born. They stuffed themselves in cars or braved the 25 kilometres on foot. The roads were hopelessly jammed. This, for once, was a real roadblock. In every hollow, on every ridge, down every street or path and on every rooftop around the Matoub villa, as far as the eye could see, a sea of mourners stood simmering under a hot and ripening sun. The presence of women, dressed defiantly in their colourful traditional dress or Western threads, all of them un- veiled, surprised many. Traditionally, funerals in Algeria are all-male affairs. The heat was intense, the atmosphere even more so, and many fainted. Militants from the various Berber political groups and local village defence associations policed the gathering. Their work was light because no one was in the mood for troublemaking. Placards bearing Matoub’s intense and anxious features were held aloft. Banners broke the silence and the sobs. ‘Remember and Revenge!’ ‘No Peace without Tamazight.’ ‘Arabo-Islamism, the shortest way to HELL.’ Eventually Matoub’s body was brought out, wrapped only in an Algerian flag, and laid tenderly in a grave just in front of his family home, between an olive and a cherry tree, facing the majestic Djurdjura Mountains which he had loved with such a passion. His mother Aldjia fired two shots in the air and his sister Malika made a short speech which ended, ‘The face of Lounès will be missed but his songs will dwell for ever in our hearts. Today is a day of great joy. We are celebrating the birth of Matoub Lounès.’ One God? One nation? One people? Like a young adult who has just broken free from parental chains, any new- born nation-state must grapple with the fundamental questions ‘Who am I? What is my identity?’ Sometimes the answer comes easily. Countries whose territory is already blessed with linguistic and cultural coherence have little pop of Guerrilla trouble establishing a national identity. But for many of the huge, amorphous nations of Africa, which were often carelessly cobbled together from a chaotic patchwork of tribes and ethnicities by civil servants in the oak-panelled minis- tries of Paris or London, the question of identity has always posed huge prob- lems. Proud, defiant but still politically immature, the new leaders of these 107 fledgling states find they cannot entertain progressive notions of federalism 13 and live-and-let-live cohabitation for fear that the weak mortar that binds their nation together will just crumble into dust and anarchy. The grail of national Africa | Africa unity becomes an end that justifies the most violent and oppressive means. Algeria’s birth pains were brutal and severe. The war of independence that ended in 1962 was one of extreme hatred and extreme violence. It combined a Gestapo-like approach to civilian control – many former resistance fighters turned French army officers were all too familiar with the Gestapo’s methods – with the kind of all-terrain guerrilla shock tactics that would later find favour with the Vietcong, the Mau Mau and many other popular people’s armies. The French used napalm, torture, mass civilian executions and a scorched-earth strategy, anything to defeat their invisible opponents. The rebel mujahidin answered in kind. Europeans killed Muslims. Muslims killed Europeans. Muslims killed Muslims and eventually Europeans killed Europeans. The scars went very deep. The war ended with the birth of an independent Algeria and one of the greatest mass exoduses of the twentieth century. Over one million people of European descent left the country in the few months before independence; businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and civil servants, taking with them the very foundations of a functioning civil society. The country’s new leaders were left with hopes and ideas but few of the skills necessary to turn them into reality. As long as the war was taking its murderous course, the rebel nationalist movement managed to maintain at least an outward appearance of unity. But beneath this veneer there were deep divisions which began to surface even before the ink was dry on the Evian Accords of March 1962 which guaranteed Algeria its independence. Various factions had very different answers to that ‘Who are we?’ question. The émigré revolutionary council led by Ahmed Ben Bella, who eventually managed to seize power and become Algeria’s first effec- tive head of state, was inspired by three overarching ideologies. The first was command-and-control socialism, Soviet style. The army and the state had a duty to commandeer the economic, social and natural resources of the country and manage them for the good of the people. The second was more a reaction than an ideology. Algeria would slowly and surely purge French civilization, the French language and French cultural values from society. In time, Arabic would pop of Guerrilla take over as the language of education, the judiciary, science, technology, cul- ture and commerce. French notions of égalité, fraternité and liberté would be strictly controlled and curtailed. Muslim Algerian intellectuals and thinkers, who had all hitherto used the French language as their vehicle of expression, would now have to think, dream and cry in Arabic. 108 109 The third ideology was Arab nationalism. Ben Bella and his crew had delved 13 deep into the same well of political inspiration as Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria or the Ba’athists in Iraq. They all believed that if a nation-state in North Africa | Africa Africa or the Middle East was to stand proud, defiant and spiritually self- sufficient in a post-colonial world, then it must draw on the glorious history and culture of Arabic civilization, the unifying power of classical Middle East- ern Arabic and the bedrock of Islam in order to succeed. ‘Petty’ regional and ethnic differences must be buried or obliterated. Unity was paramount. These ideologies only began to make a small difference to daily life in Algeria during the short reign of Ben Bella, who was ousted in a military coup by his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Colonel Houari Boumédienne in 1965. Boumédienne was an Arabic literature teacher turned steely military leader and staunch command-and-control socialist. He was also a diehard Arab nationalist, and it was during his reign that the process of Arabicizing and nationalizing the country really gained momentum. Apart from his agrarian and industrial revolutions he also instigated a cultural revolution with the aim of ‘decolonizing the mind’. He knew that Algerian society was fundamentally fractious and partisan with a historic tendency to splinter and implode. Only the discipline of the great revolutionary army and unifying forces of Islam, state socialism and the Arabic language could hold the nation together.