Mr. Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa,
President of the Republic of South Africa,
Subject: Reminder of our request to bring the “Algerian generals” before the International Criminal Court (ICC)
Dear President Ramaphosa,
First, we would like to express our congratulations on your re-election as President of the Republic of South Africa.
Secondly, we have the honour to forward to you a copy of our recent correspondence addressed to the President of the Spanish Government, Mr. Pedro Sánchez PÉREZ-CASTEJÓN, as we had the honour of sending you on 25 May last, asking him to translate the “Algerian generals” before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Thank you for your attention and time. Please accept, Mr. President, my warmest greetings.
Your Excellency Pedro Sanchez PEREZ-CASTEJON,
President of the Spanish Government,
Subject: Spain, Palestine, Algeria and crimes against humanity
Your Excellency President Sanchez,
On the occasion of the 103rd anniversary of the Battle of Annoual [1], I have the honor of drawing your attention to the crimes against humanity currently being committed in Palestine, Algeria and by Spain during the notorious Rif War of 1921-1927 [2].
Before getting to the heart of the matter, I would like to salute your courageous initiative in formally joining, on June 28, the legal proceedings opened by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, following the lawsuit brought by South Africa, accusing it of genocide and war crimes, last January 26. This led the ICJ’s Chief Prosecutor, Mr. Karim Khan, to declare that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli leaders and senior Hamas representatives were criminally responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Gaza, and to study the possibility of issuing arrest warrants against them.
To this end, and as I expressed to the South African President, Mr. Matarela Cyril Ramaphosa, on May 25 of this year [3], I say to Your Excellency that we would be very pleased if you would take a similar initiative against the “Algerian generals” who continue to violate human rights, assassinate opponents and apply an apartheid policy, repressing Algeria’s Amazigh/Berber communities with impunity for decades.
If we are asking Your Excellency to bring the “Algerian generals” before the ICC, it’s not just because they practice “state terrorism”, through the creation of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which I have denounced, for the umpteenth time, in my recent correspondence sent to Mr. Mohamed Ould Cheikh El-Ghazouani, President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and of the African Union [4], with the aim of destabilizing the countries of the Sahel, and contributing directly or indirectly to the genocide of the Tuaregs of Azawad, the “Blue Men” of the Great Sahara. In this respect, we welcome the recent decision by the judges of the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for one of the Sahel’s main jihadist leaders, Iyad Ag Ghali, on June 21, accused of numerous attacks on the country’s own armed forces and abuses against the civilian population. The leader of AQIM, renamed Groupe de soutien à l’islam et aux musulmans (GSIM), does not act alone, but enjoys the full support of Algerian generals, notably General M’henna Djebbar. The International Criminal Court should normally extend its arrest warrants not only to this criminal general, who is also directly responsible for the despicable murder of the seven French monks of Tibhirine [5], but to all Algerian generals for the various crimes committed against their citizens and their own indigenous Amazigh/Berber communities. I cite, here, the case of the bloody repression of the “Black Spring”, when the Algerian gendarmerie murdered 127 young people from the Kabylie region with complete impunity in April 2001, without a single agent being brought to justice [6].
From 2013 and during 2014 and 2015, it was the turn of the riots 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, who set about burning down their shops and homes, found themselves helpless in the hands of the authorities. Instead of coming to their aid, the authorities turned their wrath on these Mozabite victims, whose riots were accompanied by the deaths of young people, destruction and looting [7], 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’. This hirak began in February 2019, when tens of thousands of Algerians spontaneously took to the streets of the country to protest against the prospect of a 5th term for the outgoing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the return of the military to the barracks, with the army subordinated to democratically elected civilians, rather than the largely falsified and rejected presidential election of 12 December 2019, which brought Abdelmadjid Tebboune to power, as a puppet of the generals, and that they have never stopped imprisoning democrats, muzzling the press, and prosecuting human rights activists and pacifist political movements, such as the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), which they have treated as terrorist movements [8], allowing them to continue persecuting and imprisoning Kabylian activists such as Belaid Abrika, the leader of the Aarchs, Bouaziz Ait Chebib of the MAK, … And trying to assassinate in France the Chaoui Hichem Aboud and the president of the MAK Ferhat Mehenni…
Let’s not forget that these criminal generals are behind a number of political assassinations through the creation of terrorist groups, such as Jamal Zitouni’s GIA, and massacres of populations during the Black Decade of the 1990s, when they violated the electoral process and its results in favour of the FIS Islamists, and caused more than 200,000 victims and tens of thousands of missing persons! 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 you to bring them before the Hague Tribunal, it is so that we do not continue to tolerate the continuation of this mafia-like system of Algerian power in its murderous madness against the indigenous African-Amazigh populations. To explain what is happening in Algeria, the ‘senior officers’ of the French colonial army have a deep-seated colonial inferiority complex. As the famous anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who was involved with the Algerian revolution, said in his immortal study ‘Peau noir masques blancs’ (Black skin, white masks), in Algeria we could easily substitute ‘Peau amazighe masques arabes’ (Amazigh skin, Arab masks). Fanon said that: ‘all colonised peoples – that is to say, all peoples in which an inferiority complex has arisen as a result of the burial of local cultural originality – situate themselves in relation to the language of the civilising nation, that is to say, metropolitan culture. The colonised will have escaped from the bush all the more for having 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 fellow Amazigh as much as possible, they believe that they will please their supposed ‘Arab’ master or leader, who is supposed to have come from the Near East or Arabia or to have maraboutic origins.
Let’s not forget that the day after Algerian independence, President Ahmed Ben Bella declared in his speech on 5 October 1962: ‘We are Arabs, Arabs, ten million Arabs’. He added on 5 July 1963 that ‘there is no future for this country other than in Arabism’, regarding the indigenous Amazigh identity as a seed of division threatening national unity!
All the Algerian presidents who have succeeded him have stubbornly flaunted and reaffirmed their supposed ‘Arabness’, whether Houari Boumediene, Chadli Benjedid, Liamine Zeroual, Aziz Bouteflika or Abelmajid Tebboune, when in reality they are nothing more than Arabised Amazigh, Africans alienated in terms of their identity!
And it’s 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 director of Said Chengriha’s cabinet, Mr Jouadi Mohand Arezki, are all Amazigh Kabyles, distinguished by their ruthless repression and persecution of their own compatriots! It also seems highly likely that the bloodthirsty Kabyle general Tewfik Médienne was behind the assassination of the famous singer Lounès Matoub on 25 June 1998 [9], with the aim of provoking an uprising of the masses of Kabyle youth, not to face up to the danger of the Islamists, but just to put pressure on the supposedly ‘Arab’ president Chadli Benjedid!
However, if Algeria’s mafia-like generals are always attacking Moroccans as their worst enemies, it’s because they consider them all to be ‘Amazigh’, since Morocco has the highest proportion of indigenous populations who have preserved their thousand-year-old African language, Amazigh. This is due to the fact that 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’s no coincidence that President Aziz Bouteflika and his Kabyle minister at the time, 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 held in Tizi-Ouzou on 29 October 2008! What’s more, and as a result, 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 [10].
If our friend Hichem Aboud claims that the Algerian generals have no project, 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 maintained a plan: to wage 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 against French colonialism, but which they misappropriated just one 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 Mohamed 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 the help of the Egyptians and Russians, only served to exacerbate their hatred of their Moroccan neighbours, who did nothing more than offer hospitality, express their solidarity and dispense 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 the years 71 and 72, and continued, afterwards, by their military and financial support for the Polisario separatist group, which aspires to install an ‘Arab’ republic, the SADR, on ‘Amazigh-African’ land since 1976! This is unacceptable to all the Amazigh of Tamazgha, given that the Great Sahara, stretching from the Moroccan Sahara to the Libyan Sahara, is the cradle of the thousand-year-old Amazigh civilisation, which gave rise to the Pharaonic and Mediterranean civilisations [11]!
Not forgetting the dramatic expulsion of over 45,000 families, involving at least 400,000 Moroccan citizens, by forcibly separating mixed families, on 8 December 1975, by Colonel Houari Boumediene, mobilising all his security services (the army, secret services, police and gendarmerie) and which, according to several NGOs, constitutes a truly criminal act falling into the category of international crimes against humanity.
This, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I cannot forget that Spain, too, committed a crime against humanity at the beginning of the previous millennium, through the massive use of chemical weapons against the civilian population of northern Morocco during the Rif War of 1921 to 1927 [12].
In my correspondence to your Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this delicate issue, in which I requested recognition of the responsibility of the Spanish state [13], on November 11, 2021 and again on February 6, 2023. I asked your progressive government directly to intervene for an amicable solution to this issue of the use of chemical weapons, prohibited by international law, against civilian populations during Mohamed Abdelkrim El Khattabi’s war of liberation.
In conclusion, I ask Your Excellency, if you may,:
Firstly, that you kindly make every effort to file a similar complaint against the “Algerian generals” before the International Court of Justice (ICC) in The Hague, in an attempt to free the Algerian people (and Tamazgha/North Africa) from their “Arabist mafia”, deeply imbued with a policy of “anti-Amazigh apartheid”. A complaint against these criminal generals who have seized power through arms and blood, establishing “state terrorism” as their only means of perpetuating themselves in the illegitimate and undemocratic power of neighboring Algeria.
Secondly, that you kindly try to use your moral and political authority to ensure that, once and for all, the Spanish state officially acknowledges its responsibility for the damage and injuries caused during the Rif War.
Thank you for your attention and time. Please accept, Mr. President, my warmest greetings.
Rachid Raha, President of the Amazigh World Assembly (AMA)
Notes:
[4]- https://rachidraha.com/podria-la-union-africana-poner-fin-al-genocidio-en-contra-de-los-tuaregs/
[6]- https://fr.scribd.com/document/45465018/Liste-Des-Martyrs-Du-Printemps-Noir
[8]- https://amadalamazigh.press.ma/fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/BON-Rapport-Riposte-VF.pdf
[10]- https://rachidraha.com/como-argelia-intenta-desestabilizar-a-a-la-union-europea/
[11]- https://www.amadalamazigh.press.ma/pdf/Imazighen.pdf (paginas 15 al 19)
[13]- https://elfarodemelilla.es/representantes-rif-piden-espana-reparaciones-guerra-africa/#goog_rewarded
