From covert war to identity denial: the totalitarian strategy of the Algerian regime in Kabylie

Since Algeria’s accession to independence in 1962, a grim constant has continued to govern the central power’s governance: an insidious and multifaceted war secretly waged against Kabylie and its community. This conflict, which cannot be reduced to episodic clashes, constitutes in reality an enterprise of global subversion, inheriting the darkest methods ever invented by authoritarian regimes. Through the stubborn denial of Kabyle identity—relegated to the rank of an archaic vestige—as well as summary executions and disappearances orchestrated in the shadow of security apparatuses, the regime pursues an implacable ambition: to break the spirit of resistance of a region erected as a symbol of insubordination.

This work of domination extends to all spheres of social life. Economically, Kabylie is subjected to a tacit but methodical blockade—endemic underinvestment, the stifling of local initiatives, and forced dependence on the center. Simultaneously, political and social control is exercised through a stranglehold on associations, trade unions, and parties, while forced Arabization, coupled with state Islamization, aims to annihilate Kabyle linguistic and cultural foundations, relegating them to the rank of minor dialects. History itself is falsified: Kabyle resistance is obscured, its emblematic figures erased from school textbooks, to the benefit of a monolithic and centralizing national narrative in conformity with the regime’s ideology.

To perpetuate this system, the power shamelessly instrumentalizes public media, converted into echo chambers of xenophobic and contemptuous propaganda, as well as the judiciary, reduced to a repressive arm that muzzles any dissenting voice. Repression—whether police, judicial, or administrative—is skillfully dosed to instill lasting fear, while division is established as a principle of action: stirring up local rivalries, co-opting certain notables, and isolating protesters to better reduce them to silence. All these tactics, inheriting colonial and totalitarian strategies, converge toward a single design: to subdue the Kabyle people, subjugate their land, and stifle, in blood and silence, any aspiration for a prosperous and emancipated Kabylie.

History, alas, abounds in precedents where colonial or dictatorial regimes resorted to similar artifices to establish their domination. These methods, which consist of distracting the masses from structural inequities, fall under a genuine strategy of diversion and controlled terror. Among the most archetypal procedures is provocation, blamed on a circumstantial enemy to justify increased repression or war—whether the FFS uprising in 1963, the Cap Sigli affair in December 1978, the Berber Spring of 1980, the Black Spring, the multiple upheavals of 2001, the “Zero Kabyle” project organized in Mostaganem notably in August 2019, up to the Larbaâ Nath Irathen affair in 2021, whose echoes and practice remain relevant today.

Similarly, the instigation of interethnic conflicts or border incidents has often served, in a colonial context, to legitimize a strengthened military presence by channeling popular frustrations toward an external adversary or a designated minority, in order to mask economic exploitation and the absence of fundamental rights.

Creating or exacerbating scarcity remains a common technique to keep the population in a state of dependence. Recurrent crises—cooking oil, tires, building materials—obey this same logic: by controlling access to essential goods, the Algerian power breaks any inclination toward revolt, because a people anxious about immediate survival is rarely inclined to insurrection. This tactic was already experimented with in certain colonies and countries, where production was deliberately oriented toward the mainland, causing local famines blamed by the administration on climatic fatalism or indigenous incapacity.

The scorched-earth policy is also at work in Kabylie. The devastating fires that ravage the region, attributed to opponents or foreign powers, pursue a dual objective: to reduce hotbeds of resistance and decimate families to ashes, while imposing curfews and states of emergency that restrict public liberties. Beyond material acts, it is the climate of permanent insecurity that founds the system’s longevity. By alternating deceptive lulls with waves of brutal repression, the regime maintains psychological instability conducive to submission. This strategy, akin to a balance of terror, pushes some Kabyles to accept arbitrariness in exchange for an illusory peace, while solidarity disintegrates: the neighbor becomes a potential enemy, and any attempt at uprising or demand is paralyzed by the fear of civil war or bloody reprisals.

When discontent rumbles in the face of injustice or repression, the Algerian regime activates background noise—border tension with Morocco, the Israeli threat, or antagonism with France—to redirect public opinion’s attention. The nation, mobilized against an external peril, temporarily forgets its internal demands.

These strategies are by no means a matter of chance; they are the product of a deliberate political construction aimed at perpetuating an illegitimate power. History nevertheless teaches that these regimes, however formidable they may be, inevitably collapse when peoples, having seen through these mechanisms, cease to tremble. The memory of these events remains, therefore, the surest rampart against manipulation.

Boualem Afir