INSURGENT ALGERIANS

INSURGENT ALGERIANS,

The struggle that you have been carrying forward against all society’s rulers since April 2001 is an example for us and for all the exploited. Your uninterrupted rebellion has shown that the terrorism of the state and the integralist groups, allied for a decade in the slaughter of the poor to the benefit of the rich, has not lessened your ferocity. You have understood that faced with the infectious disease of military dictatorship and the plague of Islamic fundamentalism, the only choice is open revolt. In the union of two capitalisms, the liberal one that privatizes and fires people in mass and the socialist-bureaucratic one that tortures and kills, you have responded with the unity of a generalized struggle.

We imagine what it means for a state and its police to find themselves facing a mass of rebels whose posters warn: ‘You cannot kill us, we are already dead’ as occurred in June 2001.But we can barely imagine what it means for a region with a few million inhabitants, like Kabylia, where the police are barricaded in their barracks, ‘quarantined’ by the insurgent population; in which elections are deserted in mass, the ballot boxes and the offices of political parties set on fire; in which the city halls are deserted and boarded up.

The politicians who sit in the parliament with zero votes obtained have revealed the lie of representative democracy and the arrogance of a power that is increasingly mafia-like to all. You have managed to shatter the plans of anyone who tried to give your struggle a regionalist or particularist image.

The universal content of your demands – such as that of the immediate and non-negotiable withdrawal of the police – can no longer be hidden.

The autonomy of your movement, organized horizontally in the aarch (village assemblies), can only unite all the leaders of Algerian society and their accomplices in other countries against you. A revolt without leaders and without parties won’t even find favor among the professionals of international solidarity who are deprived, in this case, of charismatic figures or sub-commandantes to idealize. Up to now, you have only been able to count on yourselves. And the repression presses hard, with hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, people disabled for life, so many missing, the torture and arrest of many delegates of the aarch and many demonstrators. With prisoners on hunger strike and many insurgents forced to go underground.

Now the radicality of what you have already done finds other accomplices in the world, in order to break the information embargo and the murderous violence of the state. The bullets that strike are also given by the Italian government and Italian industries, Eni in the lead. The weapons that are used against your demonstrations are often of Italian manufacture.

COMRADES, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. MAY YOUR REVOLT EXPLODE EVERYWHERE.