Morocco Time

Amazigh people of Libya have been oppressed for decades by a totalitarian regime that wanted them to unlearn their language and cultural identity. Since 1969, this regime used all kinds of measures of uniformitarianism and militarization to make of Libya an Arab country.

Gaddafi does not even recognize their existence of Amazigh people of Libya who have been there for almost 4000 years. He says:

“We arrived here “land-land” that is (barr-barr in Arabic)… Colonialism came and said you Berbers are different people/race. You are not Arabs. They want to mislead us about our history, our origins and our civilization. The last thing they came up with is: Amazigh. The Amazigh tribes (extinct) died out long time ago since the time of the kingdom of Numidia. Maybe they were Semitic or Oriental existed but they vanished”

(full speech in Arabic)

He devised all the means and tools for a Pan-arab ideology based on the premise of the unity of the “Arab nation” (Al Watan Al Arabi) from the Gulf to the Atlantic ocean. Panarabism is a dream that lasted for almost half a century. The coup of 1952 in Egypt, lead by Gamal Abdennacer, to overthrow the monarchy was the first act that set an apparent success to this ideology followed later by Iraq, Syria and Libya after having founded different readings of Ba3th Party.

I do not want to go into details about the Pan-Arab ideology; however, understanding the structure of the Libyan regime depends on how much we know about his “revolution”, Gaddafi’s dictatorial power grab of 1969, which is the start of the “Great Arab Socialist People’s republic of Libya” based on Ba3th socialist ideology of which Arabism was the major component, an ideology that seduced Gaddafi and guided his work to physically get rid of Amazigh people through torture, isolation and displacement.

Libya is still living under a totalitarian regime that Gadafi himself had designed and theorized in his book (the Green Book) that some of my Libyan friends think is a total mess.

Imazighen have been oppressed by the Libyan regime and punished collectively by denying an identity that defined who they were for more than 3 thousand years. Gadafi stated many times in his addresses that there are no Berbers in Libya. (more). He destroyed a lot of historical sites in the Sahara desert to build “The Great River” and eradicate Amazigh collective memory. He could not stand the fact that Tamazight hold the seeds of its survival intrinsically which is hard for the most brilliant linguists and idio-linguists to understand. The rule is inside the house.

Now as Karim Achab describes it,

There are three more distinct zones where Tamazight is spoken in Libya besides that within the land of the Tuareg. Starting from the west, the zone called Ghadames, close to the southern Tunisian borders, is almost the continuation of the Ghat, yet with a different dialectical variety. The other zones in Libya include Nalout and Yefren in the Nefousa mountain area in the north, close to the southern border of Tunisia; Zouara on the north litoral; Sokna, and El Fokaha and Awdjila in the east.

The Libyan regime considers Tamazight a reminiscence of a colonial era. He banned people from speaking their language. They have to speak Arabic instead. Actually people were jailed and tortured because they spoke Amazigh in public spaces. In 2005, the Libyan Working Group to the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights-Geneva reported:

“The current political regime of Libya bans, restricts, and ceases all books, newspapers, magazines, and any press documents or articles which relates to Tamazight history, culture and language, even media items such as tapes, videos, etc…
The regime bans any use of Tamazight music in social events such as parties, weddings, and regular colander events; in addition the regime arrested individuals during social events while they were singing and celebrating in Tamazight language…
During the past 35 years, the regime of Libya never broadcasted in local state media any part of music or literature or poetry or even a piece of news regarding Libya’s ancient tradition or culture or Tamazight language.”

(Please read full report)

Amazigh people have always demanded from the regime to make policy changes to alleviate racial discrimination and oppression. Lately, Gaddafi’s son, Seif Alislam, was brought in to the front to manage the Amazigh names issues, while the president is thinking about his new trend: pan-africa.

Presently, Gaddafi thought to have shifted gears and he is ‘allowing’ more rights to Imazighen which is not true. His speech quoted above was a few months ago.

For sure, he wants to support his African inclinations after the pan-arab ideology failed to practically work and after the fall of the Ba3th regimes in Iraq, Egypt and Syria. He still thinks Tamazight is dead so there is no hope. He received the President of the Amazigh World Congress, Belkacem Lounes, who wrote back a letter that sums up everything about the “words” of the Colonel .

I personally think that Gaddafi is just a more aggressive version of the political regimes in North Africa. We might think that Morocco and Algeria are doing their best to recognize the cultural and linguistic rights of Imazighen. What they are really doing is little compared to what they should. They are wasting more energy and resources oppressing people than they would do if they just accepted to be real and true - a millennial cultural heritage called Tamazight.





This body of work (both essay and sketch) is licensed for M. Bouba under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

September 1st, 2007 | Category: Libya, Amazigh, Education, Politics, Morocco | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL