“Kabylia, colonized by Algeria, is appalled by the presence of Abdelmadjid Tebboune for the first time at the United Nations General Assembly,” President of the MAK Provisional Kabyle Government in exile Ferhat Mehenni wrote in a scathing letter on September 17 to UN Secretary-General Guterres and other world leaders attending the General Assembly this week in New York. “Tebboune is nothing other than a puppet of the violent Algerian military regime.”
The letter described Algeria’s President as “a man devoid of culture, conscience, and stature,” who is “yearning for respectability, which fascist generals strive to bestow upon him through anti-Kabyle racism and terrorism.”
President Mehenni decried Tebboune’s “unwelcome presence” in the Assembly as an attempt to garner political support for Tebboune’s second presidential term, and more gravely to legitimize the regime’s extermination of the Kabyle people through Algeria’s strategy of genocide, dubbed “Operation Zero Kabyle.”
Mehenni accused the military of “imposing martial law” over Kabylia since it unlawfully took power: “all liberties and human rights have been suspended,” and society has been suffocated by a military-police rule of terror.
In his four years of rule, Algeria’s President has allowed state terrorism to flourish. This is evident through “evil legislative measures,” such as criminalizing freedom of expression, conscience, and organization, as well as equating peaceful assembly with “terrorism.”
Mehenni added that arbitrary arrests and torture have become common, with thousands of people apprehended and many Kabyles banned from leaving the country. Over 500 people remain in prison for political reasons, he asserted, including 49 sentenced to death.
The MAK leader also stated that tens of thousands of young Kabyles have fled the country on makeshift boats to Europe, and there are even more potential emigrants due to Algeria’s state terrorism.
He condemned the Algerian army for deliberately carrying out a “scorched-earth policy” in Kabylia, setting fires and causing significant destruction and loss of life using phosphorus and incendiary capsules dropped from drones, planes, and helicopters, adding that “more than 80% of Kabyle villages, wildlife, and flora has been devastated.”
Mehenni excoriated Tebboune, “the racist, torturer, murderer, and criminal in every respect who now sits amongst [UN] ranks, who towards the Kabyle people (12 million souls) has nothing but contempt and hate.“
Concluding that Algeria is “unworthy” of a seat at the UN, he urged that the matter of the Kabyle people’s “right to decolonization” be put on the agenda for the UN’s next session.