Algerian parliamentarians said Thursday that France, the former colonial power, was behind two months of deadly riots that have mushroomed into wider anti-government unrest, according to AFP.
Several MPs from the ruling coalition said Wednesday and Thursday that Paris was "responsible" for violence and riots that have left 60 people dead and 2,000 others wounded mainly in Kabylie, an ethnic Berber region in northeastern Algeria, said the agency.
The MPs are from Islamic and nationalist wings of the coalition, and include members of the National Liberation Front, the National Democratic Rally, the Society Movement for Peace and the Nahdah renaissance movement.
They have demanded Algeria break diplomatic ties with France.
Mustapha Bouguera, from Nahdah, said France, in complicity with westerners and Algerian agitators, was at the root of the "disagreement and riots.”
On Tuesday, Algerian Prime Minister Ali Benflis blamed foreign "destabilization campaigns" for the wave of unrest in Kabylie, said AFP.
Benflis told Parliament that the "events in some districts" were the outcome of "destabilization campaigns using all possible means, such as books, 'eyewitness accounts', special broadcasts ... waged from abroad."
Although he did not name France, he said the alleged campaigns "increasingly show that neo-colonialism has not abdicated and abandoned its pretensions to control Algeria by any means, including dividing the people, the better to rule them."
Riots in and around the main Berber towns, Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia, have evolved into major demonstrations of anti-government feeling over issues such as unemployment, poor housing and perceived endemic corruption.
Berbers, indigenous north Africans who make up about a third of Algeria's population, launched the protests but many disaffected people of the Arab-speaking majority have joined the demonstrations against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's government.
Meanwhile, El Khabar newspaper reported Thursday that security forces and inhabitants of the small Kabylie village of Sidi Aich had decided to cooperate in order to find a solution to the assassination of a young man by a “drunk policeman” that took place recently.
The village committee accepted the arguments of the police that the killer should be brought to justice, according to the paper, which added that the police sid the killer was behind bars, and that the courts would decide his future – Albawaba.com
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