News & Letters, August-September 1998
Our Life and Times

Algerian singer murdered

by Andy Phillips

Lounes Matoub, the internationally known Algerian singer, was killed in June in an ambush near his home in Tizi-Ouzou, Kabylia, the center of that country's large non-Arab Berber population. Matoub's music and political statements had been a thorn in the side of the two most powerful groups in the country, the military government and the Islamic fundamentalists who have been fighting against them since 1993.

Matoub had long been on the fundamentalists' death list because his songs dealt frankly with sexuality and other "forbidden" themes, and because of his support for the secular Berber-based political party, the Assembly for Culture and Democracy. After fundamentalists kidnapped him in 1994, he escaped death after 100,000 demonstrated for his release and after he promised to give up performing. After his release he did not, of course, feel bound by such a promise given under duress, and resumed his musical career, albeit mostly from abroad. He was caught and killed during one of his brief visits home.

Although a splinter of the murderous Armed Islamic Group (GIA) took responsibility for the murder, the thousands who came out into the streets of Tizi-Ouzou and elsewhere to mourn Matoub made clear that they also blamed the military regime for his death. Many believe that the military often allows the GIA to strike against dissident intellectuals in order to eliminate its own opponents, and to strike against civilians, especially women. This allows the authoritarian government to appear reasonable when compared to the barbarity of the GIA.

The military had reason to fear Matoub because of his strong stance against new laws to make classical Arabic the official language. Matoub and other Berber intellectuals have objected to forcing Arabic on the Tamazight-speaking Berber minority, some 10% of the population. Long before the rise of fundamentalism, Matoub had first gained prominence during the Berber Spring of 1980, a cultural and political revolt against the Arabization policies of the single-party National Liberation Front regime, then still in power.

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