Mohamed Amine Belghit was placed in pre -trial detention for “crime of damage to national unity by an act targeting national unity in order to undermine the symbols of the Nation and the Republic, an offense of attack on the integrity of national unity, and the offense of dissemination of hate speeches and discrimination,” announced the prosecution of the Dar El Beida, near Algiers.
This academic teacher, presenting himself as a specialist in the Maghreb, regularly creates controversies for his words hostile to Amazigh identity and revisionist positions on Algerian identity.
He was imprisoned after the “massive” broadcast on social networks Thursday of an interview he gave to the Emirati Sky News Arabia channel in which he affirmed that “the Amazigh language is an ideological project of Franco-Zionist creation”, according to the prosecution.
Tamazight was recognized as an official language in 2016 in Algeria, and in 2017 “Yennayer”, the Berber New Year, was added to the list of national festivals.
“There is no Amazigh culture. There is not something called Amazighity,” said Mr. Belghit.
His remarks aroused a wave of indignation in Algeria. In a comment read to the 8:00 pm newspaper Friday, national television has taken it violently in the United Arab Emirates, accused of spreading “a new form of venom, dirt, indecency and insults against the Algerians”.
The Emirates, where Sky News Arabia is based, “crossed all the red lines,” added television.
The Amazighity High Commissioner, attached to the Algerian Presidency, denounced on Saturday “isolated voices (which) persist, in vain, to try to undermine national cohesion by attacking one of the essential pillars of deep (Algerian) identity, its Amazigh component”.
On social networks, Internet users have considered it as seriously the words of Mr. Belghit as those of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, imprisoned since November and sentenced at the end of March to five years in prison for having affirmed in a French media from the far right that Algeria had inherited under the French colonization of territories belonging to Morocco so far in Morocco.
