Libya's Berbers "Come in from the Cold"?

Amazighs, or Berbers, make up roughly 10% of Libya's population, but have long been denied any kind of official recognition. According to a new report, that is suddenly starting to change:

A regime that since it took power in 1969 had derided Berber demands for recognition as a colonial plot to divide the Arab nation, this month allowed Berber activists to hold a congress in a Tripoli hotel for the first time.

Both Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi`s son Seif al-Islam and Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmudi have also made high-profile visits to the Berber heartland in the Jebel Nefusa mountains southwest of the capital to launch major projects to boost the local economy.

The sharp relaxation in official policy in a matter of months has impressed activists from the wider Berber community which stretches across north Africa from Egypt to Morocco and totals more than 25 million people.

World Amazigh Congress president Belkacem Lounes hailed what he called "a courageous first step to discuss a subject of importance to all Libyans," who number around six million.

Less than six months ago, Lounes was spurred to write an open letter to Kadhafi after the Libyan leader delivered a speech in which he yet again denied the existence of a Berber minority and threatened to "eradicate those who want to spread colonialism`s poison".

Lounes retorted: "The people of whom you spoke are women, men, and children who speak their Amazigh language daily... What worse offence to elementary rights is there than denying the existence of a people?"

Libyan researcher Shishank Issa, a specialist in Berber studies, said the shift in official attitudes had been remarkarble. "Berber identity in Libya used to be a taboo not to be broken," he said. "But now we can lift the veil on the history of Libya`s Berbers and prove that we`ve been here for thousands of years and that life in Libya did not start only with the arrival of the Arabs" from the 7th century onwards...

Through the auspices of the Kadhafi Foundation which he heads, Seif al-Islam, has been a champion of the new easing of policy towards the Berbers.  Last year, his foundation won a lifting of a quarter-century-old ban on the use of Berber names which it had described as "an aggression which can no longer be ignored."

Wow... you couldn't even use Berber names in Libya until last year. If you start that low, then anything is an improvement.

Comments

[Don Cox]

That is very good news. Let's hope the Berbers can reach the same status as for example the Welsh in Britain. (Which took a long time.)

Minorities are in trouble everywhere, especially where some dominant group has come in and conquered the country (as with the Arabs in North Africa or the Anglo-Saxons in Britain). The problem is that the defeated minority would really like to get their country back and drive out the invaders, as the Spanish did the Arabs. The Greeks partly drove out the Turks.

This makes the majority feel unsafe.

[Don Cox]

That is very good news. Let's hope the Berbers can reach the same status as for example the Welsh in Britain. (Which took a long time.)

Minorities are in trouble everywhere, especially where some dominant group has come in and conquered the country (as with the Arabs in North Africa or the Anglo-Saxons in Britain). The problem is that the defeated minority would really like to get their country back and drive out the invaders, as the Spanish did the Arabs. The Greeks partly drove out the Turks.

This makes the majority feel unsafe.

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