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Five BerBer IdenTITy and The InTernaTIonal arena In recent years, the expansion of an international discourse on human rights, which includes the recognition of the existence and rights of subordinate, nondominant ethnolinguistic groups, has created new opportunities for the promotion of the Berberist agenda. Consequently , a number of Berber organizations, both in North Africa and the Diaspora, have made the advocacy of the Berber cause in various international forums a central thread of their activities. In so doing, they sought to bring pressure to bear not only on the Moroccan and Algerian states, but also to highlight the repressive policies of Libya toward its largely marginalized Berber populace, and the dire straits of the Touareg in Mali and Niger. In addition, they called European governments to task for their lack of recognition of the Berber component of immigrant communities. In particular, the phenomenon of accelerated globalization enabling or prompting greater assertion of subnational identities—familiar from the European Union (EU) experience—opened up new avenues through which Amazigh activists could challenge the prevailing ethos of contemporary North African states. Given their marginalization during earlier waves of “globalization,” there is no small irony in the fact that the latest wave helped stimulate and reinforce the fashioning of a specific Berber/Amazigh ethnopolitical community. Most recently, the Internet, the symbol, par excellence, of the contemporary global information revolution, has become an additional important tool in the construction of a “landscape of group identity,” i.e., the building of an “imagined” Amazigh community worldwide.The number of Internet sites, listservs, and Facebook pages devoted to Amazigh matters has mushroomed, as has the uploading to YouTube of a full range of Amazigh-related events. These new technologies have enabled the speedy dissemination of information and images, often in real time, as well as stimulating discussion and contacts between activists worldwide,1 thus taking Anderson’s imagined community–building 132 Reentering History in the New Millennium to a whole new level. Ironically, Berber activists often characterize their fight as “part of the vast movement of resistance to globalization, which is a movement that is in essence against cultural identities.”2 One concrete outcome has been the forging of organizations whose agenda is explicitly pan-Berber. Naturally, these could only be based outside of North Africa. In essence, a two-way street was created, as the cultural, social, and political activities of Berbers living beyond North Africa’s confines both helped strengthen and deepen the self-awareness and activities of the Berber communities back home, and reinforced their own hybrid identities. The outcome was a significant contribution to determining the multiple meanings of “being Berber” in the modern, increasingly globalized world. International human rights organizations had first been mobilized in 1985 on behalf of twenty-three Kabyle activists being tried by the Algerian authorities for challenging the state’s hegemonic discourse on national identity (see Chapter 3). Beginning in the 1990s, Berber organizations, both existing and new, expanded the scope of their activities into the international arena. Among Moroccan associations, it was the Rabat-based Tamaynut that took the lead. Made up predominantly of lawyers and with approximately thirty branches nationwide, Tamaynut had signaled its desire to internationalize the Berber question in 1991 by translating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into Tamazight.3 Two years later, it was invited by the UN to participate in an international human rights conference in Vienna ( June 14–25). Its leaders consulted with eight other associations in Rabat (five of which, along with Tamaynut, had been the original signatories of the 1991 Agadir Charter), and reached agreement on a document to be tendered to the UN meeting that foregrounded the juridical aspect of the Amazigh movement’s demands, emphasizing that the Amazigh people fit the UN definition of “indigenous minority populations” whose legal rights were supposed to be protected under international law. The juridical angle had long been advocated by Tamaynut head Hassan Idbelkassem, who, together with his fellow lawyer and activist Ahmed Adghirni, attended the Vienna meeting. AMREC activists, by contrast, were not keen on emphasizing the Moroccan Amazigh’s minority status and avoided using the vocabulary of “indigenous minority,” for it clashed with the Amazigh movement’s foundational notion that the large majority of the Moroccan population was in fact Amazigh in origin. Subsequent formative Amazigh movement texts would also reject the “minority” and “ethnic” labels. Nonetheless, AMREC did give the go-ahead to Tamaynut to present the document to the Vienna meeting.4 It would be...

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