By Roger Kaplan

Surprising as will be the inauguration as New York City mayor of an anti-Israel activist, it will be preceded by an initiative that will come as a shock from the other direction. On the 14th December, representatives of a country of dar-al-Islam, explicitly and insistently pro-Zionist and pro-liberal democracy, at a ceremony in Paris, will issue a declaration of independence for Kabylie, in northeast Algeria, defying a regime whose despotism it considers unfixable.

The Kabyles, a Berber people who supplied much of the manpower and leadership of Algeria’s own national movement that wrested independence from France in 1962, traditionally have favored multi-party democracy, separation of religion and state, a liberal approach to education and culture, and, especially in recent years, a pro-West, pro-Israel, indeed even philo-Semitic foreign policy, harking back to the Kabyle princess, Kahina, who died in battle against the 7th century Arab invasion.

As a majority-Muslim country, Kabylie (Kabylia in English) would be the only liberal-democratic state in the umma to express support for Israel and the American policy of opposing radical Islam. This is not new: the Kabyles, ever since the end of the French war, have felt oppressed under Arabo-Islamist regimes that they believe never appreciated or respected Algeria’s broadly multi-national population, composed of Jews, Maltese, Spaniards, French, Italians, Arabs, Turks, and indigenous Berbers, speaking a variety of languages and professing varieties of faiths, including secular humanistic reason.

The two greatest writers of the independence movement years in Algeria were Albert Camus, whose mother was Spanish and who opposed colonial-style discrimination against Arabs while favoring a federal system of governance attached to France, and the Kabyle teacher and writer Mouloud Ferraoun, who favored independence while hoping to retain the pied-noir population and the French connection, and who was murdered in the last days of the war by French-Algerian irredentists. For the respect due all and the love of the country’s beauty and human wealth, they were friends with deep respect for each other’s literary genius.

This striving for fraternity, this insistence on the dignity that grows out of respect, has been expressed in Kabyle protests, poetry, song, and carried a suffering people through years of monomaniacal linguistic and religious intolerance that drove the Jews out of Algeria. The same religious-statist tyranny drove out the pieds-noirs, losing their entrepreneurial and professional skills along with the passion of the fierce attachment to their native land. It forced the Christians (St Augustine, famous son) underground, instituted a mukhabarat-style secret police with East German and Soviet details added, stifled development in a country richly endowed in natural resources (one-time breadbasket of the Mediterranean world), and abandoned several generations to despair-driven emigration.

The Kabyles did what they could to reform the Algerian state and limit the power of its army and security services. These were often staffed by Kabyles, who also attained important positions of power in government, though not for ultimate decision-making and never the presidency. The Berber Spring of 1980, forerunner of the Arab Springs of decades later, the democracy movement of the late 1980s and the resistance to the blood-soaked Islamist insurgency of the 1990s, were all led by Kabyles, by no means exclusively of course. Finally, perhaps inevitably, reforms including regional autonomy were demanded by activists, which were met by repression, leading inexorably to the idea of secession.

There is a sense in which the Algerian epic represents a concentration of Islam’s confrontation with the West, not least in the role Algerian emigration has played in French domestic politics. Algerian emigration was for a time overwhelmingly Kabyle, and it was assimilationist, broadly successful across all fields from medicine to sports and culture, deeply beneficial to France. But under the influence of Islamization, immigration has become a form of civilizational subversion, an existential threat. Kabyle autonomists recognize this and see in their initiatives a lifeboat for both France and Algeria — and for themselves.

And indeed for us. John Quincy Adams’ admonition remains foundational, She [America] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. […] . Prudence is always welcome, and surely we have sound pragmatic reasons for managing our relations with African nations with tact. However, it may be recalled that the younger Adams’ famous speech insists on thé Declaration as the essential blueprint guiding our foreign policy. And that (in a dissent from his distinguished father), the great statesman did not object to resisting the pirates of Barbary.

Well wishes on your independence, Kabyles.