The Algerian regime may try to restore its habit, more fatigues than costume, in the eyes of the Algerians by pretending to commune with them at each victory, even the least significant, of one of the Algerian football teams, nothing helps . Because football remains, by far, the most powerful catalyst that polarizes the anti-power challenge in Algeria.
Last weekend, two football matches, one in Tizi Ouzou, counting for qualification for the group stages of the African Champions League, and the other in Sétif, for the 7e day of the Algerian Ligue 1, were peppered with anti-regime slogans, chanted by local supporters.
In Tizi Ouzou, where the Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie, the most successful football club in Algeria (14 times Ligue 1 champion) punched its qualifying ticket for the group stages of the African Champion’s League by eliminating the Togolese club Kara’s ASKO, local supporters have revived Hirak slogans and other anti-regime chants.
So they sang the song The Mouradia House, whose paternity belongs to the supporters of Mouloudia d’Alger (USMA), a legendary club in the capital. This song has become a Hirak anthem since Friday, February 22, 2019, the date of the first march of the popular and peaceful anti-power movement. His lyrics liken the Algerian presidential palace, in its military and civilian facades, to The Money Heista famous Spanish series that features robbers who strip the House of Money of its money to distribute part of it to the people.
This song was enriched by the tube 3am Said (Happy New Year), who castigated, in January 2019, Saïd Bouteflika, the powerful brother of the late Algerian President Abdelaziz. Said tube has now become widespread in stadiums, now targeting the other Said, namely the current boss of the Algerian army and strongman of the regime, General Chengriha.
The supporters of JS Kabylie also chanted, last Saturday, the slogan “Murderer power”, which they continued to sing even in the arteries of Tizi Ouzou, at the end of the match having qualified their team.
The city of Sétif, a little further east of Tizi Ouzou, and on the occasion of the reception by the local Wifak of the neighboring club of Khenchela, was the scene, last Thursday, of the same scenes of supporters castigating the regime. Algerian, also described as “killer power”.
Needless to recall that these regions have experienced deadly forest fires over the past two years, with nearly a hundred deaths in the Tizi Ouzou region alone in 2021, and more than forty deaths in the Sétif region in 2022. Dramas, in the face of which the Algerian government has remained idly by, limiting itself to lying by promising, each time, the purchase of water bomber planes.
For security reasons, and with a view to not exposing Kabyle supporters to the condemnation of power, and therefore to arbitrary arrests and other police custody which can last for several months, videos showing the protest in the stadiums and their surroundings were filmed from behind or from afar to make it difficult to identify people.
Indeed, since this season, access tickets to the biggest Algerian stadiums are sold exclusively on a government platform (tadkirati.mjs.gov.dz), managed by the local DGSN. At the entrance to the stadiums, the police require each holder of an electronic ticket to show their national card to ensure the conformity of the names on the two documents. This measure, supposedly put in place to avoid the black market, is in fact aimed at tracking down Hirak militants in the stands.