The Algerian government is often its own worst enemy. What could have possessed the generals who rule the country through a puppet civilian government to mark independence day yesterday by enacting the eight-year-old but repeatedly postponed Law on Arabisation?
In the midst of civil strife that has already claimed more than 100,000 lives, the law - which bans the use of any language other than classical Arabic in the administration, public meetings, radio, television and business - has reopened the most sensitive question in Algeria, that of national identity.
A lingering complex against the former French colonialists, an obsession with uniformity that goes back to the days of one-party rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN), and the pan-Arabist ideology inherited from the war of independence all motivated the generals. They may also have hoped that while massacres of civilians continue amid severe economic hardship, a debate on language would divert attention from deeper troubles.
But the June 25th assassination of the Kabyle singer Lounes Matoub has galvanised opposition to the law. Three people have been killed and dozens others injured or arrested in ten days of protests against both Matoub's murder and the law. A poll carried out by the authorities showed that 71 per cent of Algerians remain attached to French, which was imposed on the country during 132 years of colonisation. About one quarter of all Algerians speak Tamazight or Berber as their mother tongue, and they are fiercely opposed to the legislation which will make the use of their language a crime.
Algeria's first post-independence president, Ahmed Ben Bella, used to hammer into Algerians "We are Arabs, Arabs, Arabs!" Yet despite three decades of forced Arabisation and a powerful anti-western Islamist movement that won elections in 1991 and has since fought to take power, Algeria remains the most westernised Arab country. Although Arabic speakers are a majority, the Algerian dialect combines many Berber and French words; virtually no one in Algeria speaks the classical, Koranic Arabic that is now the only legal language in the country.
French is still used by the business community and high-ranking government officials. The latter have been criticised for their hypocrisy in the debate on Arabisation. For example, the son of Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, like most of the children of the ruling class, attended the former French lycee in Algiers, where many classes are still taught in French, and where he was exempted from final exams in Arabic.
Henceforward, all Algerian officials who sign a document in any language other than Arabic may be fined up to 100,000 dinars (£1,190). It is illegal to import non-Arabic computer keyboards into Algeria. Doctors can no longer write prescriptions in French - which most did until now.
Defending the law, the Arabist writer Tahar Ouettar said "only company directors still use the language left to us by the colonial power". He added, "French is the language you use to speak to dogs."
AFP adds from Algiers: Anti-riot police with batons and tear gas grenades prevented a march by socialists protesting at the introduction of the language law. Meanwhile in Paris and the southern French port of Marseille several hundred people, mainly from the Berber region of Kabylia in Algeria, demonstrated peacefully against the new legislation.