Front des Forces Socialistes

(FFS)

   This is an opposition party founded by Hocine Aït Ahmed and Mohand Ou Lhaj in 1963 to represent and defend essentially Berber civil and political rights. It resisted President Ahmed Ben Bella's one-party rule and eventually led to a Kabyle insurrection against the central government in 1963. In its early development stages, the party suffered when Mohand Ou Lhaj reconciled with Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed was captured and condemned to death. Later, Aït Ahmed's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1966, he escaped from prison and took refuge in France and Switzerland. In 1989, he returned to Algeria, and the FFS was legalized as a consequence of the new electoral reforms enacted in 1989.

   The FFS continues to be a Berber-based party and has militated for official status for Tamazight (the Berber language) and for a secular, pluralist Algerian society. The FFS has also called for greater autonomy for Berber-dominated regions and more Berber input in central policymaking. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which has controlled Algeria's government since independence, has excluded Berbers from high-ranking positions within the party and enacted anti-Berber policies, such as the 1990 Arabization Law. In 1989, another Berber-dominated party, the Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocracie (RCD), and the FFS jointly formed the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB) as an umbrella organization under which the two parties undertake joint action to promote Berber rights and temper the anti-Berber Islamist positions in Algerian politics. In the first multiparty parliamentary elections of June 1997, the FFS captured 20 seats out of a 380-member National People's Assembly (al majlis al cha`bi al watani).

   See also Berberist Crisis.