Second session of the Forum on Minority Issues Statement by Idriss Jazaïry Ambassador and Permanent Representative Geneva, 12th November 2009 Madame President, On behalf of the Algerian delegation, allow me to echo those who already congratulated you on your nomination. We commend the work and contribution of the Independent Expert on Minority Issues. Like other Mediterranean countries, Algeria has been a land of welcome and cohabitation for Berber, Arab, African and Mediterranean cultures, has experienced significant intermingling of civilizations and communities throughout history, and as such cannot lay claim a pure and homogenous ethnicity. The substratum of the Algerian population is Amazigh, and Algerian society should be assessed in light of how it has been politically, economically and culturally established throughout the ages. Given its geographical position at the crossroad of ancestral cultures and civilisations, Algeria has taken advantage of the richness, creativity and genius of these inputs and made an innovative synthesis out of it. In the 7th century Islam was introduced to North Africa by Okba Ibn Nafaa, who came from the Middle East with less than 30,000 men. These men did not remain in the North African region however, which at the time consisted of 25 million inhabitants, but returned to Egypt. A few centuries later the second wave of Hilalians didn’t settle there either, but also returned to the Middle East. In this respect, it wasn’t the population’s indignity that was affected by these waves of Islamisation, but rather their Arab or Amazigh languages, depending whether populations settled within major circulation routes or in hard to access areas. Algeria is a unitary state. The Movement for the Autonomy of Kabyle, referred to in the declaration of the Worldwide Amazigh Conference, has not been refused authorization. In order to be authorized however, every political group must conform to both the Constitution, in particular article 42 which includes the concept of national unity, and to the 1989 law on political parties, which was subsequently amended in 1997. Article 3 of this law stipulates