Black Spring (Kabylie)

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In 2001, a young Kabyle activist (Guermah Massinissa) was arrested with no reason by the gendarmes and was "accidentally" killed inside the gendarmerie. This provoked terrible riots in Kabylie that lasted for months. Bouteflika's government claimed that the real name of Massinissa was in fact Karim and that he was a jobless criminal of 26 years old. Several months after having said that, the government's admitted that the real name was in fact Massinissa, and that he was an innocent high school student. The minister of interior Yazid Zerhouni said that he "was badly informed". But still; no apologies were given to the victim. The riots did not stop.

During the Kabyle crisis of 2001, also called the "Black Spring", Bouteflika's government maintained that the Kabyles were "manipulated by a foreign hand".

A march that brought about 500 000 Kabyles into the capital, Algiers, was organized by the Arouch, it was followed by a confrontation between the local population of Algiers and the Kabyles. The police sided with the "Algérois" and the sole TV channel in Algeria thanked "les Algérois for having defended their town from the invaders". Since then marches in Algiers have become prohibited.

At the end, Bouteflika had to capitulate to some of the Kabyle revendications, he withdrew the gendarmes from Kabylie and added the Berber language, Tamazight as a "national language" in the constitution.

126 young Kabyles were killed, hundreds were severely injured in these riots, also many were tortured by the gendarmes. A new political movement appeared : The Movement for the autonomy of Kabylie which has Regionalistic revendications that never existed among the Kabyle population.