Its inauguration by President Tebboune, announced on December 23, will still wait. But the stadium, which looks like a green and yellow flying saucer, the colors of the Youth Sports of Kabylie (JSK), already stands like a fortress above Tizi-Ouzou. “The most beautiful stadium in Algeria,” judges coach Djamel Belmadi, regarding this 50,000-seat building promised by Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2003, then in the middle of his re-election campaign. It was then a question of forgetting the death of more than a hundred young people killed in riots two years previously. Twenty years later, the promise has been kept, but the fault lines between Algiers and Kabylia remain gaping.
The JSK is a standard bearer of the Berber cause in the country and beyond the borders. It represents Kabylia, its language and its culture oppressed by the Algerian central power. With her victories, she accompanied key political moments such as the “Berber Spring” in 1980 or the “Black Spring” in 2001. Slogans that could not be said in the streets were shouted in the stadiums.
In 1977, when the team reached the final of the Algerian Cup, for the first time one could hear part of the audience at the 5th of July stadium in Algiers asking “Anwa wigi? » (“Who are we?”), and the rest respond in chorus “d imazighen! » (“Des Amazigh!”), remembers Houcine, then a law student. “It was incredibly courageous, in the presence of President Boumediène, that is to say during the years of lead when military security scared everyone,” explains this lawyer, involved in the defense of prisoners of opinion, on condition of anonymity. The event is evoked by Oulahlou, author of the song Pouvoir assassin!, whose chorus has become a stadium classic since 1998 and the assassination of Matoub Lounès, rebel singer, icon during his lifetime, killed in circumstances that remain unclear.
For Aghiles, a supporter who came from Algiers to encourage his team, “JSK is like Barça, it is the pride of a region whose culture has long been despised by those in power”. For Da Ouamar, an old supporter who hasn’t gone to the stadium for a long time but whose shop is decorated with historical photos sums up the general feeling, “the JSK is a symbol of freedom and pride”.
Record number of championship titles
The Tizi-Ouzou club is an institution of Algerian football, the only one to have never left the elite since joining in 1969. It holds the record for champion titles (14) and an eloquent African record including two victories in the Continental Champions League. But for fifteen years, JSK has only collected two trophies and the last years of Mohand-Chérif Hannachi, captain of the team from the 1970s before becoming the emblematic president of the club between 1993 to 2018, have been synonymous with a gradual downgrading. “We had become an ordinary club,” laments Aghiles.
His succession by the young Cherif Mellal (42 years old), who will take the presidency after a Homeric battle, foreshadowing by a year the Hirak protests against a cacochymous power, will renew the fervor around the “canaries”.
Pushed in turn towards release in September 2021, Cherif Mellal was finally incarcerated in January 2023, then sentenced on October 25 to eighteen months in prison for undermining national unity after notably appearing in photos alongside of alleged activists from the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie, a “terrorist” organization according to Algiers. “They wanted to destroy the rebirth of the club and a man devoted to his region,” thunders a member of the Kabylie Boys Ultra, the main group of JSK supporters.
Six months ago, when his team was on the verge of relegation to the second division, Aghiles was decrying the takeover of his club by the public mobile telephone company Mobilis. As for many supporters, this change of ownership was akin to “selling the soul of the JSK”. The statement has since softened under the effect of the funds paid. “Today, no Algerian club can do without money from a public company,” notes his friend Samy.
The Hocine Aït Ahmed stadium
“JSK has an unrivaled historical heritage, but it needs skills to enter modern football. Mobilis can be a chance to modernize but you have to trust young people,” judges the club’s former communications manager, Mohamed Bellahcène.
In recent years, a battle within public opinion has also broken out over the name of the new stadium. In Tizi-Ouzou, many people pushed for him to be named “Matoub Lounès”. But the mere mention of this name gives a cold sweat to the country’s political leaders as the singer’s rebellious words still resonate in the hearts of Kabyle youth.
Finally, another figure from the region was chosen in the person of Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the fathers of the Algerian revolution of 1954, but also an opponent who remained in exile for a long time. A more consensual choice, intended to encourage this region to greater participation in political life, one year before the presidential election scheduled for December 2024. In 2019, Kabylia had boycotted the previous election by more than 99%.