Abstract
Autore:
Morone Antonio, Pagano Chiara
Titolo:
"I berberi nella Libia post-Gheddafi: il caso del Jebel Nefusa tra storia e presente"
The article analyses the
Berbers’role in Libyan uprising of February
2011, historically problematizing the emergence
of the ethnic issue in present Libya’s
social and political organization as well as
Berbers’struggle to bring the ethnic discourse
on the transition political agenda, after over
42 years of Gaddafi’s pan-Arab oppression.
Berber communities of Jebel al-Nefusa
have performed their mobilization within
the public space of the revolutionary Libya,
not only in terms of revolt against Gaddafi
but also as a “laboratory of belonging”,
inextricably linking the credibility of
Libya’s democratic transition to the constitutional
acknowledgment of minorities’rights
(e.g. their linguistic and cultural
specificity). Therefore, the cultural themes
of Berberism have been coupled to nativist
rhetoric, sustaining a process of ethnic
identity’s (re)construction.The regime
fall has provided Amazigh activists with
an unprecedented opportunity to describe
and re-build a unitary linguistic and cultural
community, represented according to
ethnic categories often inherited from the
colonial past. However, at a local level,
this attitude has led to infra-group fractures
demonstrating that it is completely
arbitrary to conclude that Berber mobilization
has developed, since the beginning,
opposing Arabs and Berbers according to
ethnic directories. Nevertheless, ethnicity
served Berber leaders as a political tool
for bargaining local interests with a weak
political center, eventually seeking for autonomy
and the control of local resources.
Features and perspectives of Berber
communities will be problematized thus
describing a non-homogenous movement
whose mobilization has engendered new centrifugal
agendas in Libya’s transition.
