Kabylia: After the Flames, Expropriation and the Death Penalty

Op-ed:  In the wake of the deadly wildfires of summer 2026, the Algerian government has announced a law on "criteria for habitation in forested areas" and the reinstatement of the death penalty for arsonists. For mountain villages, the message is clear: having been abandoned to the fire, they now risk being driven away from their land and branded as culprits. A double punishment and a method that clearly violates human rights. KHR’ duty is to report such practices and wonders whether there is an Algerian political plan that would jeopardize Kabyles’ existence. Therefore the following facts:

According to an article by the French daily Le Monde on 31 August 2026, more than 200 people died in the fires since the start of the summer, followed by three days of national mourning. The toll of the fires that ravaged Tizi Ouzou, Béjaïa and Jijel in late August 2026 marks the fifth consecutive fire season in Kabylia since the catastrophe of August 2021 and its ninety or so victims. Since then, nothing has changed: no prevention plan worthy of the name, no early warning in the villages, and rescue services that arrive (if ever) after hours of villagers fighting the flames with branches and buckets.

And yet the State's first response was not to examine its own failures. No independent investigation into the deaths has been announced. On 30 and 31 August, the authorities announced instead the death penalty for arson and a forthcoming law restricting habitation in forested areas, presented as a fire-protection measure. Both raise concerns under Algeria's international obligations.

Protecting people, or emptying the mountains?

This project is a matter of concern for the villages. The villages are not located "in" the forest: it is the forest that has for centuries surrounded villages perched on the ridges of the Djurdjura, the Akfadou and the Babors. Mountain settlement is not a planning anomaly to be corrected; it is the very foundation of Kabyle society: the tajmaât, the village, the olive tree, the fig tree, the beehive, the land handed down from generation to generation.

To set "criteria for habitation" in these areas means claiming the power to declare illegal houses that have always existed, to forbid the rebuilding of burnt homes, to make compensation conditional on "rehousing" in the lowlands and, ultimately, to transfer the land thus vacated to the State. All without asking those most directly concerned: the same logic that, as early as January 2026, led the Wali of Tizi Ouzou to prohibit by decree all access to forests and trails from May 01 to October 31, depriving village committees of the right to maintain and watch over their own massifs.

A right to property guaranteed… on paper

Yet the right to property is not a favour that the State grants or withdraws at will. Algeria's 2020 Constitution guarantees private property and permits expropriation only within the framework of the law and against fair and equitable compensation. Law No. 91-11 of 27 April 1991 requires a reasoned declaration of public interest, notified to each person concerned, and prior compensation.

International law is still more demanding. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 17) states that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of their property. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, ratified by Algeria in 1987, protects that right in Article 14 and guarantees all peoples a satisfactory environment (Article 24). The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratified in 1989, enshrines the right to adequate housing (Article 11), and its Committee, in General Comment No. 7, prohibits forced evictions that do not respect guarantees of consultation, legal remedy and rehousing. Finally, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for which Algeria voted in 2007, provides that no indigenous people may be removed from their lands without their free, prior and informed consent (Article 10) and recognises their right to the lands they traditionally own or occupy (Article 26).

A law that emptied the mountains on grounds of safety, without real compensation or a right to return, would violate every one of these standards.

A practice that recalls the old colonial method

What Kabylia fears today, it has already lived through. The dispossession of mountain communities by the central administration is one of the oldest and best-documented methods of French colonisation in Algeria.

After the insurrection of 1871, repression came first through the land: sequestration of the property of the insurgent tribes, more than 450,000 hectares confiscated, and a crushing "war contribution" imposed on Kabyle villages. The sénatus-consulte of 1863 and the Warnier Law of 1873 had already set about breaking up the collective property of the tribes so that it could be seized. The Forest Code of 1874, applied with particular brutality in mountain regions, transferred the forests to the State domain, banned the traditional use of timber and pasture and, history repeats itself, established the collective responsibility of villages for forest fires, with collective fines, sequestration and the displacement of populations. The Code de l'indigénat of 1881 completed this structure: a regime of exception that placed "natives" under a separate law, allowed administrative internment and the sequestration of property without a judge, and made land the central instrument of subjugation.

The procedure was always the same: invoke order, security or the public interest; designate the mountain people as culprit; then dispossess them by law.

That the independent Algerian State, which has made the memory of colonisation a pillar of its legitimacy (to the point of adopting, in 2026, a law criminalising French colonisation) should today contemplate the same pattern against Kabylia is more than a paradox: it is a historical fault. One cannot denounce the sequestration of 1871 and the Forest Code of 1874 in Algiers while reproducing their logic in Kabylia.

 The death penalty: a double punishment

To the announced dispossession is added the criminal threat. The Penal Code is to be amended before 15 September 2026 to reinstate the death penalty, "with execution", for those who deliberately start fires. Algeria has executed no one since 1993, and current law already punishes deliberate forest arson with sentences of up to thirty years' imprisonment, or life. The only novelty, then, is death and the end of a moratorium of more than thirty years, running counter to successive United Nations General Assembly resolutions and to Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which reserves capital punishment for the "most serious crimes" and requires impeccable fair-trial guarantees.

As far as Kabyles are concerned, this announcement has a particular bitterness. Since 2021, every fire season has come with the same official narrative: the fires are said to be the work of "criminal hands", named without any evidence being made public. That year, the authorities blamed the MAK; in 2022, dozens of death sentences were handed down in the case of the lynching of Djamel Ben Ismaïl, in a trial whose fairness was widely contested. This summer again, several people have been arrested for "arson" without the evidence against them being disclosed.

KHR denounces this project and considers that as a double punishment: to burn first, and be accused afterwards. Villages that lose their homes, their olive trees, their loved ones, would be required to prove they are not the guilty. An emergency law passed in haste, a fortnight after a tragedy, and applied in a region where the State managed neither to prevent nor to rescue, will not likely protect the forests. It will hand repression an instrument of terror and allow each fire season to be closed with culprits rather than with those responsible.

Is there a "Zero Kabyle plan"?

Many in Kabylia put these measures side by side: the forest ban, abandonment to the fire, the housing law, the death penalty, the criminalisation of all dissent and see in them the implementation of what rumour has for several years called the "Zero Kabyle plan" meaning the methodical erasure of the Kabyle presence from its own territory.

No one can establish the existence of such a written plan, and this op-ed does not claim to. But one does not need a plan to produce a result. However, KHR wonders what is the purpose  of the succession of decisions taken against the interests of the Kabyle people and in disregard of their history and international law.  Based on the facts above it is legitimate to question the real intention of the Algerian State: i.e. will it, or will it not, guarantee the Kabyles the right to live peacefully on their land?

What KHR is advocating:

The population of the mountain villages are not begging for charity. They are legitimately requesting the State to do its job: firebreaks, tracks, water points, early warning, aerial means, rescue services that arrive in time and for an independent, public inquiry to establish both the origin of the fires and the failures of prevention and rescue since 2021. They expect the compensation promised before 15 September to be paid in full, without discrimination or any condition of departure; any law on housing in forested areas to be drawn up with them, to guarantee the right to rebuild and to remain, and to exclude any disguised expropriation; and the moratorium on the death penalty to be maintained.

The Kabyle Forest has burned five summers in a row. What must not be allowed to burn is the right of those who live there to go on doing so.

KHR – Kabyle for Human Rights