The brief// by Ben FrankelME turmoil offers tough choices for Western democracies

Here are some comments on developments that caught our eye this week.

Picking and choosing

With anti-government protests sweeping the Middle East, many Western observers, if not always their governments, tend instinctively to side with the protesters and criticize the governments against which the protesters rail.

We should be more discriminating and judicious, though, when it comes to supporting this side or that, and judge each case on its merits. We should, in other words, pick and choose rather than automatically assume that all anti-government protesters are good and all governments, even if less than perfectly democratic by our standards, are bad.

Always siding with anti-government protesters is easy, but also politically and morally shallow. Picking and choosing is more demanding because to do that one must familiarize oneself with complex situations and convoluted story lines, with rival claims and competing values.

Here are two examples of complex situations.

Algeria

The Kabyles (or Kabylians) are the largest homogeneous Algerian cultural community. They consider themselves exclusively Berber. Their traditional homeland is Kabylie (or Kabylia) in Algeria’s north-east. Kabyles speak the Kabyle variety of Tamazight, the generic name for the Berber languages.

When Algeria became independent in 1962, the FLN – the guerilla movement which led the fight against the French for Algerian independence – took power and instituted harsh Arabization measures, to which the Kabyles objected. On 10 March 1980, the Algerian government announced that it would ban a conference on Kabyel history and culture which was scheduled for April at an Algerian university. On 20 April 1980, hundreds of Kabyl intellectuals, writers, and activists did turn up for the event, though, and were promptly arrested the security services. The Kabyles refer to the event as the Berber Spring.

Since the dismantling of the one-party FLN dictatorship in 1989, the government has made some concessions to the Kabyles. The Berber language, for example, is now regarded as a national language, although Arabic is still the country’s official language.

Note that there are different estimates about how many Kabyl people there are. The CIA World Factbook says that 15 percent of Algeria’s thirty-five million people identify themselves as Kabyles, that is, 5.25 million. Wikipedia says that 40 percent of the Algerian people are Kabyles, that is, fourteen million. A recent Fox News reports asserted that there are ten millions Kabyles in Algeria.

Regardless of the precise size of the Kabyl community, the Obama administration is now facing a delicate issue. Fox