Matoub Lounes was buried between a fig tree and a cherry tree in the garden of the house where he was born in the mountain village of Taourit Moussa. The Algerian singer, who was shot dead in an ambush last Thursday, had asked that his grave face the Kabylie mountains he loved.
Despite official indifference towards his assassination - it was the fifth news item on Algerian state television - tens of thousands of people crowded into the small village to attend the ceremony. Lounes's sister read a short text, then his mother fired two shots in the air. As is the custom in Kabylie, the other funeral guests also fired their weapons. At the same time, several thousand Algerians and French people attended outdoor memorial rallies in Paris.
The Algerian government and most French media reported that Lounes was murdered by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the extremist fundamentalists who allegedly kidnapped the popular singer for 15 days in the autumn of 1994. But the mourners blamed the government, chanting "pou voir assassin, pouvoir assassin" (government killers) - the same slogan used by rioters in several regional towns on Friday and Saturday. In Tizi Ouzou, the region's capital, at least two young men were shot dead by security forces.
Riotors sacked the local branches of the Banque Nationale d'Algerie, Air Algerie, the Social Security office, and a petrol station. They broke shop and car windows with iron bars.
We will probably never know with certainty who killed Matoub Lounes. The 42-year-old singer had campaigned for recognition of the Berber culture and language, Tamazight. He angered the fundamentalists, whom he call backward obscurantists, and the government, which he accused of corruption and dictatorship. He also had many enemies within the divided local community - some of whom publicly accused him of orchestrating his 1994 kidnapping for self-promotion.
Yet during his brief captivity, 100,000 people demonstrated in Tizi Ouzou to demand his liberation. After his release, Lounes wrote a book entitled Rebel.
Before he was murdered, the singer told friends that he expected problems when his new record was released on July 10th. In a virulent song to the tune of the Algerian national anthem, Kasa mane, he denounced leading politicians by name. At the end of the first stanza, the words "martyrdom, martyrdom, martyrdom" were replaced by "betrayal, betrayal, betrayal".
Lounes may have been betrayed by those around him. Dr Said Sadi, the Kabyle leader of the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and a close friend of Lounes, said some of his murderers were recognised by survivors of the ambush and were from a nearby village.
"His death raises the problem of local complicity because Kabylie is not a natural habitat for Islamists," Dr Sadi said. "They couldn't have acted without assistance." The silence of the authorities, he feared, could represent "a sort of morbid jubilation".
The fact that the gunmen used silencers and pump-action rifles also sowed doubts as to whether the GIA was responsible. The group usually uses sawed-off shotguns or Kalashnikovs.
The riots following Lounes's death and yesterday's funeral became protests against the Law on Arabisation, which will take effect on July 5th, Algeria's national day. The rioters attacked signs in Arabic. They see the law - which will make it a crime to use French or Tamazight in public - as an assault on their own language. The law was written in 1991 but was shelved by the late president, Mohamed Boudiaf, the following year.
It was revived at the end of 1996 and is deepening divisions among Algerian Arabists, who consider French the language of colonialism; French-speakers, who say their language opens the country to the world; and Berbers, who have fought unsuccessfully for the past two decades to have their language recognised.
"Like many laws, it will be joyfully violated by society," Dr Sadi predicted. "For there is Algerian officialdom, which lives in its own little world, and the real country, whose values are not in the least represented by government institutions."
The London Observer yesterday claimed Algeria is the world's worst human rights abuser. The North African country has a worse record than North Korea, Burma and Indonesia for extra-judicial killings, the use of torture and disappearances, the newspaper said.
