TEHRAN Scuffles broke out after 200,000 people marched Thursday in Algiers to denounce the rule of generals, lack of freedom and brutal police repression of Berber people in Algeria's northeastern Kabylie region.

The opposition Socialist Forces Front (FFS) Party called the rally to call for truth, justice and freedom and in protest at a bloody crackdown on unrest in Kabylie by paramilitary police. Algerian people have demanded an end to the military rule in the country.

Since April 18, when a youth was fatally shot in police custody in Kabylie and rioting broke out, 51 people have been killed and 1,300 injured, according to officials.

Witnesses, the press and the opposition say that between 60 and 80 people have been killed in Kabylie towns and villages and several thousands have been injured in battles between riot police using tear gas and live ammunition and stone-throwing youths.

In sweltering heat Thursday, marchers carried banners reading "Enough of the Generals" and "Press Freedom!" and calling for an international inquiry into the causes of the violence.

They shouted slogans such as "Bouteflika Out" and "If You Want War, We're Not Scared".

The police have long countered demonstrators not only with tear gas and water cannon but live ammunition too.

On Monday it was the journalists who took their protests against a new "muzzling law" on to the streets. The new law places hefty sentences of up to one year for insulting the head of state. Probably for the first time in the ten-year history of the country's free press, journalists of all political hues joined forces in protest at the regime's attempts to silence them. On the demo were French and Arabic writers and pro-renewal groups and conservatives. Not a newspaper was published on the "Day of the Dead Press".

Twenty-four hours later, thousands of students in Algiers announced their solidarity with the "oppressed Berbers of Kabylie". "Down With the Dictatorship", they shouted, and "No to the Hogra", the last a word applying to everything that the demonstrators are no longer prepared to accept from the authorities: Disparagement, despotism and high-handedness.

"This is an uprising by oppressed people. There is neither work nor housing here, there is nothing here at all," says one young man. Well over two-thirds of Algerians are under 30 and more than half of them are jobless. Presumably out of fear that the riot in Kabylie could spread to take in more areas, President Abdulaziz Bouteflika said to Algerians that he will punish the culprits.

At the same time, the president hoped that a cabinet shuffle will help calm the situation while the commander in charge of the reportedly brutal Kabylie gendarmerie has promised personnel changes. The word is that this will involve the sacking of more than 100 senior officers and 500 ordinary gendarmes. The demonstrators, though, are after more than a change in the law and the replacement of officials and uniformed civil servants.

Observers believe that the Bouteflika's rule is to end. The rumors on his downfall are also mounting in different news circles in Algeria and many other countries.

It seems that the Western propaganda in support of military rule in Algeria and its propaganda war against Islamists in the country does not work anymore. The Algerian government used to blame the Islamists for the killings in the country, but it has been revealed that the government itself has been behind the massacre.