ALGIERS Algerian minority Berbers blocked three national highways in their northeastern Kabylie homeland on Monday in an anti-government protest, area residents said.

Roadblocks were set up on main arteries linking the coastal capital Algiers to points east, the sources told AFP.

The protest was planned at a marathon meeting last week of Berber community leaders angered at the government's refusal to meet with them on October 5, banning a 5,000-strong march on Algiers by militants seeking to deliver a set of demands to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Scuffles broke out on Sunday between protesters and security forces near Bejaia, Kabylie's main town.

Residents said Monday that calm had returned to the city.

Berber leaders representing about one-third of Algeria's population have called for a general strike on Wednesday and a "popular march" on November 1, the anniversary of the start of Algeria's 1954-62 War of Independence against France, near Tizi Ouzou, the Kabylie capital.

The Berbers' demands include the prosecution of national police involved in a bloody crackdown against Berber protesters in April and May in which dozens were killed, mainly in police gunfire, and the withdrawal of the national police, or gendarmes, from Kabylie.

The Berbers also want their language Tamazight, to be made an official language.

Their platform of "non-negotiable" demands also seeks an end to "policies of under-development, impoverishment and making beggars of the Algerian people" and a "socioeconomic emergency plan for Kabylie."

Bloody clashes between riot police, gendarmes and mainly youthful Berbers shook Kabylie for about two months after a youth was shot dead in police custody in April.