The draw between the 16 teams that will compete in the final phase of the World Cup organized by the FIFA alternative for Stateless and Factual Nations was rendered as follows:
Group A: Jersey, Panjab, Kurdistan *, Chagos Islands
Group B: Karpatalya, Western Armenia, Tamil Eelam, Kabylia
Group C: Mapuche, Matabeleland, Cornwall, Australian First Nations
Group D: South Ossetia, Cascadia, Japanese Koreans, Darfur
The Kabyle National Football Team’s matches will take place between May 30th and June 7th 2020 in Skopje, the capital of the Republic of North Macedonia. It is the 2nd CONIFA World Cup after that of London 2018.
]]>Among the 56 members of ConIFA representing the 6 continents, here is the list of national selections qualified for this world event organized for the 4th time by CONIFA, the FIFA alternative for Stateless Nations and de facto states:
Africa zone:
– Matabeleland
– Kabylia
– Darfur
– Western Sahara (By invitation)
Asia Zone:
– Tamil Eelam
– Punjab
– Koreans from Japan
Europe zone:
– South Ossetia
– Western Armenia
– Cornwall
– Jersey
– Karpatalya (Qualified ex officio as 2018 World Champion)
North America area:- Cascadia
Oceania area:
– Australian First Nations
South America zone:
– Mapuche
Global Ticket (replacing the guest ticket):
– Chagos Islands
After London 2018, the Kabyle national football team will participate for the second time in a row in this new edition of an international sports competition.
The draw will take place at the Annual General Meeting of ConIFA members which will take place on the island of Jersey on January 25 and 26, 2020.
PS: ConIFA has chosen to illustrate this official announcement a photo (Image credit: CONIFA / Alvaro Velazquez) showing the 2018 World Cup with the Kabylie flag in the background
]]>LULEA, SWEDEN (SIWEL) – ConIFA @CONIFAOfficial has officially announced this Tuesday evening, on June 18th, 2019, the partial list of national teams who have recieved their ticket for the final phase of the next football World Cup which will be organized by Somaliland in 2020. Kabylia is one of eight (8) nations already qualified out of a total of 16 teams that will be qualified among the 56 members of ConIFA representing the 6 continents. The Kabyle national football team will participate for the second time in a row at the fourth edition of an international sports competition organized by the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), which is the alternative of FIFA for the stateless nations in the world.
The African zones: The 5 qualified teams which are all already known:
– Kabylia
– Western Sahara, by special invitation (Wild Card) following a unanimous vote of the Executive Committee of ConIFA
– Darfur
– Matabeleland
Somaliland, the country which organizes the event, is qualified ex officio.
The European zone: Only 2/5 qualified teams are already known:
– Karpatalya, the Hungarians of Ukraine, automatically qualified with their title of world champions ConIFA 2018
– South Ossetia, qualified ex officio with its title of European Champion ConIFA 2019 in Abkhazia
The remaining three (3) teams will be announced at the beginning of October 2019.
The South American Zone: The only qualified team already known are:
– Mapuches qualified as the only South American member team of ConIFA
The Asian zone: The three (3) qualified teams will be announced at the beginning of October 2019.
The North American and Oceanian Zone: It will not be until October 2019 that the teams from these two (2) zones will be announced. There will be 2 teams from these zones, one from North America and one from Oceania.
To follow the news of the national Kabyle team use the hashtag #ENKabyle which will not fail to be responsible for including a new recruitment campaign all over the place, visit his site, his page and official account on social networks:
https://www.enkabyle.com/
By Cap Kabyle
]]>ROBERT O’CONNOR
Kabylia sits at the northern tip of Africa, on the lip of the Mediterranean. It is home to some 7.5 million people, with footballing glitterati such as Karim Benzema and Zinedine Zidane part of a richly woven football heritage. Nominally, legally, these lands belong to Algeria.
But there is an “otherness” felt by the Kabylian Berbers about their place within Algeria. Ideologically, Kabylian people represent the possibility of a culturally pluralistic Algeria, an alternative to the more monolithic Arab-Islamic model of the country desired and pursued by the state government.
That feeling extends to football, says Lyes Imemmai, an Algerian national of Kabylian Berber heritage who is the head coach of a newly formed Kabylia national team. “They always tried to break us,” Imemmai says of the Algerian response. “It’s the independence movement that the Algerian police are afraid of, 100 percent.
“There is no possibility to talk football in Kabylia without touching the subject of independence.”
On April 15, thousands took to the Paris streets to lend their voices to the cause of Kabylian liberation, with the diaspora out in force in a gesture of solidarity.
For one man, the time for affirmative action had already arrived.
In March 2018, Aksel Bellabbaci sat in a cafe in his hometown, Tizi Ouzou, sipping coffee, preparing for a press conference that would never take place.
Four years earlier, he had watched Algeria compete in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. This team, he decided, represented a nation to which he could not relate. He saw nothing of his own proud Kabylian Berber heritage in what was a culturally and ethnically Arab Algerian side. Bellabbaci sat on the idea until June 2017, when the bell of opportunity began to toll.
At that same moment, in Paris, another Kabylian exile, a popular 1970s singer named Ferhat Mehenni, was learning about the existence of the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA), a registered charity based in Sweden, offering the sport’s isolated and disenfranchised the chance to play competitive football.
Bellabbaci himself was the state secretary for sport in the Kabylian provisional government in exile, also based in Paris. Soon, he and Mehenni were exchanging notes. The road opened up for a new chapter in the Kabylian story: a national football team for Kabylia.
The third member of the founding triumvirate was Imemmai. He was at a ceremony in Brussels to mark the annual day of celebration of Kabylian culture when he first heard of the plans.
Preparations, he learned, had begun in Paris for a possible Kabylia team to represent the embattled territory at a football tournament in London for the unrecognized peoples of the world.
“That was when I first heard about Aksel,” Imemmai says of those early meetings in June 2017. “So I looked him up and said, ‘I’m available to help if you need it.'” A partnership was born.
The call went out on social media for footballers of Kabylian birth to make themselves known. The response was encouraging. Within weeks, Imemmai had flown to Kabylia to touch base with those who had shown interest, and over the course of days and weeks, a squad was assembled, amateurs all but brimming with heart.
What followed was a whirlwind of activity, as Imemmai and Bellabbaci’s hastily assembled team raced through 10 games in a little over two months in a frantic dash to fulfill CONIFA’s qualification criteria. With a traditional qualifying tournament impossible under the unique circumstances in which CONIFA works, member teams collected points by competing in “qualification” games against local sides, with the results collated into a global-league table to determine who progressed to London.
On September 2, the CONIFA board confirmed that Kabylia had placed among the top two African member associations, sealing the team’s place at the finals barely three months after they first applied for membership. The same day, Algeria lost 3-1 in Zambia, eliminating them from the FIFA World Cup. Kabylia rejoiced. But the team’s problems were just beginning.
Six months later, as Bellabbaci sipped his coffee in Tizi Ouzou, he was joined by two policemen. Later that day, a heavy police presence descended on his village and cut off routes in and out of town. “There were five police in total that I saw patrolling my garden,” Bellabbaci says.
Word of his and Imemmai’s work with the Kabylia team had travelled predictably fast. The particular sensitivities of the local Tizi Ouzou government over the independence question had been pricked. The authorities were interested now.
“Fortunately, I know how the police system works,” Bellabbaci says of his interrogation. “I said, ‘Show me your documents, your papers.’ I’m not going to back down. They didn’t have the authority to shut me down. I was clever.”
It began with just two officers. Then it was five. Soon, his house was surrounded, a convoy of black SUVs with smoked windows. In the end, exasperated with Bellabbaci’s non-cooperative stance, the police arrested him.
“Twenty of them came to my house,” he says. “That’s when they took me. Was I scared? We’re all human. But the feeling of a strong identity can get you through it.”
He was held in custody for nine hours. Different tactics were used to try to break his spirit. By Bellabbaci’s count, all 20 officers took a turn. Some made threats. Others feigned sympathy and were more conciliatory. One proposed alterations to the London plans, a compromise of sorts.
Some even made threats against his family. “They said that my family in France could get hurt if I continued my work. They even knew their names.
The RTBF who interviewed Mas Sab Amar-Khodja, the minister of Youth and Sports in the Kabylian Provisional Government in Exile (Anavad), had access to the locker rooms of the Kabylian national team and interviewed Kabylian players who have put forward their pride in representing their nation, as well as Kabyle supporters who have all declared their joy to see their own, their flag, their hymn … among the other nations.
A supporter, showing Kabylian players on the ground, has also masterfully verbalized the resent that all Kabyle proud of his kabylity had to experience: “We are here, the team represents me, that’s me”
Remember that the Kabyle delegation who left London this Sunday morning will arrive shortly before eight o’clock tonight at the Bercy Seine bus station in Paris where a reception committee of several hundred Kabyles of the diaspora and headed by President Ferhat Mehenni accompanied by ministers of Anavad, will be welcoming the Kabylian heroes as it should be.
Presentation of the documentary by the RTBF:
“Punjab, Kabylia, Abkhazia … These names may not tell you anything, and for good reason, these are regions that are not recognized as states on the international scene. While many contries are ready to fly for the FIFA World Cup in Russia, these teams also play their world cup … the CONIFA on the field, no professional players, only amateurs who are there to defend their colors, far from the contracts and sponsors. ”
RTBF : Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF) is the public broadcasting organization of the French Community of Belgium, the southern, French-speaking part of Belgium
wbw / with the kind permission of RTBF *
]]>Matchday this Thursday, June 7th at 12 pm at the Queen Elizabeth II Stadium in Enfield between the two national teams of Kabylia and Tibet. A ranking match for the semi-finals of the World Cup of Nations without State, organized in London by CONIFA from May 31 to June 09, 2018.
The two teams finished 4th in their group at the end of the first round where each of the 16 teams played 3 matches. Kabylia with 1 draw and 2 losses was able to get 1 point, the first of its history for its first participation at this international tournament. Tibet had 3 defeats so 0 points.
In the quarter-finals of the playoffs for the 9-16 places on Tuesday, June 05, Kabylie beat Matabeleland 4-3 on penalties after 90 minutes of regulation, which resulted in a zero to zero; Tibet was deceived victorious because the Isle of Man (Ellan Vannin) went out of business. Having finished first in each their group, this semifinal will be for the ranking of 9 to 12.
In coming out victorious from this match, counting for the semifinals of the classification of the Nations World Cup without State, Kabylia will in the final on Saturday, June 9th, face the winner of the other semifinal which will take place at the same time at the stadium of Hayes Lane in Bromley, between Abkhazia and Koreans of Japan.
To know that Abkhazia is the reigning world champion CONIFA 2016 and the Koreans of Japan already met on June 2 by the Kabyles and whose match ended in a draw 0-0 to Kabylie its 1st point to internationally.
In the end, the Kabylian team will have been represented with dignity in the concert of the Nations, its national anthem having continuously been sang and its flag will have floated in the London sky. Its supporters coming from the Kabyle diasporas of several countries, with their passion and the festive atmosphere they provide on the stands, are in the process of being ranked as the best supporters of the tournament.
the Dalai Lama met the Tibet national team to give them a blessing and some advise for their journey to the CONIFA Paddy Power World Football Cup in London this summer!
Live match on the TaqVaylit.TV channel which is the official broadcaster of the matches of the Kabyle National Team:
Via its website: https://TaqVaylit.TV/
Via his Facebook page: https://fb.com/TaqVaylit.TV/
From noon London time, noon in Kabylia, 13h in France and 07h in Quebec.
]]>Kabylia will be among the three nations that will represent Africa next to the Barawas, represented by the diaspora of this region of southern Somalia and Matabeleland a province of western Zimbabwe, known to have been the theater in the years 1980 massacre of Ndebele, orchestrated by former president Robert Mugabe.
Obviously, when you represent a country that is occupated, politics and repression are never far away and you have to know how to be discreet. “I will not communicate the coach’s selection of the team before the start of the tournament, for fear retaliation against families left behind”, said Aksel Bellabbaci, the chairman of Kabylia’s team, who said he had been interrogated for a long time by the Algerian police, who tried to make him give up his project.
Moreover, on the eve of the departure of the players established in Kabylia, the Algerian authorities went so far as to intimidate the families of the athletes. Indeed Tizi-Ouzou Algerian sports director had turned his office into a police station to audition all the players who wanted to join the National Team Kabyle.
Often, by their very existence, the teams are already political objects. Nevertheless, like all sports competitions, the ConIFA tournament must be neutral. “On the field, teams can display their flag and sing their national anthem, but that’s it. If the chairman of the Kabyla selection wants to give his own personal opinion on the situation in his country, he can do that, but not in the name of the team, nor that of ConIFA” says a representative of the confederation.
This does not prevent the delegation from forming partnerships with political institutions. But above all, to make the Kabylas fight for independence from the Algerian colonialism more visible.
Because even if the KNT (Kabylias National Team), like the two other African teams is not part of the favorites for the title, all the ingredients are there to make known the desire for freedom of Kabylia.
match dates
May 31 Kabylia against Panjab
-June 2nd Kabylia against Koreans from Japan
-June 3 Kabylia against Western Armenia
“Kabylia is a region of Algeria, with a large Berber population. There is a huge Kabylian diaspora in France; its members include a certain Zinedine Zidane. Unfortunately, the Kabylia team have faced intimidation by the Algerian state and CONIFA took the decision to delay publishing their squad for fear the players wouldn’t have been allowed to leave.”
By playing this final of the football world cup of colonized states, Kabylie has already won this World Cup 2017-2018!
http://www.bigsoccer.com/