PARIS Several thousand people marched Sunday in Paris in support of Algeria's ethnic Berber minority, shouting slogans and brandishing signs against a government crackdown in Kabylie, their homeland.

According to AFP, the demonstrators, from the capital and the French countryside, shouted "Down With Repression, Down With the Generals, Long Live Democracy" as they marched between the French capital's La Republique and La Nation squares.

Several protesters, mainly men but also women in traditional dress, carried signs condemning the "Mafioso Government" in Algeria and calling for democracy.

During the march, called by several Berber and French human rights organizations, some protesters staged sit-ins, singing a song by Berber singer Lounes Matoub, who was killed in an ambush in June 1998 in Kabylie, in Algeria's northeast.

Relatives of Matoub, who has become the symbol of the fight against the perceived repression of Berbers, joined Sunday's march.

Several hundred people also protested in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille on Saturday to "express their anger against what has happened in Algeria and to pay homage to those there who brave the bullets," according to an organizer from an Algerian pro-democracy organization.

Antigovernment protests have been swelling across Algeria in the last two months, and on Thursday nearly a million people -- Berbers and mainstream Arabs alike -- filled the streets of Algiers in the largest protest seen there since independence in France in 1962.

The demonstration degenerated into rioting and looting, claiming four lives, while about 1,000 people were injured.

Dozens have died, many killed by police fire, in Kabylie since unrest broke out there in mid-April, sparked by the death in police custody of a Berber youth.

Some 800,000 Algerians live in France, of whom some 28 percent are from Kabylie, while Berbers make up about one-fifth of Algeria's population.