Disappeared since the 16th, shortly after landing at the Algiers airport from Paris, silence, first, and then indignation, have surrounded the mysterious arrest of the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, 75, who had just acquire French nationality. A widely recognized author in Europe, his critical voice against Islamic fundamentalism and the autocratic regime of Algeria seemed to be reluctantly tolerated in his country of birth and habitual residence, where his works continue to be banned. The Algerian Prosecutor’s Office has charged him this Tuesday with the accusation of “attack against national integrity”, a crime included under the chapter of terrorism, which can carry the death penalty, although the Maghreb country has only applied a maximum life sentence for some time. three decades.
The authorities only indirectly confirmed his arrest a week later – in an editorial article published by the state agency APS – when the clamor to demand his release already spread in France from the offices of Gallimard, his publishing house, to the presidential palace of El Elysium. 15 days have passed until Sansal appeared before the Prosecutor’s Office, according to his French lawyer, to learn about the charges against him. The accusations presented are very serious for a case that has all the elements of crimes of opinion. After being held in a prison in Algiers, Sansal has finally been admitted to a hospital. “He is in good health,” say judicial sources cited by the newspaper. The World.
His arrest, and the harassment in court suffered by the novelist Kamel Daoud, winner of the Goncourt at the beginning of this month, is a reflection of the bad times that Franco-Algerian fiction is going through. Like diplomacy and the economy, the tension between Algiers and Paris after the turn taken by President Emmanuel Macron on Western Sahara, made official in an official visit by Morocco at the end of October, has also shaken the world of culture.
The French Foreign Minister, Bruno Retailleau, acknowledged this Tuesday on a television channel that the Government of Paris is carrying out discreet actions to “offer protection” to Sansal. His arrest occurred unexpectedly, shortly after the gesture of reconciliation by the Algerian president, Abdelmayid Tebún, by pardoning a dozen political dissidents on the 1st, on the 70th anniversary of the start of the national liberation war against France. imprisoned. Among them were the journalist Ihsane el Kali, in prison for two years, and several activists linked to the Hirak, the popular movement that forced the departure from power of President Abdelaziz Buteflika in 2019, when he was seeking a fifth term after two decades in power. the charge.
Awarded the novel prize of the French Academy, the author of The German’s Village (El Aleph), has been accused by the public news agency APS of acting as “a puppet of anti-Algerian revisionism” and as a “pseudo intellectual revered by the French extreme right (…) who questions Algerian sovereignty.” Some statements by Sansal to the far-right French magazine Bordersin which he questioned the colonial borders set by France in the Maghreb and which were reproduced in the Moroccan press, seem to be behind these accusations.
“It has been an excuse from the regime,” says journalist and editor Manuel Florentín, who published Sansal’s first works translated into Spanish in Alianza. He remembers him as an intellectual who “has always been critical of any type of totalitarianism and intolerant ideology, whether political or religious: that is where all his evils have come from,” he details in a telephone conversation. “I haven’t seen him for several years (the French-Algerian author has been published again in Spanish —2084. The end of the world (Seix Barral), among others), but I spoke many times with him in Madrid, Barcelona, Frankfurt… and I consider that he is not an extreme right-wing person; On the contrary, he is someone against any intolerant idea,” he emphasizes.
Together with Yasmina Khadra
Led by Florentín, Sansal burst into Spanish bookstores with The Oath of the Barbariansalmost at the same time as What wolves dream of, by Yasmina Khadra. “Both crime novels attacked the corruption of the Algerian regime and Islamic fundamentalism, but while the second author (a female pseudonym for the former Algerian military man Mohammed Moulessehou) remained underground, the first published under his own name and ended up losing his senior position. official,” says the one who was its editor. “In addition to seeing his professional career cut short, his personal life was affected, and he ended up separating from his Czech wife when his family took refuge in Prague in the face of fundamentalist threats,” recalls Florentín, who also launched in Alianza Rue Darwin.
“A free spirit, he arrived simultaneously in literature and in dissidence against an Algerian regime accused of all baseness and against religious obscurantism,” the newspaper defined The World to the novelist in an editorial in which he questions his detention in Algeria. Those responsible for the Gallimard publishing house, where he has published his works in France, have shown their “concern” about the situation of the novelist, with whom they have lost contact since he returned to Algiers after a short stay in France.
Almost a decade ago, he acknowledged to EL PAÍS that he began to “write compulsively to kill time” during the period of violence that shook the Maghreb country in the last decade of the previous century. Boualem Samsal was one of the first authors to break the taboo of the prohibition, for the sake of “national reconciliation”, of publishing books on the Algerian civil war, the black decade (1992-2002) that pitted the Army against armed fundamentalist groups. , which claimed more than 100,000 deaths and thousands of forced disappearances. Despite being ostracized since he lost his position as director general in the Ministry of Industry 25 years ago, he has continued to live in Boumerdés, in the metropolitan region of Algiers, and has not gone into voluntary exile.
Last Goncourt Prize
This was the case of Kamel Daoud, 54 years old and nationalized French since 2020, who began a professional career as a journalist for the French-language newspaper The Daily of Oran, before dedicating himself to literature and moving to France to teach Political Science. At the beginning of this month, this Algerian writer won the Goncourt prize, the most prestigious for literature in French, for his third novel, Hourisa story about the aftermath of the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s for a woman.
The taboo of the law of silence on the black decade has also haunted him. A survivor of a terrorist massacre denounced him to court last week in Algiers, after accusing him of “revealing her medical history” in the novel, Efe reports. Daoud’s wife, a psychiatrist, cared for Saada Arbane, 31, who as a child was about to have her throat cut in a fundamentalist attack in which all of her relatives lost their lives. Arbane now accuses them both of violating “medical secrecy” by describing personal details in the novel, such as the machine she uses to breathe and a tattoo, that identify her. The Gallimard publishing house has denied the charges by ensuring that the characters in the Houris They are the result of fiction and summarize the experiences of hundreds of victims of the Algerian civil war.