In apparent good condition and assisted by an ex officio lawyer from which he disregarded, the Franco-Argelino writer Boalem Sansal has heard impassive this Thursday in an argostic outras the request of the prosecutor to impose three years of jail for “attempting against the integrity of the State.” Cancer patient and 75 years in the Civil Registry (although its real age can be around 80), Sansal is one of the most important, translated and read in the French language. His critical voice against the Government of Algeria, of which he was high official in the past, in statements to a French media, led to his arrest four months ago and the opening of a process marked by secrecy and incommunication with his lawyers. The Court is expected to issue a week, at the end of the Sacred Muslim month of Ramadán.
His judgment was developed in one of the most tense moments of relations between Algeria and France, the ancient colonial power. His main lawyer, the French lawyer François Zimeray, considered last week at a press conference that Sansal has been used as a “host” and “Turk’s Head” in the crossfire of the diplomatic conflict that emerged after the implicit recognition of Paris of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the Spanish ex -colony whose self -determination defends Algiers through its support for its support for the independence Polisario
Nationalized French just a year ago, the Algerian writer has decided to defend himself at the trial, not having allowed direct contact with his team of lawyers. Sansal expressed himself in French before the Court of Dar Al Baida, East district of Algiers, and did not allow the ex officio lawyer to be assigned, according to a journalist from the newspaper Echourouk present in the room. The defendant denied that he had the will to offend the Algerian state and described his statements of simple expression of a personal opinion.
From France, his personal lawyer described the “ghost process” trial. “It has been developed in the midst of the greatest secret, which is incompatible with the very idea of justice,” Zimeray apostilled in statements to the European station1. President Emmanuel Macron, together with other political leaders, has repeatedly requested his liberation before the official silence in Algiers.
In statements to the French ultra -right magazine Borders, The writer awarded the French Academy’s novel prize, questioned the current Eastern borders of Algeria, which considered “territories of neighboring Morocco before the French colonization in 1830 ″. Both Maghreb countries fought in 1963 the so -called War of the Arenas by the dispute of an extension strip of the desert of the Sahara.
This comment of apparent intellectual provocation touched the deepest fiber of Algerian nationalism, whose judicial system replied with article 87º bis of the Criminal Code, which typifies as “terrorist or subversive, any act that threatens the security of the State and the integrity of the territory.” The Algerian President, Abdelmayid Tebún, has limited himself to pointing out that justice follows his normal course and that the author of the Oath of the barbarians (Alliance) receives medical attention in prison.
Disappeared at first on November 16, shortly after landing at the Algiers airport from Paris, its editor and their relatives took 10 days to know the whereabouts of this author widely recognized in Europe. His critical voice with Islamic integrism and the autocratic system of Algeria had been ignored until then in his native country and habitual residence, where his works are still prohibited.
Sansal’s arrest and trial, La Paz Prize for German booksellers and veteran aspiring to the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the author of The German village (The Aleph) or 2084: The end of the world (Seix Barral), has raised a wave of solidarity in his favor. Mobilized by Franco -Argelian writer Kamel Daud, Goncourt Award with Houris (He publishes in Spanish next week Cabaret Voltaire), four Nobel awards-Ernaux, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka— and a long list of writers around the world-Salman Rushdie, Peter Sloterdjik, Andreï Kourkov, Roberto Savian Giuliano da Empoli, Sylvain Tesson, Leïla Slimani, among many others – have signed a manifesto in which they ask for their release.