Doulem Sansal: Algeria charges terrorism against one of its main writers, who could face life in prison Culture

Disappeared on the 16th, shortly after landing at Algiers airport from Paris, the mysterious arrest of Boulam Sansal, a 75-year-old Algerian writer who had recently acquired French nationality, surrounded first silence and then outrage. A widely recognized writer in Europe, his critical voice against Islamic fundamentalism and Algeria’s autocratic regime was reluctantly tolerated in the country of his birth and habitual residence, where his works remain banned. The Algerian prosecutor’s office this Tuesday charged him with “attack against national integrity”, a crime included under the chapter on terrorism, which carries the death penalty, although the Maghreb country has only briefly imposed the maximum penalty. Life sentence has been imposed. three decades.

Authorities indirectly confirmed his arrest only a week later – in an editorial article published by the state agency APS – when the clamor for his release spread from the offices of his publishing house Gallimard in France to the presidential palace of L’Elysium . , According to his French lawyer, 15 days have passed since Sansal had to appear at the prosecutor’s office to learn about the charges against him. The charges presented are very serious for a case that has all the elements of Rai’s crimes. After being imprisoned in Algiers, Sansal has finally been admitted to the hospital. “He is in good health,” judicial sources quoted by the newspaper say. Le Monde.

His arrest, and the harassment in court earlier this month that Goncourt-winning novelist Kamel Daoud faced, is a reflection of the dark times that Franco-Algerian fiction is going through. Like diplomacy and the economy, tensions between Algiers and Paris following the move by President Emmanuel Macron on Western Sahara during an official visit to Morocco in late October have also shaken the world of culture.

The French Foreign Minister, Bruno Reteleau, acknowledged on a television channel this Tuesday that the Paris government is taking prudent action to “provide protection” to Sansal. His arrest came unexpectedly, on the 70th anniversary of the start of the national liberation war against France, shortly after Algerian President Abdelmayid Teboun signaled on the 1st that he would pardon a dozen political dissidents. They included journalist Ihsan al-Qali, who has been jailed for two years, and several activists associated with the popular movement Hirak, which forced President Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power in 2019 after he sought a fifth term in office after two decades. Were staying. Power.

Awarded the Novel Prize of the French Academy to the author of german village (El Aleph) has been accused by the public news agency APS of acting as a “puppet of Algerian anti-revisionism” and a “pseudo-intellectual (…) respected by the French extreme right, who questions Algerian sovereignty.” ” Some statements given by Sansal to a far-right French magazine FrontiersIn which he questioned the colonial borders set by France in the Maghreb and which was reproduced in the Moroccan press, appears to be behind these allegations.

“It has been an excuse on the part of 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 kind of totalitarianism and intolerant ideology, whether political or religious: this is where all their evils originate,” he explained in a telephone conversation. . “I have not seen him for many years (the French-Algerian writer is re-published in Spanish –2084. end of the world

(Six Barral), among others), but I talked to him several times in Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Frankfurt… and I agree that he is not a far-right person; On the contrary, he is against any intolerant views.

with yasmina khadra

Under the leadership of Florentin, Sansal raided Spanish bookshops oath of the barbariansaround the same time What do wolves dream about, By Yasmina Khadra. “Both crime novels attacked the corruption and Islamic fundamentalism of the Algerian regime, but while the second author (a female pseudonym for former Algerian military man Mohamed Moulaysséhou) remained underground, the first published under his own name and eventually lost his senior position. Gave. .Officer,” says the man who was its editor. Florentin recalls, “In addition to his professional career being cut short, his personal life also suffered and he became separated from his Czech wife when his family took refuge in Prague due to fundamentalist threats.” Rue Darwin.

The newspaper defined, “A free spirit, he arrived simultaneously in literature and in dissent against the Algerian regime, which he accused of all baseness and religious conservatism.” le monde To the novelist in an editorial in which he questioned his detention in Algeria. Those responsible at 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 his return to Algiers after a short stay in France Is.

Nearly a decade ago, he admitted to EL PACE that he began “writing essentially to waste time” during the period of violence that shook the Maghreb country in the last decade of the last century. Boulam Samsal was one of the first writers to break the taboo of prohibition for the sake of “national reconciliation” to publish books on the Algerian civil war, the Black Decade (1992–2002), which pitted the military against armed fundamentalist groups. , which claimed more than 100,000 deaths and thousands of forced disappearances. Despite being ostracized since losing his post of Director General in the Ministry of Industry 25 years ago, he has continued to live in Boumerdes, in the metropolitan area of ​​Algiers, and has not gone into voluntary exile.

Final Goncourt Award

This was the case for Kamel Daoud, 54, a French nationalized since 2020, who began his professional career as a journalist for a French-language newspaper. Quotidien d’Oran

, Before going to France to devote himself to literature and teaching political science. Earlier this month, the Algerian author won the Goncourt Prize, the most prestigious for literature in French, for his third novel, HourA woman’s story of post-civil war Algeria in the 1990s.

The law’s taboo of silence on the Black Decade has also troubled him. A survivor of the terrorist massacre appeared in court in Algiers last week to denounce the novel, accusing it of “revealing his medical history”, Efe reports. Daoud’s wife, a psychiatrist, looked after 31-year-old Saada Arbane, who as a child had her throat slit in a fundamentalist attack that took the lives of all her relatives. Urbain has now accused both of them of violating “medical confidentiality” by describing personal details in the novel, such as the machine she uses to breathe and a tattoo that identifies her. The Gallimard publishing house has denied the allegations by maintaining that the characters in Hour They are the result of imagination and summarize the experiences of hundreds of victims of the Algerian Civil War.

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