French President Emmanuel Macron estimated, Monday January 6, that Algeria is “dishonored” by not releasing the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, arrested in mid-November in Algiers. “The Algeria that we love so much and with which we share so many children and so many stories is entering into a story that dishonors it, preventing a seriously ill man from getting treatment. that she is”, he asserted in front of the French ambassadors gathered at the Élysée.
“And we who love the Algerian people and their history, I urge their government to release Boualem Sansal,” he added. This “freedom fighter” East “detained in a totally arbitrary manner by Algerian officials”, he insisted.
Critic of Algerian power, Boualem Sansal, 75, has been incarcerated since mid-November for endangering state security and has been in a care unit since mid-December. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune first spoke of his arrest on December 29, calling it“impostor” sent by France.
The author of 2084: the end of the world, naturalized French in 2024, is prosecuted under article 87 bis of the Algerian Penal Code, which punishes “as a terrorist or subversive act, any act targeting state security, territorial integrity, stability and the normal functioning of institutions”.
According to the French daily The World, the power in Algiers would have taken badly statements by Boualem Sansal to the French media Frontières, reputed to be far-right, taking up Morocco's position according to which the country's territory would have been truncated under French colonization for the benefit of Algeria.
His arrest adds to the new crisis between Paris and Algiers, initiated in July by Emmanuel Macron's decision to recognize Western Sahara as falling within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.
The former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, considered a “non-self-governing territory” by the UN, has pitted Morocco against the Sahrawi separatists of the Polisario Front, supported by Algiers, for half a century.
