The controversy emerged on Friday November 15 with the broadcast, by the Algerian channel One TV, of an interview with Saâda Arbane, a survivor of an Islamist massacre during the civil war. She accuses Kamel Daoud of having used for his novel Houris (Gallimard, 416 pages, 23 euros), Goncourt Prize 2024, the confidences she made during therapy sessions with the writer's wife. The information was only made public on Wednesday, November 20 by lawyer Fatima Benbraham but two complaints were filed in Oran, against Kamel Daoud and psychiatrist Aïcha Dahdouh, on behalf of Saâda Arbane and the National Organization of Victims of terrorism, from the month of August, i.e. “a few days after the book was published”. According to the lawyer, cited in a statement to AFP, the plaintiffs would not have “did not want to talk about it, so that it would not be said that[ils] voul[aient] disrupt the author's nomination for the prize » Goncourt, awarded in November.
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The complaints concern the violation of medical confidentiality and the “defamation of victims of terrorism and the violation of the law on national reconciliation”. A reference to article 46 of the charter on Algerian reconciliation which provides for prison sentences for anyone “instrumentalizes the wounds of the national tragedy, to undermine the institutions of the democratic and popular Algerian Republic, weaken the State, harm the honorability of its agents who have served it worthily, or tarnish the image of the Algeria on the international level ».
This legal provision, with flexible interpretation, served above all in practice to preserve the image of the Algerian security services and did not prevent the publication in the country of works relating to the Black Decade. Thus, the sudden appearance of the lawyer Fatima Benbraham, fervent supporter of the regime, her justifications on the chronology of the filing of complaints, leaves, even among the many detractors of Kamel Daoud in Algeria, the feeling of an orchestrated campaign against the writer whose participation was not authorized at the Algiers International Book Fair, which ended on Saturday, and whose novel Houris is prohibited in Algeria, on the grounds of article 46.
“Purely fictional characters”
Kamel Daoud, who hosted a conference at Sciences Po Paris on Tuesday, has not yet reacted to his accusation and that of his wife, but his publisher Antoine Gallimard had, on Monday, recalled in a press release that “since the publication of his novel, Kamel Daoud has been the subject of violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is unaware of”. The text also stated that « and Houris is inspired by tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional”.
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The accusations against Kamel Daoud, whose political positions are often criticized in his country, also take place in a context of diplomatic tensions between Paris and Algiers, revived by the recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty” over Western Sahara, then by the state visit of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, from October 28 to 30 to Morocco.
