Editions Gallimard requested this Friday the “release” of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal after his “arrest by the Algerian security services”, the day after a “disappearance” mentioned by the French presidency.
“Gallimard editions […] express their very deep concern following the arrest of the writer by the Algerian security services and call for (his) immediate release”writes the publisher in a press release.
According to several media, including the French weekly Marianne, the 75-year-old writer fighting against religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism was arrested at the airport ofAlgerfrom France. The Algerian government agency APS also reported a “arrest” from the writer “at Algiers airport”without however giving a date. No other official information has filtered out on his fate, in a context of tense relations between Paris and Algiers.
According to Le Monde, the Algerian authorities could have taken badly statements to the French media Frontières, reputed to be far-right, which take up the Moroccan position according to which the country's territory was truncated under French colonization for the benefit of Algeria.
It would be a “red line” for Algiers, which could result in the author being accused of“attack on national integrity”.
The entourage ofEmmanuel Macron announced Thursday that the French president was “very concerned about (this) disappearance”specifying that “State services are mobilized to clarify his situation”.
“His arrest annoys me”
Several French political leaders have also expressed their concern, notably the former Prime Minister Edward Philippe who believes that the writer “embodies” notably “the call for reason, freedom and humanism against censorship, corruption and Islamism”. Authors have also expressed their support such as the French Nicolas Mathieuwho spoke of “trap”or the Franco-Moroccan Tahar Ben Jellounwho called for “release” M. Sansal. “His arrest annoys me. An intellectual's place is around a round table, around a debate of ideas, and not in prison”writes his compatriot Yasmina Khadra in a press release to AFP. In the French weekly Le Point, the Franco-Algerian Camel Daoud denounces the fact that his “brother” either “behind bars, like the whole of Algeria”.
Gallimard was banned from the Algiers International Book Fair this fall. Kamel Daoud is also the target of two complaints in Algeria which accuse him, with his psychiatrist wife, of having used the story of a patient for “Houris”, a novel evoking the civil war in the country and Goncourt (the most prestigious French literary prize) this year.
The official Algerian press agency APS criticized France on Friday for taking “the defense of a Holocaust denier who calls into question the existence, independence, history, sovereignty and borders of Algeria”calling it “puppet”.
Boualem Sansal is a great voice in contemporary French-speaking literature, author of a work committed against obscurantism and for democracy, without taboos, sometimes caustic.
Suspicions of Islamophobia
Born in 1949 in Algeria, to a father of Moroccan origin and a mother who received a French education, he began writing at the age of 48 and published his first novel, “Le Serment des Barbares”, two years ago later. He recounts the rise in power of the fundamentalists which contributed to plunging Algeria into a decade of civil war which left 200,000 dead between 1992 and 2002.
After having been a teacher, business leader and senior civil servant, he was dismissed from the Ministry of Industry in 2003 for his critical position against the government, in particular on the Arabization of education.
In 2019, he participated in protests in Algiers that led to the resignation of President Bouteflika.
Among his titles, “The German Village” (2008), censored in its country of origin, invokes the Shoah, the civil war in Algeria and the life of Algerians in the French suburbs.
In “2084, the end of the world” (2015), he denounces the threat of religious radicalism on democracies, imagining Islamism in power.
His warnings of Europe against this danger have earned this claimed atheist strong enmities. And the support of right-wing and far-right intellectuals and media, applauding his declarations on an “Islamic order” which would try “to establish itself in France”.
In Algeria, threats have increased since he went to Israel to receive a literary prize in 2014.
Boualem Sansal tirelessly defends himself against suspicions of Islamophobia.
“I have never said anything against Islam that would justify this accusation” more, “what I have never ceased to denounce is the exploitation of Islam for political and social ends”he explained to AFP in 2017.
