Editions Gallimard requested on 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.
“Editions Gallimard (…) express their very serious 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, the 75-year-old writer fighting against religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism was arrested on Saturday at Algiers airport, coming from France. The Algerian government agency APS also reported an “arrest” of the writer “at Algiers airport”, without giving a date. No other official information has filtered out on his fate, in a context of tense relations between Paris and Algiers.
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Le Monde explains that 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. This would be a “red line” for Algiers, which could result in the author being accused of “undermining national integrity”.
Emmanuel Macron’s entourage said Thursday that the French president was “very concerned by (this) disappearance”, specifying that “state services are mobilized to clarify his situation”.
Several French political leaders have also expressed their concern, notably the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe who believes that the writer “embodies” in particular “the call for reason, freedom and humanism against censorship, corruption and Islamism.
Authors also expressed their support such as the French Nicolas Mathieu, who spoke of a “trap”, or the Franco-Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, who called for “freeing” Mr. Sansal. “His arrest annoys me. The place of an intellectual is around a round table, around a debate of ideas, and not in prison,” writes her compatriot Yasmina Khadra in a press release to AFP.
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In the French weekly Le Point, the Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud denounces the fact that his “brother” is “behind bars, like the whole of Algeria”. Gallimard was banned from the Algiers International Book Fair this falle.
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 prize French literature) this year.
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.
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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.
Challenge (With AFP)
