The official reasons for his arrest are currently unknown, but we suspect that his disappearance is not unrelated to his virulent criticism of the Algerian regime. Before being a renowned writer, Sansal was a senior civil servant, general director of industry, until he was dismissed from his position in 2003, notably after speaking out against the Arabization of education. .
Boualem Sansal is a dissident. In 2019, he actively took part in the Hirak protests against the regime in Algiers, a movement which led to the resignation of President Bouteflika.
The editorial team advises you
Boualem Sansal also courageously denounced Islamist crimes in Algeria. His first novel, The Oath of the Barbarians recounts the rise in power of the fundamentalists which contributed to plunging Algeria into a bloody decade which left 200,000 dead. Boualem Sansal's work evokes, in a scathing style, the history of Algeria and tirelessly denounces Islamism. He also does not hesitate to denounce France's cowardice towards the Islamists.
One of his latest provocations is to have recently recalled in an interview that, during the colonial period, “the entire western part of Algeria was part of Morocco”, the question of borders between the two countries being highly sensitive for Algiers. But until now, the regime had not attacked him personally.
Boualem Sansal, however, suffered censorship of his works in his own country, notably “The German Village”, published in 2008 and which evokes the Shoah, the civil war in Algeria and the life of Algerians in the suburbs. French.
In “2084, the end of the world”, published in 2015, he denounced the threat that religious radicalism poses to democracies, by imagining Islamism in power.
In Algeria, threats against him have increased since he went to Israel in 2014 to receive a literary prize. Accused of Islamophobia, he tirelessly defends himself: “What I have continued to denounce is the instrumentalization of Islam for political and social ends,” he explained in 2017.
Thursday evening, Emmanuel Macron said he was “very concerned by the disappearance of Boualem Sansal”. Having become French a few months ago, the writer planned to settle in France. Did the Algerian regime want to prevent him, to silence him before he was no longer within its reach? The shadow of the military that hangs over the regime of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune makes these questions nagging.
