Boualem Sansal arrested at Algiers airport for unknown reasons

Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, 75, was arrested on Saturday, November 16, upon his arrival at Algiers airport from Paris, according to several sources joined by The Worldconfirming information given by Marianne, Thursday November 21. He was reportedly arrested by members of the general directorate of Algerian internal security and should be presented shortly before the public prosecutor, report the same sources.

Editions Gallimard, its publisher, say “very worried”. Mr. Sansal has not given any news and has remained unreachable for several days. “It was thought that his cell phone had been confiscated by the authorities upon his arrival at Algiers airportexplains his friend, the diplomat Xavier Driencourt. But he didn't respond to her emails, her WhatsApp, or her landline at home. » The former French ambassador to Algiers (2008-2012, 2017-2020) says he had dinner with the author the day before his departure for Algeria. “He returned home on an Air France flight the next day. He wasn't worried.”assure M. Driencourt.

The reasons for the writer's arrest are currently unknown. An engineer, trained at the Polytechnic School of Algiers, he was a senior civil servant and held the title of general director of industry and restructuring, until he was dismissed from his position in 2003. Since that he devotes himself to writing, he strives to go against the grain of most of the taboos and prejudices of Algerian society, where, since the coup d'état of Colonel Houari Boumédiène in 1965 and the seizure of power by the military, the intellectual and political ferment of the first years of independence gave way to marginalization and repression of deviant opinions.

Stiffness of the authorities

Thus, in his first book, The Barbarian Oath (Gallimard, 1999), he tried to understand what had pushed his compatriots into the murderous civil war of the “black decade” (1992-2002). In The German Village (Gallimard, 2008), he unearths the question of the troubled relationships between Nazism and certain movements fighting against colonization.

Likewise, he did not hesitate to go to Israel in 2012 or to maintain relationships with Israeli writers, such as David Grossman. In his country, he supported Hirak, the protest movement against the candidacy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a fifth term (2019), and protested against the fate reserved for migrants by his government.

Boualem Sansal has always made it a point to stay in Algeria, in the town of Boumerdès, about fifty kilometers east of Algiers, where, until then, he had not been worried by the authorities. His books were not banned in the country.

According to our information, he was in Algeria on November 5 and was able to leave the country without difficulty. His arrest seems to confirm a tightening of the authorities, perhaps linked to his controversial statements on the media Borders on YouTube, widely reported by the Moroccan media a few weeks ago.

Did his comments “undermine territorial integrity”?

France, he explained, did not colonize Morocco, “because it’s a big state. (…) It's easy to colonize small things that have no history, but colonizing a state is very difficult. » Undoubtedly more serious in the eyes of the Algerian authorities was the resumption of the Moroccan discourse on the supposedly truncated geography of the kingdom for the benefit of its North African rival: “When France colonized Algeria, the entire western part of Algeria was part of Morocco: Tlemcen, Oran and even as far as Mascara (…). When France colonized Algeria, it established itself as a protectorate in Morocco and decided, arbitrarily, to attach all of eastern Morocco to Algeria, by drawing a border. »

For certain observers, the writer had, through these words, crossed a line “red line” in the eyes of the regime, potentially making him liable to prosecution for “attack on territorial integrity”.

Having become French a few months ago, Boualem Sansal counted “settling in France”according to Xavier Driencourt. “He found that Algeria was becoming unbreathable. I even started looking for a house for him”he adds. The former diplomat, who has become a critic of the Algerian regime, sees in the arrest of Mr. Sansal a way, for Algiers, of “test France” with whom relations have been frozen since Paris recognized “Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara”.

The entourage of the Head of State indicated on Thursday that Emmanuel Macron is “very concerned about the disappearance” of the writer and that “State services are mobilized to clarify his situation”adding that “the President of the Republic expresses his unwavering attachment to the freedom of a great writer and intellectual. »