Boualem Sansal, prisoner… and hostage to diplomatic and media settling of scores

The Franco-Algerian writer, arrested in Algiers on November 16, finds himself at the heart of two “wars” which exceed him: the strong tensions between France and Algeria, and the violent controversies agitating the French intellectual and media landscape.

OHe can therefore be both put in prison and taken hostage. To be a victim of this double punishment, your name must be Boualem Sansal. In prison, the Franco-Algerian novelist, author notably of Barbarian Oath a you German Village, has been since November 16, arrested when he got off the plane when he had just landed in Algiers, and soon accused of“attack on national unity”. But perhaps it is not the imprisonment of a great writer that should worry us the most: it is his being taken hostage. For ten days, Boualem Sansal has in fact been the target and the pretext for two “wars” which are beyond him. The first is the sudden rise in tensions between the authoritarian regime of Algiers and the foreign policy of Emmanuel Macron around the status of Western Sahara. By affirming, on October 29 in Morocco itself, that « for France, the present and future of these territories fall within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty », Emmanuel Macron provoked the ire of the Algerian generals, and the response was not long in coming.

But Boualem Sansal is also hostage to a second settling of scores – internal this one – which resurfaces with the regularity of the metronome in the French media and intellectual landscape. Between the pathetic vituperations of Pascal Praud accusing Thomas Snégaroff and the guests of his show C policy (among whom Benjamin Stora) to kneel before Algiers, on the one hand, and the clumsy contortions of the politician Nedjib Sidi Moussa transforming Boualem Sansal into Eric Zemmour's henchman, on the other, we watched the bullets pass by all the time. weekend, and there were fears that the novelist would take a stray bullet.

The call for his immediate release, on the website of the weekly The Pointsigned by dozens of authors like Annie Ernaux and JMG Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk, Roberto Saviano or Wole Soyinka, will it be enough to build a protective bubble around the writer? Nothing is less certain: exploited by States that never stop licking their narcissistic wounds, media hungry for clashes and researchers with shaky timing, Boualem Sansal suffers the fate of all political hostages: it really doesn't matter what he is accused of, his destiny is currently being played out elsewhere – and especially without him.