In a column published this Saturday, November 23 by the weekly “Le Point”, several major writers such as Annie Ernaux and Jean-Marie Le Clézio demand the “immediate release” of the Franco-Algerian author, of whom the Algerian authorities have confirmed the arrest.
“We cannot remain silent. Freedom, the right to culture and our lives, writers targeted by this terror, are at stake.” In a column published this Saturday, November 23 on the website of the weekly The Point and initiated by the 2024 Goncourt Prize, Kamel Daoud, the Nobel Prize winners Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka, as well as several writers including Salman Rushdie and Roberto Saviano, are calling for the “immediate release” by the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. Aged 75, he was arrested on November 16 at Algiers airport, according to several media.
A “arrest” confirmed Friday by the Algerian government agency APS, which did not specify the date of the event. The fate of Boualem Sansal, in the fight against religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism, worries political and literary circles. Its publisher Gallimard expressed its “very quickly worry” and called him too “immediate release”. On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron's entourage announced that the latter was “very concerned about this disappearance” and specified that “State services are mobilized to clarify his situation”which was confirmed by a French diplomatic source on Friday.
According to The Worldthe Algerian authorities could have taken his statements to the French media badly Bordersreputed 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. 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”describing Boualem Sansal as “useful puppet”. These events take place in a tense diplomatic context between France and Algeria, after Paris' support for the Moroccan autonomy plan for the disputed territory of Western Sahara at the end of July.
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