Journalist Moahmed Tamalt died in prison on December 11, 2016.
On July 4, 2016, he was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 200,000 dinars for contempt of a body and attack on the person of the president. The subject of the dispute: a video and a poem in which he criticizes, in a farcical manner, President Bouteflika, his behavior, his social origins and his entourage.
It must be said that to date, this video posted on his Facebook page has only a little over a thousand views and shares. Therefore, the question of the minimal scope of this video did it deserve this relentlessness which will lead to his death?
Formal defects in the procedure against him were noted by the lawyers, but were not taken into account…
However, as the article on the TV5 monde website dated December 16, 2016 recalls, neither President Bouteflika nor his entourage cited in this satirical poem (which he declaimed in Arabic in a video published on Facebook on April 2, 2016 ) sued him or became a civil party, no complaint was filed against him. It was the prosecutor who was responsible for bringing him to justice in the name of public order. What public order was threatened by a thousand views and shares in a country of just over 44 million souls?
On December 14, 2016, three days after the announced death of Tamalt, the team of Café Presse Politique (CCP) titled his program “Mohamed Tamalt died in prison” and Ihsane El Kadi declared: “it was a real shock because we thought we were out of that, we thought we were safe from that.” Later, Ihsane El Kadi will add that the system can go wrong at any time and lead us to this situation. »
Later, it was Ihsane El Kadi who was imprisoned and recently released.
Mohamed Tamalt had lived in England since 2002 but, on June 8, 2016, he announced on his Facebook page that he was returning to Algeria and that he was studying the possibility of settling there permanently. He admits that this decision risks landing him in prison, or even exposing him to torture and perhaps even death. »
In this publication, he explains the reasons which motivated him and which governed the decision to return. He invokes, among other things, his faith, his desire to denounce “thieving” decision-makers and his desire to lead “a life that is not made up of trivialities” just as he mentions a certain weariness in the face of what he suffers because of ” actions of the Algerian authorities in connection with the British authorities and some other foreign regimes which seek to impose forms of censorship on his publications, not to mention his arrest by the British anti-terrorist police. He also admits to suffering from homesickness.
We can see through this publication a certain awareness of what awaited him, even if perhaps he did not think that it could lead to his death.
To return to the poem which initiated the procedure itself, and if there are a few elements to highlight, it is the judicial motivation which according to the poem, the subject of the dispute, would in a democracy amount to defamation which would be punished by a fine.
In addition, this poem could also have been considered as part of a literary production, a polemical, satirical poem which certainly attacks politicians and those around them, but which remains a literary production which had to minima fall foul of defamation and maxima be punished by a fine. In his case, incarceration happened quickly (following an immediate appearance) and his hunger strike accentuated his health problems. The fact remains that his prison conditions and his medical care are the subject of criticism; they were denounced by lawyers and the family, in vain.
The lack of solidarity towards Tamalt should be noted. It must be said that the incisive nature of his lexical and semantic repertoire can affect the dignity or morals of the people incriminated in his poem. Reading can therefore create discomfort and put off more than one person.
However, the legal debate should not focus on the literary quality of what is written. For judges, it is a matter of noting the defamatory nature of writings which constitute an appeal to hatred or racist remarks in content written, published or posted online on social media and sanctioning them accordingly.
For civil society, however, the question should not be asked in these terms: is what Tamalt or someone else writes defensible or not? Opinions can obviously differ and that is acceptable. The debate in this case, in Algeria as elsewhere, must focus on the defense of the journalist and any citizen to say, write and publish on social networks or traditional book channels etc. without being worried by a disproportionate sanction. The other fight must be the battle for respect for judicial procedure and the battle for respect for the dignity of prisoners and their prison conditions.
It is important to insist on the fact that the incarceration of any person, journalist or not, for their writings, must lead us to ask ourselves the question of the mission of those who serve power and who had an interest in making it one. incarceration for example, even if let us remember that before Mohamed Tamalt the journalist and writer Mohamed Benchicou escaped neither prison nor the closure of his newspaper The morning because of his book Bouteflika: an Algerian imposture, published in 2004. He will pay for his courage with two years in prison.
At the same period, on the political register of the protest against President Bouteflika, Amira Bouraoui, saw the Barakat movement that she largely contributed to initiating against President Bouteflika, who was seeking a fourth term, lead her into endless administrative, professional and legal harassment until his imprisonment and his ban on leaving the country well after his release and under the mandate of another president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
In other words, as soon as the established order is called into question, the judicial machine is activated, it places itself like a praetorian guard at the service of the leader.
Two. It is to be regretted the lack of solidarity from the corporation in particular, and more generally the lack of solidarity from civil society. Ihsane El Kadi regretted in his CPP program cited above, the fact of not having done enough to shed light on Tamalt’s detention.
What underlies this form of inertia of political entities and civil society? So many avenues can explain it, but if we had to cite only a few, we could first cite the work of those in power who bet deeply on the division of society and its work of undermining policies , the invocation of regionalism for example when it came to the massacres of young people in 2001 in Tizi Ouzou, massacres that would make the whole of Algeria rise up. It was nothing of the sort.
Clientelism has declined among the different layers of society and the foreign hand as well as the specter of terrorism have been brandished to stifle any desire for protest.
To return to the relentlessness against the journalist Benchicou who benefited from support both internally and internationally, his case could be considered as a bad omen for the press which should have alerted in 2004, the support should have been much more important. And regarding Amira Bouraoui, to refer to this Bouteflika era, and those who opposed him head-on and paid dearly for it, we must first recall the absence of solidarity from the medical corporation when it to prohibit the exercise of his profession as a doctor.
Many other cases could be cited. These few reminders clearly show that Bouteflika’s period recorded abuses and violations of rights which it is useful to recall for those who would be tempted to rehabilitate his record and his practices.
Today, under the era of President Tebboune, the incarceration and the charges which led to Tamalt being imprisoned, find themselves extended to hundreds of citizens with a hardening of the judicial system and the multiplication of articles of repressive laws to bring even more people under the law who are imprisoned for the simple fact of expressing their opinion.
This regime of terror imposed on Algerians, to use the metaphor, does not make good press. Internationally, the Algerian government struggles to claim to be a regime that respects human rights and freedom of expression when it locks up prisoners of conscience by the hundreds and proceeds with strategies of financial asphyxiation to close of newspapers until no longer having a free press.
Despite everything that is stated, we can say that the more the credibility of this regime is undermined, the greater the Algerians’ aspiration for freedom. We cannot repress a people indefinitely, the fight of the Algerians against colonialism and all its forms of domination is exemplary in the sense that it has inspired so many people. The fight of the elders can inspire the fight of Algerians today.
The Hirak movement showed that the people could at any time refuse arbitrariness and express it en masse. The current post-Hirak repression is only the symptom of a power which does not have the support of the people as proof; it cannot maintain its place without resorting to repressive force. The terror imposed on Algerians cannot, however, be a form of lasting governance.
To conclude, we can say with hindsight that the Tamalt case must have been perceived at the time as a serious indicator which should have alarmed society as a whole since it augured more widespread abuses to come.
Even if we do not share his ideas, which some will describe as conservative or outrageous, Mohamed Tamalt deserves our respect, his fight for freedom of expression was courageous and his memory must be honored for what his resistance to power , has irreducibility.
Ouerdia Ben Mamar, human rights activist
