ALGIERS: Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune spoke for the first time of the arrest in mid-November in Algiers of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whom he described as an “impostor sent by France”, according to the Algerian TSA information site.
“You send an imposter who does not know his identity, does not know his father, and comes to say that half of Algeria belongs to another state,” Mr. Tebboune declared in an extract from an official speech reported by TSA.
A critic of Algerian power, Mr. Sansal, aged 80, born to a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, has been incarcerated since mid-November for endangering state security and is in a detention unit. care since mid-December.
According to the French daily Le Monde, the Algerian government would have taken badly Mr. Sansal's statements to the French media Frontières, known to be far-right, in which he took up Morocco's position according to which the country's territory would have been truncated under colonization. French for the benefit of Algeria.
The author of 2084: The End of the World, naturalized French in 2024, is prosecuted under article 87 bis of the penal code, which punishes “as a terrorist or subversive act, any act aimed at state security, 'territorial integrity, stability and normal functioning of institutions'.
In a “speech to the nation” delivered before both houses of Parliament, Mr. Tebboune, re-elected for a second term in early September, strongly attacked France, according to extracts in Arabic published on the official website of the presidency.
“Those who say that we left Algeria a paradise should know that 90% of the Algerian people were illiterate at the time of independence,” underlined Mr. Tebboune, estimating that “colonization (1830-1962) left Algeria in ruins (…) they must admit that they killed and massacred Algerians.”
Regarding the issue of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony of which Morocco controls 80% of the territory but which is claimed by the separatists of the Polisario Front, supported by Algeria, Mr. Tebboune considered that it was a “question of decolonization and self-determination”.
According to him, the autonomy plan “under Moroccan sovereignty” defended by Rabat is “a French idea, not a Moroccan one”.
Algiers withdrew its ambassador to Paris at the end of July, in response to the strong support that French President Emmanuel Macron gave to Moroccan proposals on Western Sahara, before going to Rabat at the end of October.
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