The writer Boualem Sansal detained at the Algiers airport

The French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, 75, was arrested on Saturday, November 16 upon his arrival at the Algiers airport from Paris, several sources say. Worldconfirming the information provided by Marianne. He would have been detained by elements of the General Directorate of Internal Security of Algeria (DGSI) and should be presented shortly before the prosecutor, the same sources indicate. Ediciones Gallimard, its editor, says “very worried”, Mr. Sansal has not given any news and has remained inaccessible for several days.

“The authorities were thought to have confiscated his mobile phone upon arrival at Algiers airport.explains to World his friend Xavier Driencourt. But he did not respond to his emails, his WhatsApp or his home landline. » The former French ambassador in Algiers (2008-2012, 2017-2020) says he had dinner the day before with the author. “He returned home on an Air France flight the next day. “I wasn’t worried.”Driencourt assures.

So far the reasons for the writer’s arrest are 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 then he dedicated himself to writing, he worked against the current of most of the taboos and prejudices of Algerian society, where the intellectual and political effervescence of the first years of independence has given way to the marginalization and repression of opinions diverted, since the coup d’état of Colonel Houari Boumédiène in 1965 and the seizure of power by the military.

Rigidity of the authorities

Thus, in his first book, The barbarian oath (Gallimard, 1999), tried to understand the mentalities that had pushed his compatriots into the murderous civil war of the “Black Decade” (1992-2002). In The German people (Gallimard, 2008), unearthed the question of the conflictive relations between Nazism and certain movements that fight against colonization. Likewise, he did not hesitate to travel to Israel in 2012 or to maintain relationships with Israeli writers, such as David Grossman. Supported the Hirakthe protest movement against the candidacy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a fifth term (2019), and protested against the fate reserved for immigrants by his government.

Boualem Sansal always intended to remain in Algeria, in the city of Boumerdès, about fifty kilometers east of Algiers, where until then the authorities had not worried him. 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 related to his controversial statements on the “Frontières” channel on YouTube, widely reported by the Moroccan media.

Did his comments “undermine territorial integrity”?

France, he explained, did not colonize Morocco, “because it is a big state. (…) It is easy to colonize small things that have no history, but colonizing a state is very difficult. » Without a doubt, 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 annex all of eastern Morocco to Algeria, drawing a border. »

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

Boualem Sansal, who became French a few months ago, told “Settle in France”according to Xavier Driencourt. “He discovered that Algeria was becoming unbreathable. “I even started looking for a house for him.”duck. The former diplomat, turned critic of the Algerian regime, sees in Sansal’s arrest a way, for Algiers, of “Try France” with whom relations have been frozen since Emmanuel Macron recognized “Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara”. A close friend of the President of the Republic, traveling in Chile, assures World that the Head of State be informed of this arrest, which according to him “very worried”.