Boualem Sansal: Algeria faces growing calls to release author
The European Parliament has called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal who was arrested by Algerian law enforcement earlier this month.
According to AP, on November 27th the parliament discussed the case of the 75-year-old author, who is an outspoken critic of Islam and the Algerian regime.
Boualem Sansal has disappeared since leaving Paris for Algiers, with family and friends having received no contact from him.
While Algerian authorities were reticent on the matter, the APS state news service reported Sansal’s arrest at the airport.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said: “The detention without serious grounds of a writer of French nationality is unacceptable.”
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Sansal’s work, he said, “does honour to both his countries and to the values we cherish.”
A professed admirer of French culture, Sansal’s novels on Islamic society, freedom of expression and the Algerian civil war in the 1990s have won him powerful friends in France, rubbing shoulders with the likes of far-right leader Marine Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron, who attended his French naturalization ceremony in 2023.
However, back in Algeria his treatment of these sensitive issues has led him to be hated by many, with his books being temporarily banned by authorities and others sending him death threats.
In his novels he expresses pro-Israeli views and likens political Islam to Nazism, highly inflammatory rhetoric for much of the Muslim world.
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Boualem Sansal joins a long list of political prisoners in Algeria facing the ongoing government repression that Amnesty International slammed as a “brutal crackdown on human rights including the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.”
In recent months, Algeria excluded prominent authors from the country’s largest book fair, including Goncourt Prize winner Kamel Daoud.
Daoud said in an editorial this week that the arrest of Boualem Sansal “reflects an alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is no more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonment and the surveillance of the entire society.”
AP
