On 16 November the Algerian authorities arrested the prominent French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal at Algiers airport. They kept silent about his whereabouts for over a week, during which time the 75-year-old writer was interrogated and denied access to his family and legal counsel. He was subsequently charged with national security-related offences under article 87bis of the Algerian penal code, which is frequently used against government critics. According to Sansal’s legal team, the charges are based on statements he made in the media about the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi separatist group seeking to establish an independent state in parts of Morocco and Western Sahara. Sansal accused the Algerian government of ‘inventing the Polisario Front to destabilise Morocco’. The authorities insist that the comments threaten Algeria’s national security. 

Ethnically a Berber, Sansal is a vocal critic of authoritarianism and Islamism, and has long campaigned for freedom of expression in Algeria. PEN and other human rights groups have widely condemned his treatment. ‘No one should face arrest, enforced disappearance, or detention for peacefully expressing their views. Sansal must be freed immediately, and the Algerian authorities must end their assault on freedom of expression in the country,’ said Burhan Sonmez, president of PEN International. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, has also urged the Algerian government to release the writer, referring to Sansal as a ‘freedom fighter’.

Sansal started writing novels at the age of fifty, shortly after retiring as a high-ranking official in the Algerian government. In 1999, he received the Prix du Premier Roman and Prix Tropiques for his debut novel, Le serment des barbares. He was awarded the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 2011 and the prestigious Arab Novel Prize for Rue Darwin in 2012. Three years later, he won the Grand Prix du Roman for 2084: la fin du monde, which is set in an Islamist totalitarian world in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Sansal’s first novel to appear in English was An Unfinished Business, published in 2010, while Harraga was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury (both books were translated by Frank Wynne). Alison Anderson’s translation of 2084 was published by Europa Editions in 2017. The novel, ‘a cry of protest against totalitarianism of all kinds’, opens with a ‘warning’:

The reader is advised to refrain from believing that this is a true story, or that it is based on any known reality. No, in truth, everything has been invented, the characters, the events, and all the rest, and the proof of this is that the story is set in a distant world, in a distant future that looks nothing like our own. This is a work of pure invention: the world of Bigaye that I describe in these pages does not exist and has no reason to exist in the future, just as the world of Big Brother imagined by George Orwell, and so marvelously depicted in his novel 1984, did not exist in his time, does not exist in our own, and truly has no reason to exist in the future. Sleep soundly, good people, everything is sheer falsehood, and the rest is under control.

Kamel Daoud, another French-­Algerian writer who has fallen foul of the Algerian authorities, has organised an international appeal for Sansal’s release, condemning Algeria’s suppression of free speech: ‘From now on, everything is possible: life imprisonment for a text message, prison for a sigh of annoyance … Sansal writes, he does not kill and does not imprison anyone. His innocence in the face of the dictatorship made him forget the reality of the Terror in Algeria.’ The statement has been signed by Annie Ernaux, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, among others. 

Daoud, who worked as a columnist in Oran for many years, fell out of favour with the Algerian government because of his own criticisms of its policies. He moved to Paris in 2020 and has become a French citizen. In 2024, he was the first Algerian author to win the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Houris. Daoud could himself face criminal charges if he returns to Algeria for writing about the civil war of the 1990s. A 2005 ‘reconciliation’ law makes it a crime to ‘instrumentalise the wounds of the national tragedy’. 

Readers might like to write appeals expressing concern at the detention of writer Boualem Sansal, calling for his immediate and unconditional release, seeking assurances that while in detention Sansal is granted access to his family and a lawyer of his choice, and urging the authorities to uphold Algeria’s obligations to protect the right to freedom of expression under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 

Appeals to be addressed to:

Abdelmadjid Tebboune
President of the Republic of Algeria
Présidence de la République
Place Mohammed Seddik Benyahiya
El Mouradia, Alger 16000
Algeria
Email: president@el-mouradia.dz 

His Excellency Nourredine Yazid
Algerian Embassy
1–3 Riding House Street
London W1W 7DR
Email: info@algerianembassy.org.uk