Boualem Sansal, latest episode in Algeria’s crackdown on intellectuals

The whereabouts of the renowned Algerian novelist and intellectual Boualem Sansal have been unknown since he landed in Algeria on November 16. His wife and friends fear he has been persecuted because of his ideas, as part of a larger crackdown on dissidents.

Sansal, who was traveling from France, is an outspoken critic of the military regime in Algiers. His books and interviews offer a critical perspective into post-independence Algeria in which he blames the regime for installing a “Soviet-like regime.”

In a recent interview, he criticized the regime’s tactics in using France as a scapegoat to pin all Algeria’s woes on.

He irked the military rulers when he mentioned the colonial origins of Algeria’s current borders at the expense of historical Moroccan territories.

Sansal also revisited the Algerian civil war, known as the black decade, opposing Islamists to the state, when some 200,000 civilians died. The Algerian state imposes a blackout on that bloody era.

Sansal’s case highlights the regime’s targeting of renowned figures, including artists like Cheb Khaled who is facing a fomented espionage case. Khaled was targeted because he received Moroccan nationality in a context where the regime demonizes Morocco, according to observers.

Kamal Daoud, who recently won France’s highest literary distinction, Le Goncourt, has also been smeared in the media. His fault was his award-winning novel “Houris”, set during the civil war.

Houris is banned in Algeria, where the regime could persecute the writer had he not been already in exile in France.

The examples mentioned above are but the tip of an iceberg made up of independent journalists and opposition leaders who have been thrown in jail on bogus charges or forced into exile since the advent of the duo Chengriha/Tebboune.

Recently journalist and regime critic Hichem Abboud was kidnapped in Spain before he was miraculously rescued by Spanish Police.

Some journalists in exile such as Abdou Semmar have been sentenced to death.