On July 1 an appeals court in Algeria upheld a harsh five-year jail sentence imposed on prominent French Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, a longtime and outspoken critic of Algerian government authoritarianism, Islamic fundamentalism and government attacks on freedom of expression. Sansal was charged with threatening national security and jailed in November 2024 after giving an interview where he argued that under colonial rule the French rulers had redrawn Algeria’s current borders to include land that once belonged to Morocco.
The regime of President Abdulmadjid Tebboune, first elected with military support in 2019, has led a crackdown on political debate and dissent.
Sansal’s books were banned for a period in Algeria. His first book, The Oath of the Barbarians, a detective novel published in 1999, revealed corruption in the government’s military suppression of an Islamist revolt between 1992 and 2002, when as many as 150,000 people were killed.
In 2012 he was denounced for attending the Jerusalem International Writers Festival in Israel. He said only when there is freedom of expression will it be possible to disagree with Israel “only without the hate.” That same year Jew-hating opponents of Israel’s right to exist, including Hamas, organized to get prize money Sansal won as part of an Arabic novel award revoked.
Hamas “is a terrorist movement of the worst kind,” he said. “Hamas has taken Gazans hostage. It has taken Islam hostage.”
On the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom by Hamas against Jews in Israel, government figures in Algeria hosted a four-day visit by Hamas leaders.
Numerous writers and civil liberties groups have called for Sansal’s release, denouncing his imprisonment as a blow to free speech. “The Algerian government’s continued imprisonment of Boualem Sansal,” Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of PEN America’s Writers at Risk program, said July 2, “is both incomprehensible and unconscionable. We renew our call for his immediate and unconditional release.”
“This is an affront to a literary ambassador of Algeria and to the freedom of expression,” said Kristenn Einarsson, chair of the International Publishers Association’s Freedom to Publish committee.