The Algerian government has imprisoned prominent French Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal on charges of violating national security. The 75-year-old writer is an outspoken critic of reactionary Islamism, authoritarianism, and government attacks on freedom of expression. He was disappeared for a week after Nov. 16, when he arrived at Algiers airport from Paris. If convicted, he faces the rest of his life behind bars.
Numerous writers and civil liberties groups have called for his release. A joint appeal for his freedom, as well as that of “all writers imprisoned for their ideas,” was run in the French magazine Le Point Nov. 23. Written by Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, it pointed to the “alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is nothing more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonments and the surveillance of the entire society.”
Writers who signed Daoud’s letter included Salman Rushdie, Annie Ernaux, Wole Soyinka and many more. PEN America denounced the “climate of fear and repression” in Algeria and called for Sansal’s release.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom by Hamas against Jews in Israel, the regime of President Abdulmadjid Tebboune in Algiers has hosted meetings for Hamas and other Islamist currents.
Sansal’s books were banned for a period in Algeria. His first novel, in 1999, was The Oath of the Barbarians, a detective story revealing corruption during Algeria’s “Black Decade.” This was when the military suppressed an Islamist revolt, with as many as 150,000 lives lost between 1992 and 2002.
Another, published in English in 2010 as An Unfinished Business, is based on the real-life story of a Nazi engineer who supplied the gas for Hitler’s Auschwitz death camp for Jews. Escaping to Egypt after the war, he went to Algeria to aid the National Liberation Front in its war for independence against the French colonial regime in the 1950s. He retired, but later his sons uncovered his secret past, as well as the affinity of many reactionary Arab rulers to Hitlerism.
In 2012 Sansal was denounced for attending the Jerusalem International Writers Festival. He said when there is freedom of expression it will be possible to disagree with Israel, “only without the hate.” The same year he won an Arabic novel award in France, but the prize money was revoked under pressure from opponents of Israel’s right to exist, including a fatwa issued by Hamas. “It is a terrorist movement of the worst kind,” Sansal said. “Hamas has taken Gazans hostage. It has taken Islam hostage.”
His latest book, 2084: The End of the World, won the French Academy Grand Prize in 2016. A modern take on George Orwell’s famous novel 1984, it describes a postapocalyptic extremist caliphate where anyone who criticizes the regime is disappeared. Like Orwell’s classic, it is a cry of rebellion against totalitarianism.