Everything must be undertaken to free Boualem Sansal – Liberation

Days, weeks, months go by and Boualem Sansalat 80, is still locked in Algeria, cut off from the world and cancer patient. A sudden embellished in the Franco-Algerian relationship, a few weeks ago, had suggested the possibility of a release From the writer: some well -informed intermediaries took an air heard to whisper that it was a matter of days, even hours, the two presidents had finally talked about each other and Emmanuel Macron was already welcoming him to the Tarmac de Villacoublay under the flashes of the photographers. And then the wind turned. A new crisis has killed this hope.

The Drama of Boualem Sansal is that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time, at the confluence of crises, rivalries and rear ransors cooked and reversed that he probably did not all master. Or which he did not imagine that he could suffer from it, he who saw himself in the eyes of the Algerians as a simple « Old madman ». Admittedly, there was a litigation about it, the regime reproached him for his outspokenness, in the dark decade, in particular that it is prohibited to evoke in Algeria, his proximity to Israel, he who had dared to go to Jerusalem, and his last statements on Morocco.

But as our investigation shows, Sansal also paid for the encysting of the Franco-Algerian liabilities, the errors of appreciation of Emmanuel Macron who suddenly turned his back to Algiers to reappear with Rabat, the shots of Bruno Retailleau, the success of Kamel Daoud in France (the other writer honored by the regime), in short, the case is heavy at the base. How to get out of this Kafkai situation, each of the two presidents finding themselves prisoner of his (bad) choice? How to make any of them lose their face? How to restore Boualem Sansal his freedom of speech? Even if the words « freedom » and « authoritarian regime » rarely go together, everything must be undertaken, at all levels, to release this man who declared that he never ceased« Loving your country ».