Five years in prison for writer Boualem Sansal who is critical of Algeria

The Algerian-French writer Boualem Sansal was sentenced in Algeria on Thursday morning to a prison sentence of five years after a series of charges, including a threat to state security. This is reported by the AFP news agency. The 80-year-old writer was at the airport of the capital Algiers in November kept When he traveled from France to his second home in Algeria. In recent months, his arrest has sharpened the already tense diplomatic relationships between France and Algeria.

Sansal Koos in one interview With the radical-right magazine Frontières Last year the side of Morocco in a conflict dragging over a disputed piece of land in western Algeria, including part of the western Sahara. According to Morocco, in the years that the region was under French colonial control, Algeria were wrongly awarded. Sansal called that limit in the conversation « arbitrary ».

According to the prosecutor, that was an « attack on the national integrity » of Algeria. He would also have endangered Algerian institutions. During the process he was also used to have leaked sensitive information about state security and the Algerian economy to the French ambassador in Algeria.

Sansal supporters think that in all these charges the fact that the writer has been very critical of politics in his native country for years, on the influence of radical Islam in Algeria and on Islam in general. Sansal relied on freedom of expression during the process.

Political Islam

The writer, trained as an engineer and economist, lost his job as a senior official at the Algerian Ministry of Industry at the beginning of this century after he had criticized President Abdelaziz Bouteflika at the time.

Sansal debuted in 1999 with the book Le Serment des Barbaresthat plays during the Algerian civil war in the nineties. He received the Prix du Premier Roman for the book. His Orwellian 2084: La Fin du Mondean indictment of political Islam, was awarded the prestigious Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française in 2015. Because of this book and the terrorist attacks in the year of appearing, he became an important voice in the French debate about Islamism.

Ten years in prison was demanded against Sansal last week. For the things that were charged to him, he could also have had life imprisonment. Seen in this way, five years in prison is not too bad. But Sansal has cancer and his entourage has been said for some time that the circumstances under which he is in detention is an attack on his health. The French President Emmanuel Macron therefore called on his Algerian colleague Abdelmadjid Tebboune last week as leniency for « a great writer who is also sick ».

But Mild has not shown itself so far. He rather called Sansal « a cheaper who does not know his identity, does not know his father and who said that half of Algeria belongs to another state. » In Algeria there is great anger about the support of Macron for a Moroccan plan to give the Western Sahara a certain form of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. Algeria is a pronounced in favor of independence of the Western Sahara.

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