Algerian security services arrested French-Algerian novelist and freethinker Boualem Sansal upon his arrival from France at Algiers airport on Saturday, French newspaper Le Figaro reported.
Sansal, 75, known for his outspoken ideas against both the Algerian government and religious fundamentalism, is a long-term critic of the rise of Islamist extremism in his home country and the subsequent Algerian civil war. Known as the Black Decade, the civil war killed 200,000 people between 1992 and 2002.
After having landed on a flight from Paris to Algiers on Saturday, Sansal, who has Moroccan parents, was declared missing for six days, with his family not having heard from him.
Algerian security services effectively disappeared Sansal, Le Figaro reported, by holding him incommunicado during the days he was missing. According to Le Figaro’s sources, Algeria has accused him of “colluding with the enemy.”
The arrest of this dual Algerian-French citizen has mobilized the French authorities and moved the political class, Le Figaro reported.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who personally granted Sansal French citizenship early this year in 2024, is said by unofficial sources close to Macron to be “deeply concerned and is closely monitoring the situation.” They said the President “reaffirms his unwavering commitment to the freedom of a great writer and intellectual.”
Fellow French-Algerian writer and friend of Sansal, Kamel Daoud, said in an article in Le Figaro that while he stands behind Sansal, he was perplexed over Sansal’s “recklessness” in traveling to Algeria.
“I sincerely hope my friend Boualem will return to us very soon,” he wrote.
Sansal’s apparent “cardinal sin” against the Algerian government is having repeatedly criticized the Polisario Front militia group and praised Morocco at a time when relations between the two countries are strained.
Sansal said in a video interview with Frontières, “Algeria invented the Polisario to destabilize Morocco, the oldest country in the world.”
Ferhat Mehenni, the President of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia, who is also a close friend of Sansal, tweeted that Sansal is “incorruptible” and a man “faithful to his principles.”
Mehenni strongly criticized Article 87 bis of Algeria’s penal code which the Algerian regime uses to deem a thinker like Sansal “a terrorist and consider his books Kalashnikovs.”
He told BarlamanToday that the Algerian regime had arrested Sansal “for his support of Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara and the Kabyle cause.”
“All my solidarity with this man of letters who honors all North African peoples and the entire human race,” he said