France’s Emmanuel Macron has joined calls for information on Franco-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, who went missing after flying to Algiers last Saturday.
A major critic of the Algerian regime, Sansal is reported by the French media to have been arrested by the Algerian police when he got off the plane.
“The president is very concerned and is following the situation closely,” said a spokesman at the Elysée Palace. “He greatly respects the freedom of this great writer and thinker.”
Some prominent French politicians, particularly on the center and right, have expressed their fear of Sansal, who has appeared regularly in the French media criticizing the Algerian government and the rise of Islam.
On Friday there was no official reaction in Algeria regarding France’s concerns.
Former prime minister Edouard Philippe said he was “deeply concerned… [Sansal] it includes everything we love. He represents reason, freedom and humanity against the power of censorship, corruption and Islamism”.
Right-wing leader Marine Le Pen called him “a freedom fighter and a brave opponent of Islamism.”
The disappearance of Sansal, 75, was first reported by his friends in Paris, who discovered that his phone was dead and were told that he had not yet arrived at his home in Boumerdès.
Among his supporters is writer Kamel Daoud, another Franco-Algerian critic of the Algiers government who earlier this month was awarded France’s top book prize for a novel about Algeria’s bloody civil war in the 1990s.
It was announced only this week that Daoud was being sued in Algeria for allegedly stealing his story from a survivor of the civil war, and violating a 2005 “reconciliation law” that prohibits public comment on the conflict.
Saada Arbane said he had many bouts of mental illness with Daoud’s future wife, Aicha Dahdouh. The BBC has contacted Daoud for comment.
Sada Arbane said that he refused to meet Kamel Daoud when he found out that he wanted to use him as a basis for his book. [Getty Images]
In a story published on Friday in Paris, where he lives now, Daoud expressed concern about his “friend” Sansal, who he was sure was arrested.
“Being a writer in Algeria is a difficult job. The regime does not appreciate the work and the Islamists are in a position to expand…. Indeed an armed wing [of the Islamists] he is the kingdom,” he wrote.
The difficulties faced by these two authors have raised the fear that the Algerian government is responding to the change of policy of President Macron in the friendship with Morocco, and in Algeria.
Antoine Gallimard, of Daoud’s publishing company, Gallimard, said the charges against the writer prove “a campaign of violent defamation organized by some media close to the (Algerian) regime.”
Last month Macron made a state visit to Morocco, where he announced France’s support for Moroccan claims to sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara. Algeria is a historic supporter of the liberal Polisario movement.
Macron’s move has angered many Algerians, who view the awarding of France’s Prix Goncourt to Daoud as a political act rather than a written one.
Elysée officials told reporters that Macron was frustrated by his repeated attempts to build bridges to Algeria that kept failing due to Algerian stonewalling.
Some French media speculated that Sansal was arrested in connection with a recent interview in which he appeared to question Algeria’s historic sovereignty over parts of the border with Morocco. He also said that the Polisario was “founded” by Algeria to “destroy Morocco”.
Over the years Daoud and Sansal have both attracted the ire of official circles in Algeria, where they are often accused of selling out to the former colonial power.
Sansal was trained as a scientist and held a senior position in the Algerian industrial service before being fired after the publication of his first novels. He was severely attacked for attending a book fair in Jerusalem in 2012.
Daoud, 54, began his career as a journalist reporting on the massacres of the civil war, in which up to 200,000 people were killed.
He became a journalist and gained international fame in 2015 with his first novel The Meursault investigationwhich was a remake of The Stranger by Albert Camus.
Additional reporting by Ahmed Rouaba.
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