Boualem Sansal : his freedom is our freedom (Jacques Tarnero)
Boualem Sansal speaks about justice, human rights, freedom; he denounced the racism and anti-Semitism of the Algerian government. It was unbearable for this government. Our friend Boualem, member of our Honorary Committee, was arrested on November 16, 2024, upon his arrival at Algiers airport from France.
Like Boualem Sansal, hundreds of political prisoners, Kabyle activists and human rights activists are in prison in Algeria. Dhimmi Watch demands the release of Boualem, the release of all of them, and calls for a rally organized by the Kabyle Human Rights League on January 26, at 2 p.m., Place de la Nation in Paris. We publish here an article by Jacques Tarnero, explaining who is Bpualem and who is the Algherian government.
This is not just another opponent who has just been thrown into prison by a political power. It’s about one of those writers who changed the course of history in their country and around the world. What were Vaclav Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn guilty of? They were imprisoned or gulagged for denouncing systems that stifled all freedom of thought. Boualem Sansal is a man of that calibre. Now it’s his turn to be the victim of the Islamic-nationalist gulag.
Because he carries within him a multiple identity, Algerian and French, because he writes in French, because his Algerian childhood was irradiated by a rabbi, because he has read Albert Camus, he alone embodies the complexity of the post-twentieth century, the complexity that questions this cursed century, the century of triumphant totalitarianisms that promised paradise and delivered hell. How was this possible? The fire smouldered beneath the ashes, and thoughts of death did not die out with the demise of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.
Because he holds up a mirror to the Arabs, to the Algerian authorities and to what Algeria did with its independence, he has been outlawed by this new totalitarianism that wants to pursue an imaginary war. Decolonial thinking against the white man, against the North in the name of a ‘global South’, feeds this imposture, and what Boualem Sansal writes renews, with a Mediterranean flavour, what George Orwell, Arthur Koestler or Simon Leys were able to decipher, to the great displeasure of the idolaters.
Boualem Sansal develops a way of thinking that goes far beyond this first political liberation. He explores the factors that encouraged the transition from one colonial submission to another, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world. How does this alienation, which always attributes its own misfortunes to others, work? In the Arab world, in the world born of Muslim culture, there is this characteristic that is unique to it: a plot from elsewhere would poison what was promised to be a radiant future. But there is something else, something far worse.
Boualem Sansal is guilty of the crime of crimes. He is guilty of an inexpiable crime. He has travelled to Israel. He paid a cordial visit to the epicentre of hell, where all evil comes from. The ‘Zionist entity’ opened its doors to him, welcomed him. He dared to declare ‘I am not at war with Israel’, thereby betraying that new sacred oath imposed on every ‘Arab’ or supposed Arab. Algeria has made hatred of Israel the new matrix of its identity. It holds captive THE traitor who undermines this new fundamental law. Hatred of Israel is an extension of the hatred of the Jew as theorised by Saïd Qutb, the leading thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood. Far from any Enlightenment Islam, this intellectual regression has ravaged the whole area from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. It explains everything: climate change, water shortages in Algiers, devastating locusts and other curses created by Mossad, of course Mossad. Boualem Sansal is an accomplice, a double agent, an insider miscreant. He is the renegade of his origins. Along with the status of women, Israel is the other fantasy that explains the Arab misfortune, its alleged ‘humiliation’.
This magical thinking has for ages prohibited any critical look at Islamic thought, at what Arabs have done to Arabs. This ‘best aphrodisiac’ for the world. Arabs, in the words of Hassan II, is part of the paranoid system that is the hallmark of all totalitarian mechanisms.
The President of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has just confirmed its vivacity in a speech to the Algerian parliament: ‘You are sending an impostor who doesn’t know his identity, doesn’t know his father and has come to say that half of Algeria belongs to another state’. Algeria had everything it needed to become the California of the Maghreb, even if it was socialist in its early days. Oil revenues have prevented Algerians from thinking about their own history. Boualem Sansal was wrong to point out in his book ‘The Village of the German’ the complicity of the Algerian national movement with the Nazis, recalling that of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el Husseini, with the Third Reich. Let’s not forget the role played by the Swiss Nazi banker François Genoud in helping the FLN and the entire anti-Israeli movement. It’s a long story that President Tebboune seems to know nothing about. Then there was the Mélouza massacre (1957), committed by an FLN unit led by Mohamedi Saïd, a former deserter from the French army who went over to the Germans and became a member of the SS. Looking at the horrors committed in this war cannot be done with one-eyed eyes.
Boualem Sansal is now the hostage of this conspiracy mechanism, which has become a system for explaining the world. For two months now, this free spirit has been the victim of a crime of opinion. His entire body of work is a hymn to freedom and truth. Although his writing is characterised by irony, it is devoid of any insults or slander. This man has a limpid pen, free of conceptual mumbo-jumbo. When he speaks, he uses ‘what’s-his-name’, ‘thing’ and ‘thing’ as tools of language to fluidify and unravel shifts in meaning. Too many innocent people have paid the price in blood for not respecting dogma and religious, spiritualist or pseudo-scientific theories.
It is a disgrace for Algeria to slander Boualem Sansal. While France thanks and honours two great French-speaking writers of Algerian origin, Kamel Daoud and Boualem Sansal, here they are, disowned by their homeland but welcomed with open arms by French literature. Rachid Mimouni, Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Ferraoun understood this paradox: the French Republic had, at the same time, brought the spirit of the Enlightenment with it in the baggage of colonisation. Emir Abdelkader understood this, as did Mohamed V and Bourguiba. By perpetuating an endless war against the former colonising power, President Tebboune is preventing his people from thinking about their own past, if not their future. The culture of resentment is not a political project.
How can Algeria fail to understand that it is getting rid of the best of itself? For Boualem Sansal, freedom is of course first and foremost a matter for Algerians, but it has also become a matter for us in France. His freedom is a matter for all those who want to live free.
