The French daily Le Monde looked at the case of Algeria by devoting the first two pages of its edition of the Weekend to it. The “return” of repression is mentioned there, but also the military dictatorship, and the inability of the regime to federate which led it to tighten the screw against any form of criticism to give itself a forced legitimacy.
In its edition to be published this Saturday, Le Monde set out to sharply criticize the Algerian regime by devoting 3 subjects to it, which trace the beginning of the dictatorship in the country with the coming to power of Abdelmadjid Tebboune and the flight of the intellectuals.
After the episode of the exfiltration of the opponent Amira Bouraoui by the French authorities in Tunisia, Franco-Algerian relations are not only on a return to square one, the deterioration goes even further with the French press which responds with strength to the anger of Algiers.
” Algeria is tipping into a new era of repression”headlined the French daily, which ignored the continuity of this same repression which has befallen Algerian citizens since 2019 with the coming to power of the controversial Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who is seeking support from Paris for a second mandate in 2024 through a state visit scheduled for March 2023.
Between Paris and Algiers, which immediately patched themselves up as soon as they separated, the French press suddenly awoke to talk about the dramatic situation of human rights in Algeria, freedom of expression and the Algerian State which is cracking down on any form of opposition forcing thousands of opinion leaders, bloggers, journalists and opponents to leave the country to go to France, Canada, Great Britain…
” Nearly four years after the great wave of peaceful demonstrations of Hirak, the climate has hardened, to the point of provoking an exodus of representatives of the media and civil society”, wrote the French daily.
And to quote Amira Bouraoui, at the origin of the quarrel between Paris and Algiers: “I never wanted to leave Algeria. This is my country, my land. Where I fought. Circumstances imposed it on me. The pressure was becoming unbearable..
” For Algerian opponent Amira Bouraoui, the equation was simple: prison or exile.tells Le Monde after his meeting with the opponent on February 7.
Opponents in Algeria “leak on a large scale” because the atmosphere there has become “unbreathable”. A country “in full authoritarian drift where arrest awaits at any moment”indicates the publication, focusing on the case of members of Hirak, the movement born in 2019 with demonstrations against the fifth term of ex-president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, which later turned into a demand for democracy and calls for regime change.
Police and legal repression, prison, violence and physical and medical suffering, the tearing of families, have become the daily life of those who wanted to continue the protest movement (which has run out of steam due to the covid pandemic). ) at the risk of their lives and their number, their names are known.
Le Monde cites the case of opponents who have not had the chance to go into exile in a Western country and who have suffered the betrayal of Tunisia, which has become another Algerian “wilaya” since the strengthening of the authority of Algiers on Tunis against a background of institutional and economic crisis.
Slimane Bouhafs, sympathizer of the Movement for the self-determination of Kabylia (MAK) was kidnapped in August 2021 in the heart of Tunis by unknown persons who forcibly repatriated him to Algeria, the newspaper recalls.
” Algiers is trying to stem this wave of departures for fear that these opponents, once abroad, will widely disseminate information about the repression,” underlines Le Monde, quoting an Algerian intellectual on condition of anonymity: “The regime does not appreciate that the international community sticks its nose in human rights in Algeria”which explains the bans on leaving the national territory pronounced by the courts.
As for the Algerian press, “whose vitality clashed in North Africa, is now only a shadow of itself”, indicates Le Monde citing the case of several titles that have forcibly disappeared since the accession to power of Abdelmadjid Tebboune and the strengthening of the role of the army.
This “New Algeria” which President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has made his slogan, in fact devotes a great leap back in politics, retorts the French media. “We were much freer under the era of Bouteflika”laments a journalist.
The daily recounts the Hirak movement which called for a “civil and non-military status”a movement that shook Algerian society despite the traumatic memories of the dark decade of the 1990s that “had in no way dissuaded families from walking the streets and avenues, patriotism in saltire, dreaming of a + new independence +”.
” These jovial, peaceful and disciplined masses, lifted by a rediscovered collective pride, had amazed the world. All hopes seemed permitted. Hence the pain of disenchantment when the regime, aided by the Covid19 in the spring of 2020, gradually regained the advantage, and tightened the security grip nut by nut around a movement that had become powerless, handicapped by its refusal to get organized “notes the media, telling how the Algerian regime has locked all space for freedom since 2019.
“It’s a much more authoritarian regime than before. He was authoritarian, but with leeway for freedoms. Today, we have entered a dictatorial phase,” declared the professor of public law at the University of Picardy Jules Verne, the Algerian Mouloud Boumghar.
The academic recalled the criminalization by the Algerian regime of the very claim of Hirak, which wanted a radical change in the political system with the revision in summer 2021 of the penal code on the subject of terrorism by President Tebboune.
“The weapon of the accusation of terrorism has such a deterrent effect that there is no need to resort to it massively, since the objective is to terrorize people”, he explained, adding that this came after the classification of the Rachad movement and the Movement for the self-determination of Kabylia (MAK) as terrorists by the High Security Council “without any legal basis”.
The goal of the Algerian regime “is to terrorize all those who would like to keep in mind this idea of change of political governance and to make believe that the Hirak is led by Rachad”, he asserted.
Furthermore, the researcher noted that the Algerian diet “is increasingly overtly militarized. The tradition wanted the army to be a king who does not govern but to whom the last word falls on important matters”, but faced with the regime’s inability to “to rebuild its clientele and
its social base, the army came forward”.
And to conclude that it remains for those who hold the reins of the country ” that coercion, the exacerbation of chauvinism and a conservative project (…) We flatter a form of fantasized identity, presented as besieged”.