Member of the MDS, a state-certified secular left formation, Fethi Ghares was pursued for “infringement of the person of the President of the Republic”.
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To the judge who asked him about his desire to “change the regime”, he had retorted that “in democracy, the political fight takes place in the public space and it is the people who slice”. “I am the coordinator of a political party, he added. This quality, I even keep it in my cell.”
Judge on December 26, 2021, Fethi Ghares, a member of the Democratic and Social Movement (MDS), a secular left-wing formation in 2019 in the Hirak anti-antiticime demonstrations, was sentenced to two years in prison , Sunday, January 9th. This verdict pronounced against the head of a legal party and approved by the authorities marks a new escalation in repression in Algeria, are worried opponents and lawyers.
The MDS spokesman was arrested on June 30th. Detained, it was continued for “violation of the person of the President of the Republic”, “Constitutive Body”, “dissemination to the public of publications that may affect the national interest”, “dissemination of information that could carry Reached national unity “and” dissemination of information that may undermine public order “. Charges based on Mr. Gheras’s publications on the Facebook social network and private exchanges extracted from his phone. The prosecutor had required three years in prison, without bothering to plead.
The “Sultan” and the “Pyromania”
“Fethi Ghares contradicted the Sultan,” said one of his defenders during the December 26 hearing, reminiscent of the support of the opponent of a journalist that President Abdelmadjid Tebboune had publicly qualified as “pyromane”. Inmate for six months, Rabah Karèche, of the daily freedom, had been charged after reporting a protest movement in the Algerian South.
“By targeting Fethi Ghares, the power also seeks to prohibit any possibility of articulating political and social struggles,” says Yacine Teguia, a member of the MDS direction. “It is not the only one. Other activists have been heavily condemned, I think of the President of the Association SOS BAB El-Oued, Nacer Meghnine,” he adds to the fate of the Animator of a cultural organization created in the 1990s and very active in this popular district of Western Algiers: in September, Nacer Meghnine was sentenced to eight months in prison for, among other charges, his “participation in offenses that affect national interest and national unity “.
“The MDS has been the responsibility for years. The current power behavior is in the line of the time of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, when the arrests and lawsuits aiming for us have been numerous and that activists of our Movement knew the prison, reminds Mr. Teguia. These judicial persecutions were already manifested by the prohibition of our political activities. The current situation reveals a new calculation of power: the desire to tackle one of the currents that emerged from the hirak. “
Threatened parties of dissolution
Other opposition parties are thus threatened by the authorities. They share with the MDS support for detainees and their belonging to the Democratic Alternation Covenant (PAD), a group of democratic camp organizations that was created in June 2019 with the ambition to build a political alternative . “Fethi Ghares plays a prominent role. It is the grouping of the progressive forces that is now targeted,” says Teguia.
In the authorities’ collimator in particular, the rally for culture and democracy (RCD), put in notice by the Ministry of the Interior to no longer open its premises to the associative movement. The RCD is one of the first opposition parties created in the aftermath of the political opening that followed the riots of October 1988. It risks a dissolution, just like the Union for change and progress (UCP) and The Socialist Party of Workers (PST), also members of the PAD.
More than 200 people are currently behind the bar in Algeria for the facts related to the Hirak, according to the National Committee for the Liberation of Inmates (NSCA).