The authorities multiply the arrests and convictions on the eve of the third anniversary of the protest movement.
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At least forty belief inmates in El-Harrach Prison, in Algiers, have started a hunger strike since January 28, according to several lawyers of the Collective Defense of Opinions. These incarcerated hirak activists denounce their remand – most await their trial for several months – and the proceedings of which they are the subject on the basis of Article 87a of the Penal Code, amended in June 2021.
This new provision, which assimilates to “terrorism” or “sabotage” any appeal to “change the governance system by unconventional means”, has allowed the intensification of the repression against the actors of the Agitation antisystem born of the refusal of an application for a fifth mandate of the former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (deceased in September 2021). Safe stiffening of the Algerian regime that the sanitary crisis related to COVID-19 has facilitated.
The authorities nevertheless deny any abnormal situation in prisons. “No strikes were recorded within this penitentiary [El-Harrach]”, provided in a statement on 29 January, the Algiers prosecution by threatening any person who would relaunch information “Tendancies”. Lawyers maintain, however, that the detainees did not refuse to eat.
Families on hunger strike
Wednesday 2 February, twenty-three of them were transferred to the prisons of Berrouaghia, in the region of Medéa (West D’Algiers) and Bouira (East), affirmed the Algerian league for the defense of human rights (LADDH) which qualifies such a transfer of “illegal and arbitrary”. “It’s about breaking the hunger strike, says Saïd Salhi, the Vice-President of the LADDH. We called the strikers to suspend their movement to preserve their physical integrity, but they persist. It is dramatic that it is dramatic. They come to this ultimate recourse to shout their distress. “
At a solidarity meeting with the detainees held on February 5 at the headquarters of the democratic and social movement (MDS) in the capital, an opposition party whose Fethi Ghares coordinator was sentenced on 9 January to two years in firm prison, families announced that they also came on hunger strike.
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