Nearly four years after the 2019 pacifist uprising, the political climate darkened in Algeria while the regime intensifies its hunt for the last protester nuclei.
by Frédéric Bobin and Madjid Zerrouky
“I never wanted to leave Algeria. It is my country, my land. Where I fought. These are the circumstances that imposed it to me. The pressure became unbearable.” For the ‘Algerian opponent Amira Bouraoui, the equation was simple: prison or exile. When you meet it, Tuesday, February 7 in the morning, Gare de Lyon, in Paris, head wrapped in a woolen cap and suitcases on your fingertips, lost on quays deserted by the strike that strikes France that day – Her train is almost the only one to circulate -, she still has the features drawn by the mad escapade which saved her in extremis from the Algerian jails. Fear is always read on his face.
The day before, at the end of the evening, she had landed in Lyon of an airplane taken in Tunis thanks to the diplomatic assistance of Paris who, invoking her French nationality (she is binational), had convinced the Tunisian presidency of not Not allow extradition to Algeria to which she seemed to be condemned. The French consular intervention caused a new fever push in the relationship between Paris and Algiers.
Entry illegally into Tunisia on February 3, Amira Bouraoui had already been imprisoned in June and July 2021 in Algeria. She had been sentenced to two years in prison there for “attacking the person of the President of the Republic” and “offense to Islam”. If this sentence was not followed at the time of a warrant of deposit at the hearing, it remained executable at the slightest misstep, at the slightest declaration that could displease power. An extradition from Tunisia to Algeria would have inevitably earned him to return behind bars.
“Fear is back”
On the exodus road, it is not alone. Like M me bouraoui, opponents flee a large scale an Algeria with the atmosphere that has become “unbreathable”, they say. A country in full authoritarian drift where the arrest lies at all times those who displayed themselves too much during the Hirak (started in 2019 with demonstrations against the fifth mandate of ex-president Bouteflika, before turning into a dispute ), in particular those who continued the fight after the output of the popular mobilization initiated in the spring of 2020, anti-Cavid restrictions oblige. Thousands of them have exiled themselves in France and elsewhere in Europe, or even in Canada. Some have passed through Tunisia, a sensitive and perilous step since Algiers strengthened his influence on the Kaïs Saïed regime. M Me bouraoui owed his salvation only to the detention of a French passport. Others did not have this chance. Like Slimane Bouhafs, sympathizer of the movement for the self -determination of Kabylia (MAK) and converted to Christianity, which was removed in August 2021 at the heart of Tunis by strangers who repatriated him by force in Algeria.
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