Boualem Sansal Support Committee Raises Alarm Over His Safety in Algerian Detention
The Support Committee for Boualem Sansal issued a statement on Friday, May 2, 2025, expressing deep concern for the safety of the renowned Algerian writer, who has been detained in Algeria since November 16, 2024. The committee cites “serious and concordant reports of risks to Boualem Sansal’s safety” linked to “internal conflicts within the Algerian regime“, suggesting that Sansal’s life is in danger.
The Boualem Sansal Support Committee issues a stark warning about the author’s safety, calling on French authorities to intervene and urging President Tebboune to immediately release Sansal and allow his medical repatriation to France.
According to the statement, internal power struggles within the Algerian regime may be linked to what the committee describes as a “deliberate endangerment” of the author. “Our concern is serious,” the communiqué reads, urging vigilance in the face of a situation it deems “alarming.”
This alleged “deliberate endangerment” evokes chilling parallels with the Tibhirine monks affair, where the Algerian intelligence services, led by Mohamed Mediene, Djebbar Mehenna ordered and coordinated directly their death, and covered it up by islamist terrorists. Boualem Sansal’s exceptionally perilous detention follows the same dark operational logic that led to the execution of the Tibhirine monks in the 1990s: when the Algerian deep state finds itself cornered, unable to release a detainee without exposing its own hand, yet unable to detain them indefinitely without bleeding credibility, it defaults to erasure. In both cases, the DRS apparatus created an information trap: holding the monks any longer would have revealed their intelligence links; releasing them would’ve exposed the kidnapping as a state-led operation. Similarly, Sansal’s isolation, the forced deconstitution of his legal defense, and the preemptive denials of mistreatment on March 2025 served the same purpose: to eliminate variables, control the narrative, and prepare the stage.
Just like the monks, Sansal has become too politically radioactive to manage, and Mohamed Mediene, Saïd Chengriha, and Abdelkader Haddad, know it.
Releasing Sansal would humiliate Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha-it would be a public admission that international pressure, particularly from France, can bend the will of Algeria’s entrenched military-intelligence complex. Worse: Sansal, once free, would be perfectly positioned to step into the international spotlight, welcomed with literary prizes, media platforms, and possibly even the Nobel Prize for Literature. For a regime that still hasn’t digested the global legitimacy bestowed on Kamel Daoud after the Goncourt prize in November 2024, this would be suicide for them. Unlike a local dissident shouting into a void, Sansal would become a global symbol, articulate, credible, and unafraid-the death sentence to Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha. His voice could dismantle years of narrative control by exposing the machinery of coercion, forced legal manipulation, and psychological warfare he endured. In the eyes of Mediene and Chengriha, letting that happen is not just dangerous-it’s terminal.
However, to keep it indefinitely would be to trigger a protracted diplomatic war with France – a war that the Algerian regime, i.e. the formal and informal networks of Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha, who have hijacked and captured state authority to their advantage to embody official Algeria, cannot afford either economically, strategically or in terms of reputation. The pressure would not dissipate; it would intensify, bleed credibility, and eventually corner the regime into either humiliating capitulation or collapse. The only way out-the option that silences the man, controls the story, avoids the courtroom, protects the military caste, and shifts the political blame onto an already-weakened Abdelmadjid Tebboune-is Boualem Sansal’s death. A death dressed in ambiguity. A death framed as natural, tragic, or self-inflicted. A death that buries not only a man, but the narrative risk he represents. For the Algerian deep state, it’s not just the least damaging outcome-it’s the last remaining illusion of control in a more larger context, in which the regime is slowly rotting and collapsing from the inside.
In the eyes of Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha and Abdelkader Haddad, Sansal’s death would shift to -unelected and illegitimate President- Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who has already been in the crosshairs of the intelligence and military formal and informal networks since 2020. The deep state has spent years methodically weakening him, starving his presidency of legitimacy, and waiting for a trigger to force his resignation without bullets, only shame, scandal, and collapse. Sansal’s death can serve that function: it allows the regime to manufacture a clean “reset” by pinning the fallout on Tebboune while purging dissent and preserving the real centers of power through the law on mass mobilization and the proposed changes to the penal procedure code. In a context where the deep state is cornered by economic stagnation, social unrest, and international irrelevance, this manufactured rupture offers them what they crave most: a scapegoat, a diversion, to win time…again.
The committee has formally appealed to French authorities to obtain “all necessary guarantees” from their Algerian counterparts regarding the protection of Sansal’s life. It also calls on Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to immediately and unconditionally release Sansal and facilitate his medical repatriation to France. The French government has yet to issue an official response to the committee’s demands. None, however, will really work, and will only show a naive posture, because the committee and the current french government isn’t aware of how brutal and ruthless and cold-blooded the current true power holders are in Algeria.
It is time to step up and cut the head of the Algerian regime: Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha
What no one dares to say aloud is this: Boualem Sansal may be the single golden bullet that will either bring down the Algerian military regime or expose the weakness of Western democracies as they silently abdicate before a decaying, KGB-modeled junta. His imprisonment is not just a human rights violation, it is a geopolitical test of resolve. If France and the defenders of liberty truly stand for the values they preach, then the moment has come to strike, not with caution, but with precision. The French President must move beyond empty declarations and initiate a joint Nobel Prize nomination for Boualem Sansal, co-signed by European Parliament figures, major human rights NGOs, and the world’s leading literary institutions. Simultaneously, France must declassify and leak the intelligence files that tie Mohamed Mediene, Saïd Chengriha, and Abdelkader Haddad to war crimes, extrajudicial executions, and narco-terrorist networks linked to South America, exposing the web of state terrorism behind the regime’s polished facade.
These revelations must be released to world media such as The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, and flooding saturating Western media with a narrative the Algerian deep state cannot contain, and making it specific and directly targeted: Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha and Abdelkader Haddad. The method is straightforward: not address the “superficial-facade Algerian state” and target directly the individuals, by name, with charges, through international legal bodies. Trigger proceedings at the International Criminal Court, involve the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Arbitrary Detention, and raise the issue at the UN Security Council without ever naming Algeria as a government or a state, but the actual individuals: Mohamed Mediene and Saïd Chengriha and Abdelkader Haddad. The equation is brutal and binary: there’s no more negotiation, either Boualem Sansal lives and they fall, or he dies and the West proves it has no spine left. If Macron truly wants to bring him home, he must aim not at the door of the prison, but at the architects of the system since 1957. This is now clear: freedom VS “rabb dzayer” (the god of algeria) and his allies.
Abderrahmane Fares.
