Saturday, February 11, 2023 at 12:30 PM
Paris – Almost four years after the Hirak, a peaceful uprising of 2019, the political climate has darkened in Algeria as the regime intensifies its hunt for the last protesting cores, writes, on Saturday, the French daily Le Monde, in an article entitled “From Hirak to repression, Algeria is rocking into a new era”.
Faced with this repression, the opponents opted for exodus and “flee on a large scale from an Algeria whose atmosphere had become” unbreathable”, notes the newspaper, adding that Algeria is a country “in full authoritarian drift where the arrest watches at all times for those who showed themselves too much during the Hirak, in particular those who continued the fight after the breathlessness of the popular mobilization that began in the spring of 2020, anti-Covid restrictions oblige.
They are thousands to have thus exiled themselves in France and elsewhere in Europe, or even in Canada, notes the publication, which evokes the case of the opponent Amira Bouraoui, who was faced with a simple equation: prison or exile .
“Some passed through Tunisia, a sensitive and perilous step since Algiers strengthened its influence on the regime of Kaïs Saïed. Mrs. Bouraoui owed her salvation only to the possession of a French passport”, observes the newspaper, specifying that others did not have this chance such as “Slimane Bouhafs, sympathizer of the Movement for the self-determination of the Kabylie (MAK) and converted to Christianity, who was kidnapped in August 2021 in the heart of Tunis by unknown persons who forcibly repatriated him to Algeria”.
And to continue that “such an exodus could arrange the Algerian power by ridding it of centers of activists. However, quite the opposite, Algiers is trying to stem this wave of departures for fear that these opponents, once abroad, will widely disseminate information on internal repression”, hence the hundreds of “bans on exit from national territory” (ISTN) pronounced by the courts against Hirak sympathizers.
How could it be otherwise when nearly three hundred prisoners of conscience are now behind bars? asks the French media, pointing to the dissolutions that continue to strike emblematic structures of civil society.
At the same time, we continue, the media field has continued to impoverish, the sealing at the end of December 2022 of Interface Médias (combining Radio M and the magazine Maghreb Emergent) and the arrest of its founding journalist Ihsane El-Kadi was the “high point of a recovery going crescendo for three years”.
The Algerian press is no more than a shadow of itself, underlines the French daily.
“We have to come to terms with the facts: Algeria has entered a new era. This + New Algeria + whose President Abdelmadjid Tebboune – elected in December 2019 – has made his slogan in fact devotes a great leap back politically”, we continue.
With the Hirak, which marked an unprecedented “earthquake” and “shaking” of Algerian society, all hopes seemed permitted. Hence the “pain of disenchantment” when the regime, miraculously helped by the Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, gradually regained the advantage, tightening nut by nut the security noose around a movement that had become powerless. -we.
In its recovery, adds Le Monde, the regime benefited from a double boon: the Covid-19 crisis, which very opportunely justified the banning of protest rallies in the name of health security, and the war in Ukraine, providential for gas and oil Algeria, which was going to boost the prices of hydrocarbons, offering the Algerian power a breath of fresh air allowing it to buy social peace, “while imposing Algeria as an alternative to Russian gas, as such courted by Westerners suddenly less concerned with human rights”.
And to explain that this double international conjuncture would not have been enough on its own to save the regime. It only consolidated a takeover of internal control already underway and whose achievements were already tangible. Started in the wake of the ousting of Bouteflika, a key moment when the army became concerned about the transformation of the anti-Bouteflika mobilization into an anti-system movement, this restoration deepened the day after the election of Mr. Tebboune, end of 2019. It obeyed a very precise modus operandi, worthy of a recipe manual for the use of authoritarian powers in danger.
Reminiscent of the dark decade, the infamous accusation of + terrorism + frightens, including the families of detainees who sometimes refuse to communicate on the fate of their prosecuted relative, we observe, arguing that the “machine is implacable”.
In Algeria in the midst of a security escalation, the scathing humor in the face of the twists and turns of a repression that has become Kafkaesque is no more than a consolation, the newspaper concludes.