Algerian journalists are on the frontline of an unprecedented wave of state repression against the uprising that toppled former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
On 22 February, 2019, demonstrations erupted across Algeria in opposition to the candidacy of Abdelaziz Bouteflika to a fifth presidential mandate. The biggest and most consequential the country had seen in decades, they became a biweekly event and involved millions of people. Along with public and popular debates as well as cultural events, they transformed and enlivened the country by drawing its citizens around the rejection of its longtime rulers and political elites.
Merzoug Touati, an independent journalist from Bejaia in the Kabylie region and the editor of the news website El Hogra, couldn't join them. He had been in detention since January 2017 for "treason" after interviewing an Israeli diplomat. But on 4 March, as the protest movement called Hirak was expanding, he was released after his sentence had been reduced from ten to five years, including the two he had already served in detention.
The protesters were expressing demands in line with what Touati had stood for and had been putting forward in El Hogra. "I found the Hirak taking place when I got out of prison and I realised I had more or less the same demands," he recalls. "They demanded the departure of the corrupt regime and I agreed. They demanded democracy and I was a democrat. They demanded freedom and I was for freedoms, freedom of expression, press freedom, political freedom."
New enemies of the state
Touati soon got involved in the Hirak by extensively covering the demonstrations.
"I attended all the marches from the time I got out of jail until they stopped in March 2020. I almost never missed Fridays, the day of the weekly marches, maybe once or twice for something important that kept me from going," he said. "I tried to give a voice to the demonstrators. When I had the chance, I travelled on Fridays or on Tuesdays for the student demonstrations. I moved around, in Constantine, Algiers, Bouira, Tizi Ouzou."
At first, the local authorities attempted to prevent him as well as other independent journalists from getting to the protests, especially in Algiers, Algeria's capital and window to the international community. Protesters from other regions would converge on the city and encounter roadblocks and security forces on full display on their way starting Thursday evenings. "On several occasions while going there, I found myself at the police station all day and I could not report on the march. In the morning, they'd take me away because they'd recognise me," he said.
While the repression increased throughout 2019, Touati was repeatedly summoned and briefly detained. He underwent several interrogations, in most cases concerning his Facebook publications. However, in June 2020, weeks after the protests had stopped because of the pandemic, he was arrested and remained in prison for a month. In December 2021, as a crackdown followed the sudden return of the Hirak in February 2021 after the Lockdown, he was jailed in the southern city of Ghardaia for insulting the police - he published a summons on his Facebook page - and for spreading false news. This time, his detention lasted six months.
The Deep State and the treacherous virus
In 2019, the orderliness as well as the large attendance of the protests prevented a full scale crackdown. Instead, the Hirak was progressively weakened. The Army seemingly answered the protesters' demands by pushing Boutelfika to resign and by arresting political and business figures associated with his presidency. It then instrumentalised identity and cultural differences by banning the Amazigh flag in June 2019 and jailing dozens of people for holding or simply carrying it. The installation of a new dubiously-elected president, Abdelmajid Tebboune in December 2019, and the adoption of a Constitution largely ignored by the population in November 2020, gave the regime continuity and provided a façade to the international community.
Meanwhile, the corona virus lockdown forced people to remain in their homes and enabled the authorities to arrest activists and outspoken critics who had retreated to social networks online. Because the popular pressure was absent, the internal divisions within the Hirak and the failure to politically translate its demands became more evident. After the Hirak returned to the streets in February 2021, the regime silenced protesters and the opposition by launching an unprecedented wave of political detentions in April 2021.
Since June 2019, about a thousand people have been incarcerated for politically related motives or for expressing anti-governmental criticism. However, the number of prisoners, certainly underestimated, doesn't reveal the full extent and the severity of the repression. Dozens have been repeatedly arrested or have completed several jail sentences. Numerous activists who had emerged and played an important role in the mobilisation of the Hirak underwent judicial harassment, with consecutive or even simultaneous trials. They were relentlessly prosecuted, charged in multiple cases and at times with several counts in each. This way, even after they were released from prison, they were prevented from pursuing their work as activists or journalists by having to focus on their continuing judicial entanglements.
Many had undergone similar difficulties prior to the Hirak. Yet the intensity as well as the scope of the repression under the new leadership far exceeds the one that took place under Bouteflika.
Ahmed Manseri, director of the Tiaret bureau of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH), an organisation banned in June 2022, had already been detained and prosecuted prior to the Hirak. He has been arrested and summoned more than 20 times since 2019. His daily life has been punctuated by his legal obligations, including judicial supervision. Although he wasn't incarcerated, he was sentenced to three years in prison in absentia for disseminating publications that may undermine public order and security, and charged with inciting an unarmed gathering and promoting terrorism.
A bonanza of repression
In order to prevent the return of the Hirak, the regime has diversified the forms of its repression. Other than political detention, it arrested activists yet swiftly released them in order to intimidate them, at times so frequently that they - and their lawyers - would stop counting. It kept at bay those who were prosecuted during lengthy pretrial detentions - in several cases up to two years - that have become the norm contrary to the provisions of the criminal procedure code. It instrumentalised the conditions of judicial supervision decided by investigative judges pending their trials. Consequently, those who were prosecuted were not allowed to engage in political activities, or leave their town, talk to the press, attend a protest or even do business. For example, renowned businessman Issad Rabrab, a former detainee, cannot carry out any commercial or managerial activity within his company.
But Algerian authorities use more concealed ways to silence dissent.
Looking back on his recent path, Touati told me : "I don't think I've ever gone through a normal day." "You can't have a normal life," he further explained. "When you get out of your house, you look left and right, to check if someone is surveilling and when you leave, backwards to check if someone is following you. If someone is staring at you, you get nervous... And you also have the judiciary procedures, the obstacles to earning your livelihood."
A considerable number of activists, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists and even magistrates underwent pressure in the workplace or lost their jobs. For his part, Zakaria Boussaha, a 28 year-old technician in solar panel installations and activist from the eastern city of Annaba who has been jailed in 2019 and in 2020, was not only left unemployed afterwards but has been struggling to pay heavy fines. He said he has been sentenced to pay 17 fines with the latest one, in June 2023, amounting to 100 000 Da (740 USD). His release after eight months in prison in 2020 didn't mean he was exonerated from further pressures. A new case lodged against him could result in further incarceration. Moreover, he has to report regularly at court and his movements are closely watched. He was arrested last year as he was travelling from the airport of Algiers to Annaba and was banned from leaving the country this May.
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Interdiction de sortie
The ISTN (Interdiction de sortie du territoire national), a provision preventing citizens from leaving the national territory, has become an additional tool of repression. It has affected dozens of citizens, activists, Hirak supporters who live outside Algeria and even former government officials. In some cases, it has been used arbitrarily by security officials (instead of being issued by a court as provided by law); the targeted individual is only informed of the preventive order as they embark on their travels.
This was the case of Mustapha Bendjama, the editor of the daily newspaper Le Provincial, based in Annaba and the most surveilled journalist in the country. He had been under ISTN from November 2019 to April 2022, when a court lifted the decision. Nevertheless, after trying to cross the border to Tunisia in October 2022, he was held for several hours and had to turn back. That month, he made the attempt three other times. Bendjama said that a border officer told him there was no official ban but that he had received "instructions". Several weeks later, after he filed a complaint to reclaim his right to travel outside Algeria, he ended up being jailed and accused of helping the dissident Amira Bouraoui to cross the border to Tunisia despite the ISTN - even though he himself couldn't leave the country and hadn't met with her. His incarceration in February 2023 came after over three years of judicial troubles and at least 35 arrests and summons. For many Algerian journalists and activists, prison is the latest step of a gruelling path.
Ilhem Rachidi is a freelance journalist focusing on protest movements and human rights issues in Morocco and Algeria.
