In Algeria, the unequal duel between the president and the journalist Ihsane el Kadi

In detention, Ihsane el Kadi lost weight. But the Algerian journalist, head of the Interface media company, imprisoned for more than three months in El Harrach prison in Algiers, remains just as incisive and biting. This prison, he had already known it when he was 22 years old. Then a victim of the repression of the Berber spring, the young Kabyle student had been detained there for nine months in 1981. Twenty-two years later, at 63, married and father of two children, he remains as determined as ever not to bow down. his back before a regime that seeks to crush him.

The day before his trial, Sunday March 26, he still affixed his signature at the bottom of the rostrum “The regimes of the Great Maghreb only converge to repress their peoples”, carried by some 250 personalities from North Africa. On the day of the hearing, before the prosecutor demanded five years in prison against him, he told the choking judge that he had dreamed of the president in his cell. “In my dream, I sued Abdelmadjid Tebboune in this court and I won,” report his colleagues, present in court, from Radio M and Maghreb Emergent, the two online media of Interface. media created by Ihsane el Kadi and placed under seal on the day of his arrest, on December 24.

Abdelmadjid Tebboune slandered him publicly

It is that the Tebboune era – elected in December 2019 – marks a severe turn of the security screw in Algeria, from which nearly 300 prisoners of conscience suffer. And it took the turn of a very unequal duel between the president and the journalist, one of the best known in Algeria and beyond the borders and one of the last to still speak freely.

On television on February 24, Abdelmadjid Tebboune attacked him by calling him the offensive term “khabardji” (“informant”), in other words in the pay of foreigners. A way of condemning the journalist even before the holding of his trial, officially for receiving funds from abroad “in order to perform acts likely to undermine the stability and security of the State”.

Ihsane el Kadi was arrested in the middle of the night from December 23 to 24 in his residence in Kabylia. It was a few hours later that, as a good economic journalist, he tackled the president on Twitter. “The public treasury has recovered 20 billion dollars from the oligarchs of Issaba (the “gang” around ex-president Bouteflika, editor’s note) said President Tebboune without batting an eyelid!!!! How can you say something so mathematically crude, ”he was indignant at the time. His relatives and the collective of lawyers who defend him see it as more than a coincidence. Especially since a few days earlier, he had published an article on the questions of the army around a second term for the president.

“Obviously the president is making it a personal matter”

“Obviously the president is making it a personal matter,” worries a relative. He has so far remained deaf to the international mobilization for the immediate release and the end of the judicial harassment of Ihsane el Kadi, prosecuted in four cases for three years, as demanded by human rights NGOs. “It is time to put an end to this relentlessness,” demanded Antoine Bernard, of Reporters Without Borders, by depositing 13,000 envelopes symbolizing the signatures of the petition demanding his release in front of the Algerian embassy in Paris, Thursday, March 30.

As a good marathon runner – a big sports fan, he began his career as a sports journalist – Ihsane el Kadi is not one to give up along the way. Combative with the sparkling eye of the irreducible optimist. Like this March 1, 2019 where he declares: “I wish everyone of good will to live once in their life this cosmic moment when the revolution of their dream and their action passes below their office window”. Words still highlighted on his Twitter account. That day a gigantic crowd had swept through the streets of Algiers and elsewhere in the country to demand the departure of old President Bouteflika, on the eve of a fifth term.

Already sentenced to six months in prison

This hirak, this protest movement that lasted for months, Ihsane el Kadi believed in it terribly. He mobilized tirelessly to free journalists and activists who were arrested and imprisoned by the shovel. And he struggled to try to bring together the various movements of society. But authoritarian regimes, whose mainspring is to “divide and conquer”, hate nothing so much as the quest for unity.

It was, moreover, an article from March 2021, in which he pleaded for the Islamist movement Rachad to be entitled to its place in the hirak, which earned him a sentence of six months in prison, without a warrant, following a complaint from the Minister of Communication – complaint confirmed on appeal on 18 December. Algiers classified this anti-regime Islamo-conservative movement as a “terrorist organization” in May 2021.

“He reads constantly, does weight training three times a week”

Ihsane el Kadi thus remained faithful to his lifelong convictions. In the bloody 1990s, he was already deeply convinced that “a political solution was possible with the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front)”, as journalist, historian and long-time travel companion Yassine Temlali recalls.

In prison, his wife only has the right to a short visit, once every fortnight, enough to bring food. According to his lawyers who can meet him, he is keeping in shape and in good spirits. “He reads constantly, does bodybuilding three times a week, he considers himself lucky compared to all the prisoners of conscience who remain invisible”, reports a relative. “He is an activist, a fighter”, adds the lawyer Mostafa Bouchachi who denounces this “political trial”.

But, according to the relative, he is very tormented by the possible agony of his company, his work which he has defended for a dozen years, and the fate of his twenty-five employees who painfully continue their work remotely, without being able to be paid for sites that have become inaccessible in Algeria.

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