In Algeria, three years in prison for journalist Ihsane El Kadi

In detention, Insane El Cadi lost weight. And, despite the sentence of three years in prison, announced by the court this Sunday, April 2, accompanied by the dissolution of his company Interface Media, the Algerian journalist, imprisoned for more than three months, remains incisive and biting. He had already been detained for nine months, in this prison of El-Harrach in Algiers when he was 22 years old in 1981, then victim of the repression of the Berber spring. Forty-two years later, at age 63, he remains just as determined in the face of a regime that seeks to crush him.

From prison, on March 25, he affixed his signature at the bottom of the rostrum “The regimes of the Greater Maghreb only converge to repress their peoples”, carried by some 250 personalities from North Africa. On the day of the trial, March 26, he declared to the choking judge that he had dreamed of the president: “In my dream, I brought a lawsuit against Abdelmadjid Tebboune in this court and I won my case. . »

It is that the Tebboune era, elected in December 2019, marked a severe turn of the security screw in Algeria. And it took the turn of a very unequal duel between the president and the journalist, one of the last to still speak freely. On television on February 24, Abdelmadjid Tebboune attacked him by calling him the insulting term of khabardji (“informant”), in other words in the pay of foreigners. A way of condemning in advance the journalist, who was being prosecuted for receiving funds from abroad “in order to perform acts likely to undermine the stability and security of the State”.

“It is time to put an end to this relentlessness”, claimed Antoine Bernard, of Reporters without borders, by depositing, in front of the Algerian embassy in Paris on Thursday March 30, 13,000 envelopes symbolizing the signatures of the petition demanding the release of the journalist, prosecuted in four cases over the past three years.

As a good marathon runner, Insane El Cadi is not the type to let go along the way. Combative with the sparkling eye of the irreducible optimist who in 2019 actively participated in Hirak, this protest movement which got the better of the fifth term of old President Bouteflika, he struggled to try to bring together the various movements of society under the reproving eye of an authoritarian regime quick to cultivate division.

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

Insane El Cadi 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 historian and long-time travel companion Yassine Temlali recalls. In prison, “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. But, according to him, he is also tormented by the possible agony of his company and the fate of his 25 employees.

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