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France’s Emmanuel Macron has joined calls for information about Franco-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, who has gone missing after he flew to Algiers last Saturday.<\/p>\n
An outspoken critic of the Algerian regime<\/a>, Sansal is reported by some French media to have been arrested by Algerian police when he stepped off the plane.<\/p>\n \u201cThe president is very concerned and is following the situation closely,\u201d a spokesman at the Elys\u00e9e palace said. \u201cHe holds very dear the freedom of this great writer and intellectual.\u201d<\/p>\n Several other prominent French politicians, mainly on the centre and right, have voiced their fears for Sansal, who made regular appearances on French media criticising both the Algerian government and the rise of Islamism.<\/p>\n By Friday there had been no official reaction in Algeria to the French concerns.<\/p>\n Former prime minister Edouard Philippe said he was \u201cprofoundly worried\u2026 [Sansal] embodies all that we cherish. He stands for reason, freedom and humanism against the forces of censorship, corruption and Islamism”.<\/p>\n Far-right leader Marine Le Pen called him a \u201cfighter for liberty and a courageous opponent of Islamism.\u201d<\/p>\n The disappearance of Sansal, 75, was first reported by friends in Paris, who found that his mobile telephone had gone dead and were told that he had not arrived at his home in Boumerd\u00e8s.<\/p>\n Among his supporters is the writer Kamel Daoud, another Franco-Algerian critic of the government in Algiers who earlier this month was awarded France\u2019s top book award for a novel about the bloody Algerian civil war of the 1990s.<\/p>\n It was announced only this week that Daoud was being sued in Algeria for allegedly stealing his story from a survivor of the civil war, and for breaching a 2005 \u201creconciliation law\u201d which restricts public comment on the conflict.<\/p>\n Saada Arbane said she had had several psychiatric sessions with Daoud\u2019s future wife, Aicha Dahdouh. The BBC has approached Daoud for comment.<\/p>\n Saada Arbane said she had refused to meet Kamel Daoud when she found out he wanted to use her as the basis of his book [Getty Images]<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n In an article published Friday in Paris, where he now lives, Daoud expressed concern for his \u201cfriend\u201d Sansal, who he was sure had been arrested.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing a writer in Algeria is an onerous task. The regime does not at all appreciate the profession and the Islamists are in expansion mode\u2026. Indeed the armed wing [of the Islamists] is the regime,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n The difficulties facing the two writers have stoked fears of a vendetta being conducted by the Algerian government in response to an apparent switch in policy by President Macron towards friendship with Morocco, and away from Algeria.<\/p>\n Antoine Gallimard, of Daoud\u2019s publishing firm Gallimard, said that the lawsuits against the writer were proof of a \u201ccampaign of violent defamation orchestrated by certain media close to the (Algerian) regime.\u201d<\/p>\n