Ihsane El Kadi is fine. As good as possible. This is all that could be transmitted on Tuesday, December 27 by his family and the group of lawyers who were able to visit the journalist, one of the most renowned in Algeria, detained in the famous Antar barracks of the General Directorate of Security. Interior (DGSI), near Algiers. “No information has been provided on the reasons for his arrest, his 48-hour police custody has been extended by 48 hours, will they play the extensions? Everything is possible in Algeria,” sighs lawyer Mustapha Bouchachi.
The intelligence services did not skimp to give a serious and spectacular character to the arrest of the journalist. Six men in civilian clothes came to dislodge him in the middle of the night from December 23 to 24, in his residence in Zemmouri, 60 kilometers east of Algiers, communicated his daughter Tin Hinane. On the afternoon of the 24th, he appeared in handcuffs surrounded by a DGSI brigade in the premises of his agency Interface Médias, which publishes the Radio M station and the Maghreb Émergent site.
A six-month prison sentence
“The offices were searched, the computers, hard drives and documents taken, then the premises sealed off”, reports an employee in shock, hoping to continue the activity by teleworking. “My father is very devastated by the closure of his business, a 30-year job, and the consequences for the 30 people who work there”, reports Tin Hinane.
The noose continues to tighten around the journalist victim of judicial harassment, under the influence of several pending cases, and sentenced to six months firm, without filing, following a complaint from a former Minister of Communication for an article published in March 2020. Conviction confirmed on appeal and made public on December 25. But everyone is lost in conjectures about this arrest, which could not be linked to this judgment.
Could it be his December 17 article on the army evaluating the possibility of a second term for President Tebboune that would have displeased? Or his tweet of December 23 which attacked the president for his remarks “coarse” on an alleged jackpot of 20 billion dollars which would have been recovered from the oligarchs of the “Issaba” (namely the band which gravitated around the ex-president Bouteflika)? “In Algeria, the world is upside down, first we arrest people and then we look for, or we invent, things to blame them for”, fulminates Tin Hinane, believing that it is no coincidence that the Algerian services have chosen December 24 to do their tricks, when the planet is looking elsewhere.
Mobilization abroad, “the only thing that can scare the regime”
Everywhere in Algeria and abroad, the mobilization is organized in order to put pressure for the release of the journalist and to save Radio M and Maghreb Émergent, considered as the last survivors of an independent press stifled by the regime. « They break us, crush us. And we don’t even know exactly who they are. But we won’t give up.” thus storms feminist activist Wiame Awres. “Imagine if we all carried within us the commitment, freedom and courage of Ihsane El Kadi… They would go crazy! Let’s all mobilize for Ihsane and Interface Médias. Let’s drive them crazy! », asks economist Kahina Redjala.
Signatures are piling up under the petition hosted on Radio M’s Facebook page. The international press echoes it. ” It is, believes the daughter of Ihsane El Kadi,the only thing that can scare the regime. »