Activist's case shows widening repression
PARIS » When Amira Bouraoui, an AlgerianFrench pro-democracy activist, boarded a plane to France from Tunisia last month, she thought her ordeal had finally come to an end.
She had already failed twice to flee Algeria, where her activism had put her in the government's crosshairs. Her third attempt, by illegally entering neighboring Tunisia, resulted in her being arrested and threatened with deportation. Only a last-minute offer of consular protection from France saved her.
“I was ready to do anything to leave Algeria,” Bouraoui, 47, said in a recent interview in a Paris suburb where she now lives in exile, asking that the precise location not be disclosed. “Not being able to express myself freely was like a slow death to me.”
What she did not expect, however, was the Algerian government's retaliation. A dozen days after Bouraoui's escape, prosecutors charged her 71-year-old mother, her cousin, a journalist acquaintance, a taxi driver and a customs official for “criminal conspiracy” in helping her flee.
“They're telling me, `We've got you through your mother,'” Bouraoui said.
Her case is part of what academics and human rights groups have described as an intensifying crackdown on civil society by an Algerian government sliding toward authoritarianism. In recent years, hundreds of activists have been sent to jail, dozens more have fled abroad and the last remnants of an independent news media have been stifled.
Four years after a popular uprising, known as the Hirak, ousted Algeria's autocratic president of 20 years, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and seemed to herald a new dawn for the country, hopes for real democracy have been dashed. In a cruel twist of fate, some Hirak supporters now even feel nostalgic for the time when Bouteflika was in power.
“We were freer,” Bouraoui said. “I feel sad to say that.”
Bouraoui, a gynecologist, gained prominence in the 2010s for her vocal opposition to Bouteflika's long and undemocratic rule.
When the Hirak uprising erupted in 2019, she quickly became a face of the movement. Every week, streams of protesters from all backgrounds peacefully took to the streets to demand an overhaul of Algeria's corrupt, military-backed government. Shaken by the rare demonstrations, the country's establishment dismissed Bouteflika and endorsed a new president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was elected on a promise to heed the protesters' demands. He began with a few goodwill gestures, releasing detained protesters.
“One of Tebboune's first statements was `I extend my hand to Hirak,'” Bouraoui said. “I believed him.”
But, she added, “it was only extended to beat us up.”
After the coronavirus pandemic brought the protests to a halt, Algerian security services stepped back in, arresting dozens of activists in a cat-and-mouse game. As of October, about 250 people “were being held in prison for their participation in peaceful protest, activism or expression,” according to a Human Rights Watch report.
Bouraoui, who faced multiple arrests and spent several days in custody, was sentenced in 2021 to two years in prison for “offending Islam” and insulting the president. She had not yet been jailed upon her escape because of a pending appeal.
Fearful of new protests, Algerian authorities have specifically targeted individuals and groups with ties to the Hirak uprising to make sure that the movement “is suffocated once and for all,” said Dalia Ghanem, an Algeria expert at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.
Two weeks ago, the Rassemblement Actions Jeunesse, a leading youth-oriented human rights organization, and the Mouvement Democratique et Social, a leftist party founded 60 years ago, were banned by Algeria's highest administrative court. Journalists and media organizations that extensively covered the uprising have been imprisoned and shut down.
“They're blocking any possibility of civil society organization, any hope of a return of Hirak,” said Said Salhi, vice president of the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights.