Until two
months ago, Mohamed Benchicou was managing editor of
a leading Algerian French-language daily, Le Matin,
known for his stinging eloquence and exposés
of corruption in high places. Now he is serving a two-year
sentence for currency violations at El Harrach prison
in Algiers, where he
shares a stifling dormitory with 24 other convicted
criminals and suffers from dangerously low blood pressure.
Benchicou entered
prison June 14. Two weeks later, his newspaper's building
was seized and sold at auction to pay back taxes. In
July, the government printing office refused to print
Le Matin until all outstanding bills had been paid in
full. As of July 25, Le Matin and two other papers had
disappeared from the news stands.
Benchicou is
the most visible victim of a crackdown on Algeria's independent
press that has intensified since the re-election in
April of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. The currency
charges on which Benchicou was convicted were trumped
up, according to Ghania Hammadou, one of Le Matin's
founders and its first editor in chief, who returned
from Paris to take over
the newspaper after Benchicou was jailed.
The Paris-based
organization Reporters Without Borders and the New York-based
group Committee to Protect Journalists agree with Hammadou,
and have taken up his case. Benchicou's lawyers are
expected to appeal the verdict against him in an Algiers court on Wednesday.
Benchicou's real crime was good old-fashioned muckraking.
During the presidential campaign this year he published
a book about the regime called "Bouteflika: An
Algerian Fraud." Benchicou is "a man of conviction
and commitment," Hammadou said. "He knew there'd
be a price to pay."
In the southern
city of Djelfa, in the poorest
part of Algeria, the journalist
and human rights activist Ghoul Hafnaoui has been in
jail since May 24 for daring to investigate the deaths
of 13 newborn babies in a local maternity ward within
a single month last spring. For his enterprising legwork,
Hafnaoui was rewarded with a three-month sentence. Several
other charges are pending. Last week Hafnaoui's sentence
was extended a further two months after he sent a letter
to his 10-year-old daughter outside authorized channels.
In Oran, in western
Algeria, the newspaper
owner Ahmed Benaoum was jailed in late June for on charges
of defaming the local government real estate office.
The anti-defamation law passed in 2001 prescribes prison
terms of up to a year for journalists guilty of defaming
the president, Parliament, the courts or the military.
But "local scoundrels," as Benchicou calls
them, seem to make liberal use of it too.
Benchicou and
a colleague are due back in court in November, on charges
of defaming the Ministry of Defense, for having dared
to report on torture and sexual humiliation of teenage
boys arrested during demonstrations last May in the
city of Tkout, in the Aures mountains, where a citizen's
movement demanding local autonomy and clean government
thrives despite heavy repression. "It's not just
freedom of the press that is at stake, but all our freedoms,"
Hammadou said. "We have to win everything back.
The right for unions to hold meetings, the rights of
the citizens' movement leaders in jail. We're being
crushed with a steamroller." But didn't the French
government just offer the Algerian regime E1 billion
($1.22 billion) in credits and investments? She replied
with startling passion, "Oh, for the French we're
still just that race of natives." She surely knows,
but is perhaps too polite to remind me, that the United States is just as eager
as France to invest in
Algeria. The American
company Halliburton is building two hospitals for the
Algerian military.
Benchicou's fellow
prisoners in El Harrach call him the White Mandela,
Hammadou said, because of his white hair and pale eyes,
and because they know why he's in prison with them.
The question now is, how to liberate him - and the disenfranchised
millions of Algerians for whom he speaks - when not
prevented from doing so.
New York,
Suzanne
RUTA
Suzanne Ruta, author
of "Stalin in the Bronx, and Other Stories,"
is a member of the writers' group PEN, whose Freedom
to Write committee has adopted the cases of Mohamed
Benchicou and Ghoul Hafnaoui.
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