mercredi 23 novembre 2011

Quelques extraits d’interviews d’Anouar Benmalek dans le livre : « Between terror and democracy : Algeria since 1989 »

Quelques extraits d’interviews d’Anouar Benmalek dans le livre : « Between terror and democracy : Algeria since 1989 » de James D. Le Sueur  (Fernwood Publishing , 2010)


Sur les événements de 1988 en Algérie :

      But few did so naïvely: it was understood that Algerian society  could not be transformed without the government’s willingness to  respect human rights. As Anouar Benmalek, a journalist writing for  the Algiers newspaper Algérie-Actualité, put it in an open letter to  President Chadli on November 3, 1989:  « To live as a republic requires at the minimum a contract of confidence  between the state and citizens. Torture is an extreme rupture  of this contract. Know that one can be tortured for thinking differently;  know that those responsible for this torture will continue to  carry out their business, either at the old jobs or at new ones. This is  what keeps all of us hostages in the grip of barbarism. »

Sur les appels au meurtre contre un écrivain :
    Truth to tell, despite the international support of Rushdie by other  writers, very few writers within Algeria took issue with Khomeini’s  fatwa.5 No doubt Algerian writers were consumed with their own  internal challenges in 1989, but nevertheless the absence of a general  protest was somewhat peculiar. In this context, one person stood out  as perhaps the first Algerian writer to criticize Khomeini: Anouar  Benmalek, a professor of mathematics at the University of Algiers and  a writer. For Benmalek the Khomeini fatwa was not only theologically  misguided, but, even worse, it trivialized far more pressing concerns  within the Arab world in 1989, such as poverty and oppression. For  this reason, Benmalek asked sarcastically if Khomeini was really  serious. How could it be that against the backdrop of “great tragedies  that have been known or are known today in the Muslim world,  underdevelopment, illiteracy, oppression, dictatorships, famine, that  all of this is nothing compared to this book: The Satanic Verses!?


Sur la censure et l’autocensure :

   Thus violence transformed cultural debates, but not  always in the ways that its perpetrators hoped. Why? I asked Anouar  Benmalek, who went into exile in 1994, this very question when I  interviewed him in Paris. Benmalek’s response is crucial to understanding  how violence boomeranged to become a creative cultural  force in Algeria:

  « The big problem for a society like Algeria’s between 1988 and 1989  was self-censorship, self-censorship that was obviously cultivated  by organs of repression – the army, the SM [military security], the  police  and so forth. This self-censorship was extremely powerful.  And, paradoxically, I would say that the violence [of the 1990s],  because it was limitless, in fact liberated people and writing. Why?  Because people discovered that no matter what one did – one could  write or not write, write with extreme caution, or throw caution to  the wind – either way, they got killed. There’s a poem about this  by Tahar Djaout that I like a lot. It says this: “If you speak, they will  kill you. If you do not speak, they will kill you. Therefore, speak  and die.” And that’s true, because in the newspaper where I was,  they killed Tahar Djaout, but they [radical Islamists] also killed  the newspaper’s accountant. Why? Because he worked for the  newspaper. That is to say that one can be killed for reasons that are  completely ridiculous. So people said to themselves, “Die just to  die? Enough! We’ve got to write what we really think.” People who  had been extremely frightened no longer had any fear, because the  price was the same. When they chop off your head – whether it be  for some tiny little thing or for something important – it’s the same  thing. Paradoxically, we owe this liberty to terrorism. But a lot of  people were forced to leave; a lot were forced into exile and to leave  behind that which was the dearest in the world to them. As for me,  I never imagined I would someday end up in France and be laid  to rest in France. Never! That was never part of the plan. I was very  content living in Algeria. I had a job at the university. I was involved  in the newspaper. I wrote about what I wanted, more or less. Then  terrorism changed my way of life. It made me say, “So now what are  you going to do? What are you going to do with yourself?” And it’s at  that moment when you say, “They killed my friends, and now there  remains only one thing left for me – to truly say what I think.” And  in the Arab world, that is revolutionary. »

   However, the fact is that revolutionary potential signaled by the end of self-censorship, as Benmalek would acknowledge, has never been fully realized.

Sur l’amnésie politique en Algérie :

   In a 2007 Paris interview, the exiled Algerian writer Anouar Benmalek  offered a slightly different reading of amnesty in Algeria, but  agreed that Algeria has sadly chosen amnesia over remembrance.  Benmalek, like many Algerians I have spoken with, expressed frustration  with what he called the “recurring theme” of amnesty in Algeria.  He pointed out that after the riots of 1988, the Algerian state granted  amnesty for those involved in the attacks on civilians. In Benmalek’s  words: “At each bloody confrontation there is an amnesty, and a  culture of amnesia is interwoven in Algerian history. There are no  lessons in Algeria. History offers no lessons, and each time it gets  worse.”This lack of accountability has made things worse, not better  in Algeria. As he pointed out, the situation went from the routine use  of “torture” in 1988 (against Islamists), to “mass killings” later on  “without any repercussions” and without ever bringing those guilty  of heinous crimes to trial.

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