Algeria Targets Author Kamel Daoud With Two International Arrest Warrants
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the information on Wednesday.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christophe Lemoine said France would keep a close watch on the situation. He described Daoud as a 'respected and well-known author' and recalled France's unwavering stance on freedom of expression.
The warrants come in the wake of legal proceedings launched in Algeria last year. A court in Oran accepted complaints filed against Daoud and his wife, a psychiatrist, over the novel Houris, which won the 2024 Prix Goncourt, one of France's highest literary honors.
At the heart of the case lies the story of Saâda Arbane, a woman who survived one of the many massacres of Algeria's civil war in the 1990s. Arbane accuses Daoud and his wife of using details from her trauma without her consent.
She had been under the care of Daoud's wife, and the novel's protagonist bears echoes of her experience, particularly a harrowing incident where a young woman survives a throat-slashing on the eve of Algeria's new millennium.
Arbane filed one of the two complaints in Algeria. The second comes from Algeria's National Organization of Victims of Terrorism. Both claim the novel appropriates the pain of real people for literary gain.
Daoud also faces a civil lawsuit in France, where Arbane claims violation of privacy. A court in Paris held a preliminary hearing on Wednesday.
Under Algerian law, courts may issue international arrest warrants when suspects are abroad. Daoud, currently in France, learned of the warrants through his lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk.
'These warrants carry a clear political motive,' she told AFP. 'This is part of a wider attempt to silence a writer whose work touches on Algeria's most painful memories.'
Laffont-Haïk said her team would file an appeal with Interpol's Commission for the Control of Files to prevent further distribution of the warrants.
Houris explores the aftermath of Islamist violence in Algeria, focusing on the personal scars it left behind. Due to Algerian censorship laws, which ban literature addressing the civil war between 1992 and 2002, the novel remains unavailable in the country.
Speaking on France Inter in December, Daoud defended his novel, stating the story was already part of the public domain in Algeria and insisting that Houris does not chronicle Arbane's life. His publisher, Gallimard, denounced what it described as smear campaigns from media close to Algerian authorities.
As legal pressure mounts on Daoud, the case raises larger questions about the boundaries between fiction and truth, memory and silence, and the cost writers may pay when they return to the wounds a country refuses to examine. Tags: Algerian authorbook censorshipdaoud kamelhourisKamel DaoudLiterature
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