Algeria: Heavy sentencing of military personnel on political grounds
Many soldiers are in prison for purely political reasons. "In addition to the dozens of generals imprisoned for settling scores or for criticising General Chengriha in private meetings, and the atmosphere of terror he is creating in the military establishment, many junior officers and NCOs are still being sentenced by the various military courts in the six regions of the country," says a source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The same source informs us that, on 2 February, three defendants were individually convicted on political grounds.
The highest-ranking, a colonel, head of the military sector of the wilaya (department) of Tizi-Ouzou (capital of Kabylia), was sentenced to seven years in prison. He was accused of complicity in setting forest fires in the Kabylia region during the summer of 2021. It was a sentence that stirred up old demons and surprised those present in the courtroom of the military court in Constantine (capital of eastern Algeria). The audience was composed of the families of the accused, gendarmes and lawyers.
Our source added: "At the time, the powers, through the public and private press, accused Morocco, Israel and the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK). Today, we are surprised to see a senior army officer accused by his superiors of being behind the forest fires that ravaged Kabylia in 2021". The trial did not last long and ended quickly with the accused being sentenced to 7 years in prison.
The trial of a junior officer accused of belonging to the MAK did not last long. Although it was a very serious charge and we expected to see a parade of accomplices, it was nothing of the sort. The accused admitted his membership in the MAK and did not raise any problems. According to the prosecutor, "investigators found messages exchanged on his phone with Ferhat Mehenni (leader of this movement, classified as a terrorist organisation in May 2021 by the Algerian authorities)".
Questioned, Ferhat Mehenni, president of the MAK and of the interim government of Kabylia, affirmed that he had never exchanged messages with any member of his movement. "Unless this soldier has not declared his official status. In any case, we have thousands of militants in all social categories and in all sectors of activity, including in the army. This is perfectly normal," the Kabyle leader added.
On the same day, the gendarmerie sergeant Abdelmalek Adel, whose abduction and disappearance we reported in a previous edition, reappeared in court to be tried for "attacking the security of the state". He is accused of having saved on his laptop computer records of citizens' reports of neighbourhood fights, break-ins, assaults, etc. He is accused of having deleted them from his laptop. These reports had been deleted from his laptop. These minutes had been deleted, but remained in the cache of his PC's hard drive. "They are not of a political nature and do not constitute a threat to state security," he told the judge, according to our source. The same goes for the souvenir photos taken with his colleagues more than ten years ago, which have no political character. The judge ordered him to keep quiet when he began by saying that he had been "atrociously tortured on the premises of the DGSI". He was also prevented from recounting "the difficult conditions of his transfer from Tébessa to Algiers by members of the DGSI itself". The trial ended in 30 minutes, despite the seriousness of the accusation. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
Colonel Bennacer Boualem, a colonel in the DGDSE and former Algerian consul in Alicante, is being tried in the court of Blida (50 km from Algiers). He is accused of conspiring against one of President Tebboune's advisers and currently his chief of staff.
