Seasoned journalist and known for his thorough analysis of the Algerian political world, Ihsane El Kadi, director of Radio M and Maghreb Emergent was placed under arrest on Thursday 29 December by the prosecutor of the Sidi M'hamed Court in Algiers, after six days in custody. 

He is being prosecuted under Articles 95 and 95 bis of the Penal Code, which state that anyone who receives funds from a state, organisation or person inside or outside the country to carry out acts that undermine state security or national unity is punished by five to seven years in prison. The penalty can even be doubled when the funds are received by an association or organisation.

Ihsane El Kadi was arrested at his home on the night of 23-24 December around midnight, 60 kilometres from Algiers. According to his family, six men from the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) came to his family home and asked the journalist to “follow them immediately to the Antar barracks” in Ben Aknoun, on the heights of Algiers.

In the afternoon of 24 December, the day after the arrest, the headquarters of Radio M and Maghreb Emergent, the last bastions of free media debate in Algeria, were searched by DGSI agents in the presence of Ihsane El Kadi in handcuffs. According to a statement published on 25 December on the Maghreb Emergent website, the journalists and employees present were asked to leave the premises and IT equipment, computers, seals and documents were seized before the offices were sealed. 

Legal harassment

The imprisonment of Ihsane El Kadi completes a series of arrests and intimidations against the journalists of these media and their supporters since 2019.

Ihsane El Kadi alone is being prosecuted in at least three cases. He is facing a complaint from the Ministry of Communication for an opinion article on the place of Islamists in the Hirak. Sentenced in the first instance to six months imprisonment without a warrant and fined 50,000 dinars (342 euros) for “disseminating false information”, “disrupting elections” and “reopening the file of the national tragedy” - a civil war of the 1990s whose mere mention is forbidden by a law adopted in 2005.  The verdict of the appeal was confirmed on Sunday 25 December while he was in custody at the Antar barracks.

He is also being prosecuted in a second case at the Larbaâ Nath Irathen Court (Tizi-Ouzou) where he is accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation. On 17 November, the founder of Interface Médias was dismissed in a third case in which, together with the activist Zaki Hannache, he is co-defendant of belonging to a terrorist movement.

Since October 2020, Ihsane El Kadi was regularly interrogated by police authorities but always came out free. Nonetheless, in May 2021 he was placed under judicial supervision, a decision accompanied by a ban on leaving the national territory and the territory of the Wilaya of Algiers.

Imprisoned journalists

Between 2019 and 2021, other journalists from Radio M and Maghreb Emergent have been arrested and imprisoned, particularly for their coverage of the Hirak protests.

If the eleven months imprisonment (March 2020 to February 2021) of journalist Khaled Drareni, presenter of the “Café presse politique”, one of the most famous and popular programmes of Radio M is still in everyone’s memory, the arrest of the journalist Kenza Khatto, violently arrested during her coverage of the Hirak in May 2021 has shaken the editorial staff of Radio M.

Founded respectively in 2010 and 2013, since their establishment, Maghreb Emergent and Radio M have not ceased to shed light on the political life of Algeria thanks to a freedom of tone, sometimes critical depending on the situation, especially towards the fourth term of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 2014 and the arrests of the Hirak activists. Was the recent criticism in an article by Ihsane El Kadi of a second term for President Abdelmadjid Tebboune the one too many for the authorities? This is what many journalists are expressing in their messages of support for the closed media and their imprisoned director.

In recent months, Radio M was the only media refusing to bend to the editorial line that the government seeks to impose. It was also the only established media in Algeria open to all parties and ideologies. Ihsane and his teams were disturbing. They had to be silenced to put an end to media openness for good, said the Algerian journalist Mustapha Bendjama. 

Updated on 30 December 2022. 

Translated from French by Elizabeth Grech