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Last year, Christophe Gleizes, an independent French sports journalist, traveled to Algeria to cover a variety of stories related to that country’s soccer scene, including commemorations marking the tenth anniversary of the death, under mysterious circumstances, of a player for JS Kabylie, one of Algeria’s most prominent clubs. Shortly after entering the country, however, Gleizes was arrested. This ought, perhaps, to have been a major international story, but his family, a publisher with which he has worked, and press-freedom groups kept quiet about it, apparently on the advice of France’s foreign ministry, which seemed to judge that giving the case publicity would diminish the chances of a favorable outcome. Meanwhile, Gleizes was released but banned from leaving Algeria, even for his brother’s wedding. His mother and partner were able to visit him; he passed his time writing, exercising, and teaching chess to autistic children. He tried to reassure friends and colleagues over WhatsApp, according to a report in Le Monde. But he also spoke of the “hard reality of solitude.”
The apparent charges against Gleizes seemed bizarre: he was accused of “apology for terrorism,” and harboring “harmful propaganda” against Algeria’s national interest. (He was also accused of wrongfully entering the country on a tourist visa.) At issue, reportedly, were interviews that he did with a JS Kabylie official who was also active in a regional autonomy movement, in the club’s Kabylia region, that Algeria has listed as a terrorist organization. But those interviews took place in 2015 and 2017, years before the terrorist designation came down, in 2021. Gleizes had reportedly been back in touch with the official in the course of his more recent reporting; from the outside, the timeline is a little murky, but the Kabylia movement confirmed to Le Monde that its representatives had only met with Gleizes in his capacity as a sports journalist, and only on French soil. Nonetheless, two weeks ago, a court sentenced Gleizes to seven years in prison. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), this was the harshest punishment received by a French journalist in a decade.
Gleizes’s family expressed shock. “How is it justifiable to punish a journalist like this for honestly practicing his profession?” they said, in a statement shared by RSF. “Does his passion for the lives of African footballers, which is expressed in all his work, deserve such treatment?” In a subsequent interview with Le Monde, his mother and stepfather said that they had hoped their discretion was making a difference. “If we weren’t so sad and devastated, we’d laugh about it,” the stepfather said. “Christophe, a terrorist? It makes no sense.” The publisher with which Gleizes worked said that he was known for approaching assignments without political preconceptions. Thibaut Bruttin, the director general of RSF, said that the verdict demonstrated the extent to which, in Algeria, everything is political nowadays.
The world of soccer is highly political, of course (as readers of yesterday’s newsletter will have noticed in the US context), and Gleizes appears always to have taken an engaged approach to his work: his stepfather, who is a sociologist, told Le Monde that Gleizes understood that soccer “can say a lot about society”; in 2018, he copublished a book making the case that young African players seeking stardom overseas are vulnerable to a form of “modern slavery” and preyed upon by shady fixers. (And soccer in North Africa has more than its fair share of strange characters; earlier this year, Le Monde published a fascinating interview with Fergie Chambers, an heir to the Cox media fortune in the US who has Marxist views and sponsors a club in Tunisia, which neighbors Algeria.) Perhaps more pressingly, however, Gleizes’s ordeal has a geopolitical dimension, becoming the latest flash point in a diplomatic crisis between France and Algeria that I wrote about in this newsletter back in February. Tensions between the two countries have periodically escalated ever since the latter won independence from the former, its colonizer, in 1962, but they reached something of a boil last year. The main trigger was French president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to effectively recognize Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara, a strip of land where Algeria has long backed a rival separatist movement, but the dispute has also played out in the arenas of free expression and new media. In November, Algeria arrested Boualem Sansal, a writer with dual nationality, after he made comments to a far-right French outlet suggesting that other pieces of Algerian territory historically belonged to Morocco. Then, earlier this year, France arrested several Algerian social media influencers who spread violent messages against critics of the Algerian regime based in France. France tried to deport one of them, but Algeria refused to take him.
Since I wrote in February, these storylines have continued to play out, and the recriminations have continued. Charges and convictions have been brought against some of the influencers in France, and there’s been further back-and-forth on the question of deportations to Algeria, including after an Algerian man who had already been ordered to leave France went on an apparently Islamist-inspired stabbing rampage at a market in the eastern town of Mulhouse in late February, killing one person; France warned that if Algeria didn’t start accepting deportees, other aspects of a long-standing migratory agreement between the nations might be invalidated. There followed a move toward rapprochement: Macron spoke by phone with his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, before dispatching his foreign minister to visit Algeria in person. Just days after that visit, however, France detained an Algerian consular official over his alleged complicity in a 2024 kidnapping plot targeting Amir Boukhors, an Algerian YouTuber based in France who has been among the critics of Tebboune’s regime. (Boukhors was allegedly abducted off the street, tied up, and drugged by men pretending to be police officers, who subsequently told him that a senior Algerian official wanted to speak with him, but no meeting materialized and Boukhors was let go; he has said that he believes the regime was trying to intimidate him into not disclosing information that would embarrass it.) Algeria reacted with fury, calling the arrest an attempt to torpedo improving relations and moving to expel a dozen French diplomats, a move France then reciprocated. (Le Monde has since reported that a higher-ranking Algerian diplomat is also suspected of involvement in the kidnapping.)
While this was all playing out, Sansal was finally sentenced to five years in prison over his comments about Algeria’s borders. (He had been charged with undermining the country’s territorial integrity.) This happened in early March, and the fact the sentence wasn’t longer led to suggestions that the rapprochement was working. Algerian prosecutors nonetheless appealed for the sentence to be doubled; at the beginning of this month (right around the time that Gleizes was being convicted on terrorism charges), a court rejected this request but upheld Sansal’s existing punishment. Even this news was not totally without hope: a few days later, Algeria observed its independence day, and French officials called on Algeria to take the opportunity of an expected mass pardon of prisoners to release Sansal. In the end, Sansal wasn’t included; Le Monde’s Frédéric Bobin wrote afterward that the hopes to the contrary always seemed misplaced, given the domestic political costs to Tebboune of being seen to give France a concession on a day marked by anti-colonial patriotism. Bobin suggested that sections of the Algerian regime may nonetheless be looking for an off-ramp on a more favorable timeline, pointing to suggestions in the country’s tightly controlled media that Sansal be released individually, on humanitarian grounds. (He is eighty, and has prostate cancer.) For now, at least, he remains behind bars. We’ll have to watch this space.
If Sansal’s case has been a big story in French media from the start—and central to the narrative of Franco-Algerian discord—Gleizes’s case is starting to become one; it seems now that keeping his name out of the wider diplomatic spat didn’t help him after all. He has started to become a domestic political football, too: after he was sentenced, Bruno Retailleau—France’s hard-right interior minister, who has taken a harsh line against Algeria throughout the recent crisis, and clashed with others within the government in doing so—did a radio interview in which he criticized the foreign ministry’s apparent advice that Gleizes’s family stay quiet. In an editorial after news of Gleizes’s fate emerged—but before it emerged that Tebboune had declined to pardon Sansal, at least in the short term—Le Monde noted how attempts at Franco-Algerian reconciliation have often been subverted by domestic posturing on both sides of the divide, and argued that, from this point of view, Gleizes’s incarceration looks like “disastrous news,” sending a “maximalist message” that undercuts the relative optimism that Sansal could soon go free. “We must resign ourselves to the fact that Franco-Algerian relations are doomed to stagnate in the deep waters of acrimony,” the editorial continued. “Clearly, this crucial link for the future of both countries must be rebuilt, but wisdom dictates that we tackle it without illusions.”
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