Algeria.
The Kabyle blogger Merzoug Touati was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Thirty year old Merzoug Touati, has been detained since he was arrested in Bejaia in January 2017, after protesting against the new finance law, by posting a video interview on his Facebook page, showing a spokesman from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Vgayet criminal court found him guilty and sentenced him to ten years in prison, as well as a fine of 50,000.00 DA for “mingling with the agents of a foreign intelligence power, likely to harm the military or diplomatic position of Algeria or its essential economic interests”. A crime which is punishable by up to twenty years in prison.
In this trial, the prosecution had required life imprisonment against the blogger.
The conviction is considerably unfair, given that Merrzoug has never held a position of responsibility which could give him access to information that he could have communicated to any foreign power. He has only had precarious jobs since he graduated from college. It is a one-way trial, solely against him. There have been no defense witnesses. The witnesses cited by the defense, are not summoned. It is a disproportionate file, with very serious charges in relation to the content.
Merzoug Touati was really down at the time of the verdict and very weak, recalling that the blogger had led seven hunger strikes since his imprisonment. Hamaïli, his lawyer, who pleaded the acquittal, said he was going to talk with his client on Sunday to find out if he decided to appeal.
This case confirms: Algeria is a country of justice and law.
– Every citizen has the right to be miserable.
– Every citizen has the right to be Arab and Muslim, according to the democratic and popular constitution.
– Every citizen has the right to be tortured at the time he wants.
– Every journalist has the right to be incarcerated and to wait for his mock trial.
– Every citizen has the right to be a terrorist Islamist and claim it in the media.
– Every Islamist terrorist citizen has the right to be granted an amnesty.
– Every citizen Kabyle has the right to the club.
– Every citizen policeman has the right to shoot explosive bullets at Kabyle.
– All citizens have the right to participate in a fraudulent vote.
– All citizens have the right to the tap that makes PFFFFFFFF! Pokhkhkh! (in Arabic)
– Every citizen has the right to salat el djoumoua. Every citizen has the right not to go to salat el djoumoua and follow it on TV.
– All citizens have the right to build a logistical support network for future Islamist amnestiers.
…
You do not belive it! I will not copy all the Algerian constitution !!
-The judge: Did you know that interviewing an Israeli official is forbidden?
-Touati: The newspaper El Watan has made several interviews with Shimon Peres who has been a minister for years and nothing has been criticized.
-The Judge: How dare you say that the Algerian intelligence was behind the crimes committed in Ghardaia?
-Touati: I just transmitted the statements of Amar Saidani of the time he published on his website as secretary general of the FLN.
-The Judge: Do you think that doing interviews with people wanted by the Algerian justice is normal?
-Touati: I know that Chakib Khelil, former Algerian oil minister and thief, was wanted, and under international arrest warrant and he still gave an interview to a newspaper close to the system.
-The judge: why are you on a hunger strike?
-Touati: I asked that Arial Taboul be brought back as a witness, because he is an Algerian Jew living in Tlemcen, and all the accusations that are addressed to me are based on his statements, but the judge rejected my request .
These were the last sentences exchanged before the judge sentenced Merzoug Touati 10 years in prison and fined.
CHRONIC (SIWEL) – How? Merzoug Touati dared to speak to a Jew? This Jew whom we have erected as an enemy since 62 and who signs our characteristic of belonging to the “Arab Islamic nation”? How to speak to a Jew, in addition to Israeli nationality?
Bitter, they are bitter. And how !? Nearly 60 years after the pseudo-independence, the wheat is ruined. Cold report on a dilapidated country which after having worked during the first years of this “pseudo-independence” thanks to the inheritance and the good functioning of the institutions left by the colonial France, this bled finds itself currently to survive and to wade in the total anarchy. Do not DIY by the week but by the day. Blind navigation. One law drives another, one law contradicts the other, it is in the sand of alliances and misalliances.
Algerians are there to watch incredulously their moribund country withering each day a little more.
In the evening of their lives, where the men of good will, the builders of the world and of hope are getting closer to the sky with the feeling of the duty well done even if in their humiliations of Great Men, they l ‘Incomplete, the thugs of Algiers, touched by senility, wade in bitterness not to have ruined the country but to have missed their shot to pose as honest characters.
It is in this climate of sovereignty struggle Kabyle and this unhealthy climate of war clans, the “do you want it here” violate until disgust, that the sentence in the “trial” against Merzoug Touati comes from fall. 10 years in prison for having published on his blog an interview with an Israeli diplomat. An interview as it is in millions of newspapers and TVs around the world. A banal and daily occurrence in civilized countries but which takes in this bled a national dimension. Merzoug is accused of intelligence with the enemy, here Israeli, as was Captain Alfred Dreyfus wrongly accused of delivering documents to the German Empire.
Israel is more than 3,000 kilometers from this country, it has no border problems with this country “Algeria” since France created it and named in 1839 and everyone knows that this great democracy Near East has never declared war on this country.
It should also be noted that the Islamic Arab countries (Jordan, Egypt) bordering Israel have signed peace agreements with him and have opened diplomatic representations there.
Recall that the Palestinian Yasser Arafat at the head of the PLO recognized Israel and rendered obsolete its charter calling for the extermination of Israel.
The crime of Merzoug Touati, a young graduate, crushed by unemployment as hundreds of thousands of young people in this ruined country, who has never had access to any confidential information that could put the security of this country in danger, is to have spoken to an Israeli.
How? Merzoug Touati dared to speak to a Jew? This Jew whom we have erected as an enemy since 62 and who signs our characteristic of belonging to the “Arab Islamic nation”?
This is the nodal point of the whole problem of this case Merzoug Touati.
Since 1962, colonial power has attempted to structure the “identity,” “culture,” and “political thinking” of Algerians into hatred, violence, and brutality towards Jews, just like anything else happens in the Islamic Arab countries, in place and place to develop and propagate the concepts of democracy, tolerance and love of each other.
In this bled, we learn to eat the Jew at breakfast, the Christian at noon and Kabyle, the layman, the atheist, the woman and the Democrat at dinner.
This is the Algerian national identity. To get out of these nails is worth treason and prison.
Merzoug Touati broke this taboo, these precepts drawn from the old propaganda and Arab Islamic culture that makes all that is not Arab and Muslim is called to be fought and disappear.
In this interview the Israeli diplomat emphasizes that the state of Israel has no problem with “Algeria”, and that his country even opened an office in Algiers, until the year 2000.
We recall here, that the newspaper “Le Monde” newspaper of reference in France and around the world reported in one of its editions in the years 90, that Algeria then under undeclared embargo, because of the implication of the Algerian army in the killings at the time, bought drugs and other goods from Israel ….
Not to mention the famous meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Bouteflika at the funeral of the monarch Hassan II where he missed only the “bousboussates” … and the secret sale of oil and gas via Egypt to Israel … .
Thus Merzoug Touati, unemployed of his state who occupied his time writing on his blog, in his small village of Kabylie, where other young unemployed like him fall into drug trafficking, the “Harga”, suicide, deep depressions, delinquency, is charged with spying for the benefit of Israel. This colonial power is not his first lie, conspiracy and contradiction . To try to make this fabric of lies believe is to insult the intelligence of the people and that at the same time raises the anger of the people who love justice when it is not the total hilarity. The crime of Merzoug Touati, Kabyle, Like the majority of Kabyles, it is not to have fallen into the trap of hatred of the other person of racism and anti-Semitism. About sixty years of bad weather in this land of sun and light. A country set in steady section, where the Kabyle and the Algerians have been and still are treated like flies. Yes ! Like flies and that is saying little. Gods of the gods, masters of the land and souls, none of the men who dared to oppose them peacefully, by word or writings, remained alive.Many thousands of Men, among them a great majority of Kabyles had to undergo their anger, that of these sick individuals, paranoid and schizophrenic not to bear even a look.This is, at dusk a path macabre, dismal, whose cupboards are full of corpses, which, after provoking and leading in the 90s one of the most abject massacres in history, whose number, 250 000 deaths comes tickle the one of the 350 000 deaths of the seven years of the war of liberation thought and conducted mainly by the Kabyles (1) and this for the sole purpose of presenting themselves at the end as the saviors of this country that would have disappeared without their intervention. These thugs, including one of them, a general, pompously called, without laughter, the “philosopher”, he who has never laid a single book or a diploma in this discipline and who would be the gray matter of this bunch of thugs see themselves today insulted, vilified and rejected.At breathless, tired, sick, declared illegitimate, mocked by the international community that denounces them in bad examples and in an irony of the most ruthless proposes to publish a book on the failure of the Algerian power that “managed” this country as a grocery store. A country that runs empty and in a vacuum, in clinical death, with more than 1000 billion dollars evaporated in the circuits theft, corruption and the informal that conceals and brews loot of more than 50 billion dollars to the delight of this scum who invests in real estate in the West. What remains to this horde of thieves, one of whom is called “Reb ezzayer” (the god of Algeria), the most bloodthirsty of these thugs, the other the “philosopher”, another the “Wali al Amr “(Guardian believer Bouteflika 1st) reached the madness of grandeur with its largest mosque in Africa where Algeria does not even produce its liter of milk, the other allegedly great eradicator (sic) Islamist terrorists who strut at the expense of the Algerian taxpayer and who treats his smoking in Switzerland, the list is long … Yes! What remains of these old “Youvs” (thugs in verlan) who drag their paw like old rabid jackals whose fangs are still, sharp enough to devour even their guts.Gagas but no less resentful, surly and vindictive. No bloggers, facebookers, rebellious unemployed, free journalist etc. … have escaped their black anger. All are in prison or in the cemetery.They are bitter for not having been able to impose their Arab Islamic ideology to Kabylie despite the billions of dollars of Arabization and salafisation and despite the killings of Kabyles.They are bitter to know about the point to leave with a total failure against the Kabylie who stood up to them despite their military power and their crimes. Forced by the pro-independence Tsunami Kabyle, they fell back by opportunism and political calculation on Tamazight and Yennayer in the illusory hope of stopping the Kabyle sovereignty that made them kneel down.Amers they are serious, their trap of the pseudo formalization of Tamazight and Yennayer, did not work. So like all thugs in check, they have nothing left but revenge and grudge. They take revenge through “justice” they instrumentalize, the judges put under their bloody boots obey the finger and the eye of this murderous gerontocracy, who has eaten the wheat, the Kabylie and all the peoples living in this territory that they have monopolized with all their riches in booty. Sad country that this “Algeria”, a violent and brutal Zombie.
Ifilku NughaladSIWEL 260600 MAY 18
“Merzoug is sentenced before being heard by the court”
In this interview, Me Salah Dabouz the lawyer and human rights defender discusses the arrest, imprisonment and trial of blogger Merzoug Touati sentenced to 10 years in prison for intelligence with the enemy by the court of Vgayet. For his lawyer the trial is shady and full of irregularities. He goes so far as to declare that this lawsuit “… is a rude and vulgar manipulation of security and justice institutions to validate a state lie that is this stupid conspiracy theory better known as the foreign hand”
You are the lawyer of blogger Marzouk Touati sentenced to 10 years in prison. First, how is he since the conviction?
Mr. Dabouz: Touati Merzoug is serene and he has a good morale, I visited him three days after the hearing. He told me that he relies heavily on national and international solidarity and is preparing for the hearing of the appeal.
Let’s talk a little about the procedure, we’re talking about vice deforms?
For the procedure, what happened in this case is much more serious than a simple formality, it is a rude and vulgar manipulation of security and justice institutions to validate a state lie that is this stupid conspiracy theory better known as the foreign hand.
No guarantee for a fair trial was respected for Touati Merzoug. And for proofs; police officers who have nothing to do with the intelligence services carried out the investigation, they subjected him to terrible moral pressure in the absence of a lawyer to extract “confessions”.
An investigating judge who submits Touati Merzoug to another interrogation without the presence of a lawyer to validate police reports and who lets “leak” confidential information that is the entirety of this PV for the benefit of a press propaganda and then refuses to open a judicial inquiry considering itself incompetent.
The same judge who refuses to summon Ariel Tabol, a Jew from Tlemcen who offered Touati Merzoug money to fuel zizanies between Arabs and Amazighs in Algeria, which Touati Merzoug refused to do.
However, a chamber of accusations that supports all the decisions of the investigating judge without ever responding to the arguments raised by Touati Merzoug in writing. And so on … This is called a dependent institution.
At the trial hearing, the judge clearly told Touati Merzoug during the interrogation that what he had committed is serious. “Who are you to do all this? “.
This clearly proves that Touati Merzoug was sentenced before being heard by the court.
And legally, what were your arguments?
On the legal side It’s very simple. Touati Merzoug has no confidential information related to the economy, the security of the State or the diplomatic position of Algeria that he could divulge to anyone and that would have harmed the interests of Algeria.
Moreover, if that would have been the case, it is the military security that would have been on the spot.
Touati Merzoug is also accused of making calls to the riots that took place in Bejaia by a video found on his page. Except that this video is made after the riots and not before.
So his arrest and incarceration are illegal?
His arrest and imprisonment are unfair. The procedural laws in Algeria are rarely respected that I do not even want to mention this aspect.
Is not this a more political than legal trial? Maybe the regime wants to set an example …
This is a trial tainted with serious irregularities for all that I explained above. This proves one thing, some circles act in the shadows and control strategic institutions such as security services and justice. They want to validate absurdities like conspiracy theory by conspiring against a young citizen blogger.
Will there be a chance to see Merzoug released?
Touati Merzoug and I believe very strongly in his innocence and therefore we continue to work so that he regains his freedom very soon. We intend to use all the legal means at national and international level that the laws offer us to achieve this. And we’ll get there, because there are so many serious mistakes in this file that you just have to lift them. It’s a question of time. Touati Merzoug is a determined person and will surprise those who think he is a “little blogger lost in Kabylie”