The southern suburbs of Montreal were under the sun Thursday evening for the return of small families and workers after their day’s work. And for the first time in several weeks, Lazhar Zouaïmia has taken part in this ballet of cars parking in the paved alleys of simple and comfortable houses, returning from a little further than his neighbors, his face above all a little more tired than them.
“I still can’t really understand what happened to me,” drops the man, a technician at Hydro-Québec, whose life and that of his family changed on February 19, when he was returning to Montreal after visiting his family in Algeria. “I always navigate between strangeness and incomprehension. »
Arrested at Constantine airport by the police for his involvement from Canada in the cause of Hirak, the pro-democracy movement which has shaken the political and military regime in place for more than three years, he spent 40 days in detention before being detained. be released on bail at the end of March. Twice in April he attempted to board for Montreal, without a legal ban on doing so, but each time he was detained and interrogated for no reason by the Algerian customs service. Thursday, he tried his luck a third time, carried by the filing of a request by his lawyer before the courts of Algiers to denounce his inability to leave the country. And this third attempt was the right one. At 2 p.m. Thursday, his plane landed in Montreal.
“I had a very bad time at Algiers airport”, says the man in his fifties, his voice calm and his eyes weakened by “three days and three nights without sleep”, he will specify. .
“Until 10 minutes before takeoff, I still didn’t know if they were going to let me go. And then a senior member of the security services came downstairs to hand me my passport, and I was able to fly away”
Next to him, his wife, Fatima Benzerara, a mathematics teacher in a school in the Montreal area, said she was “relieved” by this outcome, more than two months after being separated from her husband by “events as absurd than bizarre”. Lazhar Zouaïmia speaks of a “partial relief”. ” It is not finished. I will have to go back to Algeria for my trial, he said. And there, I don’t know how it will still happen. »
In the Maghreb country, charges against the Algerian-Canadian national have been reduced in recent weeks as he was released on bail, which technically ended up on probation for more than 36 days. He is accused of “undermining security and national unity”.
“I don’t quite understand what that means and I’m not the only one. Over there, no one, even within the security forces, could explain to me what it was all about”, says, smiling a little, but not too much, the activist and committed citizen, whose only crime for which he is ready to confess guilt is for having supported “the democratic aspirations of the Algerian people, from Montreal”.
“I am not a pure and hard hirakist, assures Lazhar Zouaïmia. Online, my posts are even very disciplined. This support is part of my global political commitment, for several causes around the world. The man is active within Amnesty International, which has, like other NGOs for several weeks, denounced the arbitrary arrest of this father in Algeria. “So why me? This is the question I have been asking myself since February 19. And the only answer I can find is that Algeria has sought, through me, to intimidate the Algerian diaspora in Canada, which overwhelmingly supports the democratic demands of Algerians. »
To crush dissent
From Algiers, the lawyer of this other Mr. Lazhar welcomed Thursday the return of his client to Canada, considering that the media coverage of his arrest as well as the mobilization of citizens to denounce the arbitrariness of Algerian justice had certainly contributed to get out of this impasse. “We are very happy that he was able to make this return trip,” said Zoubida Assoul to the To have to. There was nothing in the law that could prevent him from doing so until his trial. »
A trial whose proceedings are to resume on May 31 and which Lazhar Zouaïmia says he will face.
“I have my honor to defend,” he said, his face lit up by the falling daylight that waters the garden of his suburban home. I do not accept having been called a terrorist. The first charges he faced in February indeed spoke of “praising terrorist acts through media and communication technology”.
These abusive and heavily loaded formulations in Algeria — which was hit by the violence of terrorism during the dark decade of the late 1990s — are used purposely by the military in power to discredit and crush the popular protest movement.
Since last June, moreover, a reform of the Algerian Penal Code has allowed them to assimilate to “terrorism” and “sabotage” any call to “change the system of governance by unconventional means”.
“These accusations were like rape,” he said. I have friends who were killed by Islamist terrorists during this decade. I know what they did. And I can’t accept being equated with that. It’s the opposite of who I am. »
When asked what he is going to do in the next few days, Lazhar Zouaïmia says he will start by sleeping. “I don’t have enough neurons available to be able to make a plan,” he admits. I can talk to you, but I don’t really know how. And then, before returning home, after taking a suitcase out of the trunk of his car and unloading the many bouquets of flowers that friends, activists, relatives brought him when he got off the plane, the activist of the human rights will say that he especially hopes to regain the calm of his former life.
“There are even more serious things happening in the world, in Ukraine in particular, and which are more important than my little person,” he drops.