The journalists of the daily founded in 1992 cannot explain the decision of the businessman Issad Rebrab, the majority shareholder of the title.
“The Last Week”. After days of persistent rumors, the front page of the newspaper Liberté of this Thursday, April 7 leaves no room for doubt: the French-speaking Algerian daily will soon cease to appear. On Wednesday, its majority shareholder, businessman Issad Rebrab, maintained his decision to dissolve the media publishing company, with no possibility of recovery despite calls from civil society to save this emblematic title of the contemporary Algerian press.
In recent days, the journalists, grouped in a collective, have chained meetings to try to save the newspaper founded in 1992, in the context of democratic openness initiated by Algeria in the late 1980s, by the three journalists Ahmed Fattani, Hacène Ouandjeli, Ali Ouafek and entrepreneur Issad Rebrab, owner of the Cevital group, the country’s leading private conglomerate.
It was mid-March that the billionaire, seventh fortune in Africa according to Forbes, took the decision to “delete the newspaper” , explained Monday Abrous Outoudert, director of the publication and manager of Liberté, whose career is closely linked to this daily since he had already directed it from 1995 to 2003 then from 2009 to 2018. When he returned to the head of Liberté, in July 2021, he took difficult measures to try to maintain the financial stability of the media.
The departure of several employees as part of a social plan and early retirements, melting the workforce from 167 to 82 employees, will not have been enough. But that is not the reason, maintains Abrous Outoudert, for whom “the newspaper is not bankrupt”. “We made two negative assessments which are explained by the fact that for ten years, we have not had advertising”, he affirmed.
“It does not help anyone, not even the state”
Liberté no longer benefits from the public windfall distributed by the National Publishing and Advertising Agency (ANEP) and has had to deal with the economic crisis, which has prompted private advertisers to cut advertising budgets mainly. In addition, the health crisis linked to Covid-19 caused the closure of kiosks for several months. Despite everything, the daily was kept afloat thanks to “its sales and its savings, a financial cushion that could have held it up for at least two years”, assures Hassane Ouali, editorial director.
In the corridors of the newspaper, which notably publishes the cartoons of the cartoonist Dilem and the chronicles of the writer Kamel Daoud, the news is experienced as a “betrayal”. On the walls, emblematic headlines were displayed alongside portraits of the disappeared journalists, Zineddine Aliou Salah and Hamid Mahiout, as well as two other staff members murdered by terrorists in 1995, during the dark decade.
“At one time, we were a landmark in terms of the press in the Maghreb and in the Arab world”, recalls Hassane Ouali, who deplores the successive blows to the Algerian press. “It does not help anyone, not even the state or the political power. It is not in its interest that newspapers that carry free and contradictory speech disappear.”
If Abrous Outoudert was presented for a time as the buyer of the media, the negotiations were ultimately unsuccessful. Behind his inflexibility, Issad Rebrab, 77, would hide a desire to clean up his affairs and retire from public life, some say. Sentenced in January 2020 to eighteen months in prison, including six months in prison for tax, banking, and customs offenses, he would have been deeply marked by his eight months of preventive detention in 2019.
Several journalists worried about the justice
For others, the disappearance of the medium would be the result of political pressure. In recent months, several journalists from Liberté have been harassed by the courts. First, there was Rabah Karèche, a correspondent for Tamanrasset (south), who was imprisoned between April and October 2021 after the publication of articles relating to local challenges to a new administrative division. On October 11, the journalist was sentenced on appeal to one year in prison, including six months in prison, for “voluntary dissemination of false information likely to threaten public order”.
Since September 2021, Mohamed Mouloudj, another journalist, has been in pre-trial detention. Pending his trial, he is being prosecuted for “undermining national unity, joining a terrorist group, and disseminating false information”. Finally, a third journalist from Liberté is still under judicial supervision after the broadcast of an interview with the CEO of Sonatrach. The national oil company filed a complaint against the newspaper on February 28, accusing it of having “manipulated and distorted” its boss’ comments.
The disappearance of Liberté could, according to several journalists, accelerate the “slow death” of another emblematic title of the private French-language press: El Watan. In financial difficulty and also deprived of public advertising, he had to revise his price upwards, which rose from 30 to 40 dinars on 1 March.
