TUNIS: Algerian police shut down a book signing by sociologist Fatma Oussedik and temporarily closed the bookstore slated to host it, her publisher said on Sunday, calling the incident "as incomprehensible as it is illegal".
The Koukou Editions publishing house said police on Saturday seized copies of the book, whose title translates to "Rebellious Identities: Rethinking One's Own History", and shut the Beaux-Arts bookstore in Algiers for a month.
The book was "the fruit of several years of field research on the history and sociology of the M'zab Valley", a Berber-speaking region in Algeria, Koukou director Arezki Ait-Larbi said in a statement.
He said that police, tax officials and culture ministry representatives visited the bookstore two days before the signing to demand the event's cancellation, then returned on Saturday morning, prompting the shop to put off the event.
Nonetheless, the authorities came back in the afternoon to seize the copies and shutter the store.
"We are wondering about the intentions of those behind an operation that is as incomprehensible as it is illegal," Ait-Larbi added, saying Algeria's laws had "once again been violated by those whose responsibility it is to enforce them".
The publisher cited Article 54 of the Constitution, which states that "publishing activity may be prohibited only by virtue of a court decision".
Koukou has been subject to other acts of censorship in recent years.
In 2022, it said 12 of its books -- mainly touching on politics -- had been banned from appearing at Algeria's main bookfair, SILA.
Algerian police briefly arrested Ait-Larbi, French author Dominique Martre and others during a raid on a book event in the eastern city of Bejaia in 2024.
The book was a memoir of Martre's time spent with women in Kabylia, a region in the country inhabited by the Berber ethnic group, also known as the Amazigh.
