Editor’s note: The following is an English translation of Boualem Sansal’s original French open letter to the Moroccan people. For the original French version, click here.
To my Moroccan brothers, on the other side of the border, yet on the same side of history, of the heart and of reason
My dear Moroccan friends, my dear brothers,
Life is, at times, rich in irony.
Only a few months ago, I was confined within the walls of an Algerian prison. Today, my first steps lead me toward you. I have regained my freedom. I have regained my voice. And I have rediscovered a people to whom I have always felt deeply connected.
Morocco has never been, in my eyes, a foreign country. We are neighbors by geography, brothers through history, companions in culture, bound together by this Mediterranean that, for millennia, has united far more than it has divided. A border separates us, and it has its purpose. But borders belong to states; the heart, reason and hope belong to peoples.
I write to you neither from exile nor from refuge. I write to you from France, my country, the country where I now live; from Algeria, the land of my birth, from which I was unlawfully driven but which will forever inhabit my memory; and from Morocco, where I hope to come as often as possible, because between our three countries flows a shared history that is also my own—our own. I refuse to accept that borders should have the final word. They trace maps; they do not shape consciences.
Today, Le360 offers me the opportunity to continue a conversation with you that began long ago. I am all the more grateful because this publication has become, in Morocco and far beyond, a respected forum for news, reflection and debate, read across the Maghreb, throughout Europe and wherever the future of our region commands attention.
I come neither to persuade nor to seduce.
I come to reflect with you.
We live in an age in which information travels at the speed of light while understanding advances only at the pace of humankind. We know almost everything, yet we understand less and less of what is happening to us. And understanding has become an imperative. Knowledge has meaning only if it leads to awareness. And awareness has value only if it illuminates our responsibility. I believe profoundly in the power of ideas. They do not change the world in a single day, but they change men—and it is men who change the world. That is the spirit in which I shall write to you.
We shall speak about the things that shape our lives: our freedoms, our beliefs, our anxieties, our children, our countries—and our mistakes as well. In a word, we shall speak of our common future.
Naturally, we shall speak of Algeria. I do not confuse the Algerian people with the regime that governs them. Algerians are the first victims of a system that deprives them of their freedom and distances them from their neighbors. In that sense, Morocco is not my interlocutor against Algeria; it is my indispensable partner in imagining—together with the Algeria for which I long—a fraternal future for our region. Through its dynamism, its openness and its own aspirations, Morocco represents an essential point of reference in that endeavor. It is from the foundation of a free Algeria, reconciled with itself and with its neighbors, that we shall be able to rebuild our common destiny.
I shall continue to say what my conscience compels me to say. Without hatred. Without complacency. Because silence has never protected a people for long. I am convinced that the Maghreb, the Sahel and the western Mediterranean can once again become a space of intelligence, prosperity and civilization. Nothing condemns them to perpetual mistrust except the resignation of men.
That is why I believe in dialogue. Not the dialogue of convenience, which lulls consciences to sleep, but the dialogue that obliges each of us to confront reality as it is. The dialogue that carries us from knowledge to awareness, and from awareness to commitment. Not a commitment born of anger or resentment, but a mobilization of minds and wills in the service of the common good, against everything that runs counter to reason, to freedom and to our shared destiny.
I shall write to you in complete freedom, and I hope you will answer me with the same candour. For governments come and go, but peoples endure. So let us continue speaking to one another. Borders may at times separate us, but they will never prevent us from standing on the same side of the heart, of reason and of hope.
Paris, July 22, 2026.
