Paris (AFP)
The French Academician and winner of the Goncourt Prize, Andreï Makine, takes up the cause for the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, victim, according to him, of "barbarism anti-journalistic".
Julian Assange who has just been indicted in the United States under the anti-espionage laws is a journalist "of a new type, revolutionary", assures the author of the "French Testament", in an interview published Wednesday on the site from Mediapart.
The Academician of Russian origin proposes the creation of a "grand prix international Julian-Assange" at the same time "journalistic and literary" which "would distinguish a feather, a microphone or a camera persecuted in Turkey?" Or in Russia, why not ...?, while priming a novel, a collection of news or poems, even an essay that helped open the cage.
In this interview, the novelist does not hesitate to compare Assange to the former Soviet dissident Alexander Ginsburg, victim of the Gulag, "although it is of course not a question of comparing with the horror of the Gulag the conditions of (the) forced imprisonment (of Assange), since 2012, in a room of the district of Knightsbridge in London ".
But, he adds, "I find, in the way of denigrating Assange to delegitimize, an echo of gossip used to erase dissidents in the USSR."
"In different times, is reproduced (...) a typical situation, which aims to silence, to break, to annihilate a provider of news that a power does not want to see made public," said the writer. "From Ginsburg to Assange, from one century to the next, from real socialism to frenetic capitalism, I see the same penchant for it: anti-journalistic barbarism!" He says.
According to the writer, "Afghanistan's war with Libya, in the name of democratic values, of which Washington would be the depositary, seems to me the main injustice that Assange fought through WikiLeaks."
"If he had not been hindered", Assange would have come "to denounce the Russian oligarchs," says Andrei Makine, known for his pro-Russian positions including the issue of Crimea.
"So (to denounce) also Vladimir Putin?" Does the one questions. "Take off your anti-Putin glasses and stop seeing only a hold on him," the writer retorts, explaining that "Putin, playing with the pieces of the chessboard he inherited, hampers the oligarchs by acting statesman, somehow ".
? 2019 AFP