Headline April 16, 2018/ ''' ! PENALIZING EMIGRATION? '''

''' ! PENALIZING EMIGRATION? '''

*PROUD PAKISTAN*  - LIKE OTHER WINNING COUNTRIES, SAY Malaysia, is winding up for the much awaited elections just ahead.

Researcher and master author, Kamel Daoud is also the author of the novel 'The Meursault Investigation'.

The World Students Society stops to acknowledge his brilliant essay, just as brilliantly translated by John Cullen from the French.

So, on The World Students Society *Global Leadership Journey*, I have the honor to invite the  Great Students of America, and nominate-

Shahzaib Khan to lead, compose a committee of US students, model, learn and have watched all electoral processes, the world over.

And distill notes for publishing

One votes *NO* by leaving the country - all the more so when leaving for Europe, which many Algerian conservatives and political and religious leaders hold responsible for all great ills in Algeria.

Some sources say there were more than 3,100 illegal immigration attempts from the coasts of  Algeria in 2017.

Others place the number closer to 5,000. This figure may seem modest compared to greater exoduses that receive more media coverage, but according to the French daily Le Monde, it has increased.

The interior ministry of Spain reported a deluge at the end of November, Nearly 500 migrants, more than half of them Algerians, disembarked in Spain in the course of just one week.

An article from October in the leading Algerian newspaper EI Watan reported, citing figures from N.G.O's that more than 10,000 haragas had been stopped between 2005 and 2016 -

While 20,000 to 25,000 were thought to have reached other shores and more than 1,500 had died during the crossing.

The Algerian government manages such statistics with prudence.

Too large a number of Algerian emigrants would be an evidence of its shortcomings and serve as a fodder for its opponents.

Yet too small a figure couldn't mobilize public opinion against the exodus.

The harga already signals the authorities failing twice over. First, it's proof that the government hasn't managed to build a nation that is attractive to its own people.

And the government's disastrous attempts to stem the problem have only made it worse:

Emigration has increased since the state criminalized it in 2009. [Any citizen or resident of Algeria  who tries to leave the country illicitly is subject to a fine and a prison term of two to six months].

Was it fair to penalize the victims of a national failure? Worse, the law designed to do that, controversial from the outset, has turned out to be ineffective.

And so the government has resorted to other methods. To block emigration with more than coast guards, it has begun tapping conservative media.

Those outlets publish appeals to patriotism and numerous reports about shipwreck victims, disconsolate parents, disillusioned returnees and mistreatment in Spanish refugee camps.

In February, Echorouk, a popular newspaper, ran a teaser of a headline that claimed ''gangs'' were stealing the organs of some migrants and contaminating others with H.I.V.

The article itself contained hardly a word about this.

More spectacular and more problematic still, the government has mobilized the religious to help with its message. Early this year it called on scholars and imams to help.

But the move backfired with a least one segment of the public. Some people have asked :

How can these religious men declare the right to leave to be sin while staying silent about repression, corruption, ecological destruction and the lifetime mandate of a president who won't die?

Oddly, the flow of harragas leaving Algeria seem to both offset and imitate the flow of immigrants who come to Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa only to be welcomed here at indifference at best.

Besides, the regime's apparatchitks are exiling their own children even as they condemn the harga. Why?

Because illegal immigration is a sort of indirect denunciation - against the lack of democracy and clean elections, the lack of the right to free expression or, simply, to happiness.

One votes ''no'' by leaving the country and all the more so when leaving for Europe, which many Algerian conservatives and political or religious leaders hold responsible for nearly all our great ills.

On their makeshift boats, departing migrants often sing instead of staying silent and discreet.

They seem to be mocking those who stay behind. Really, they are yelling things at government from the sea that for years they didn't dare tell it to its face.

To leave illegally is, above all, to speak out. And the World Students Society acknowledges that with great respect.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! - the World Students Society and Twitter - !E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' WinConference - !WOW! '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless