So many things come to mind indeed....
HEY, CARLA DEL PONTE!!! Where are you when we need you? LOL!
Torture in the Algerian war (1954-62)
The role of the French army-then and now
By Marianne Arens and Françoise Thull
9 April 2001
The French army systematically used torture and murder in Algeria against its opponents. For several months now this topic has been openly discussed in France, since two high-ranking retired generals admitted last November that in the 1954-62 Algeria war members of the Algerian liberation movement (FLN) were tortured, abused and executed.
This was confirmed in the French daily Le Monde by 92-year old general Jacques Massu, who in 1957 was in charge of the notorious "Paras" (10th Parachute Division), and his deputy, the 82-year old general Paul Aussaresses, then director of the French secret service in Algiers, who admitted that over 3,000 prisoners considered to have "disappeared" at that time had in reality been executed. Aussaresses explained that in 1957, torture and murder were an integral part of France's war policy. He boasted that methods were employed that were not covered by the conventions of war , that he had given his subordinates orders to kill and had personally liquidated 24 FLN members, telling Le Monde, "I do not regret it."
An earlier report in Le Monde by one of the torture victims had set the ball rolling. The then twenty-year-old Algerian partisan Louisetta Ighil Ahgiz, who fell into the hands of the torturers in September 1957, still suffers today from the physical and psychological consequences of the torture at the age of 64. Together with an FLN group, she fell into an ambush by general Massu and was taken, seriously wounded, to his headquarters. Here she was subjected to almost continuous torture for three months. Louisetta reported how Massu and General Marcel Bigeard insulted and degraded her, before they gave the instruction for the torture to begin with a hand movement. "It was as if a secret code existed", she said. She only survived thanks to an army doctor, who discovered her in December 1957 and took her to a military hospital, hiding her from the torturers. Louisetta said she hoped to find the doctor through the article published in Le Monde and thank him.
The report about Louisetta Ighil Ahgiz unleashed a tide of readers' letters and articles throughout the French media. Another former FLN fighter, Noui M'Hidi Abdelkader, who had been arrested in Paris in 1958 and was then imprisoned in Versailles, confirmed that torture was also used in the French capital. He is convinced that unopened archives still contain the statements of thousands of torture victims.
The Algerian war 1954-62
In 1954, Algeria's smouldering independence struggle erupted into a war. Just before, the French army had been forced to withdraw from Vietnam following its historical defeat at Dien Bien Phu. France moved the largest part of the Foreign Legion to Algeria, its largest and oldest colony. As the attacks mounted by the FLN increased during 1954, the French government decided it would not abandon Algeria, which had been a French colony since 1830. For the first time conscripts were despatched to a colony, and by mid 1956 half a million French soldiers were stationed on Algerian soil.
By 1962, 1.7 million French soldiers had fought in the Algerian war. Over 25,000 of these were killed and 60,000 wounded, while on the Algerian side, over half a million died. Despite these enormous numbers, for a long time no one was officially allowed to use the word "war". One spoke only of the "events in Algeria" or of “preserving order” in the three Algerian provinces. Only in October 1999 did the French National Assembly (parliament) decided to officially permit the term "Algerian War".
It was the social-democratic government of Guy Mollet that had given a free hand to the occupying forces in Algeria to carry out torture. In June 1956, shortly before the notorious battle for Algiers, the National Assembly accepted Mollet's proposal to set aside individual freedoms in Algeria and permit the gendarmes and soldiers stationed there to use "extended questioning," "coercive measures" or "special treatment". General Aussaresses now confirms, "We were given a free hand to do what we considered necessary."
The French Prefect in Algeria at that time, Robert Lacoste, was also a social democrat. The social democratic Interior Minister François Mitterrand, who later became president, said in parliament on November 5, 1954: "The Algerian rebellion can lead to only one conclusion, that is, war." He declared that Algeria was part of France: the Mediterranean separates Algeria from France just as the river Seine separates the two halves of Paris. When he became Justice Minister two years later, he rejected the clemency request of the Algerian communist Fernand Iveton made on February 10, 1957, thus assuring his death.
France's colonial policy won the support of the Stalinists, when the Communist Party under the leadership of Jacques Duclos supported the state budget in 1954 and in 1956 voted for the special measures proposed by the government, at a time when there were already mass demonstrations taking place in Paris against the Algerian war.
The eyewitness reports and recently published documents leave no doubt about the brutality, extent and systematic use of torture in Algeria. Part of the daily practice included mass rapes, submerging victims in freezing water or excrement, and repeated use of electric shocks. Even in the Algerian hinterland where there was no electricity, electric shock torture was carried out using the so-called " Gégène", utilising the pedal-powered generation system used for the radio stations.
Command over Algeria was exercised by a group of top generals, who had fought under Charles de Gaulle against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. De Gaulle became president of France in 1958, following a putsch by French settlers and the military in Algeria. In 1959, when de Gaulle tentatively moved towards allowing self-determination for Algeria, these same generals organised a second putsch attempt in April 1961; under the battle cry "Algeria must stay French!" After it failed, they created the terrorist Organization Armée Secrète (OAS—Secret Army Organisation), which carried out numerous killings of civilians in Algeria and also in France. Thanks to the amnesty announced in the declaration of independence signed at Evian in July 1962, as well as a further amnesty at the end of the 1960s, these generals have never faced any criminal charges for the attempted coup or for the systematic use of torture.
Some of these military figures, such as general Marcel Bigeard, who achieved the highest military honours in the post-war period, continue to resist any uncovering of the crimes committed in Algeria. Bigeard, the Algerian Commander and a former OAS member, is today the spokesman of a parliamentary group of yesterday's men who dispute all accusations of torture in the public debate. In agreement with people such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right-wing National Front and a former paratrooper who served in Algeria, Bigeard speaks of the "network of lies", which in his opinion is "destroying everything that remains decent in France".
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