Hi Sig; Last night I started reading the autobiography of the French general Aussaressess who was responsible for a good part of the torture and summary executions in Algeria in the late 1950s:
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Those we brought to Tourelles [a torture center run by the French army's intelligence service] were sufficiently implicated in terrorist activity that there was no way we were going to release them alive. On busy days, when all the regiments were overwhelmed with prisoners, they would send me everybody they had no time to interrogate. At Tourelles, as at the regimental headquarters, torture was always used if a prisoner refused to talk. ... When the suspects had talked and seemed to have nothing more to say..my men would take a batch of them out in the bush, 20 kilometers or so from Algiers, shoot them down with a machine-gun burst, then bury them. Regimental headquarters also sent me prisoners they had interrogated and who were no longer useful. Nobody ever asked me what I planned to do with these people. Long story short: when the army wanted to get rid of somebody, he would end up at Tourelles.
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worldpress.org
Review from Arab web page:
weekly.ahram.org.eg
Review from Strategy Page.com:
strategypage.com
Perspective as compared to French resistance in WW2:
geocities.com
He flew on flight with the shoe bomber, a comparison:
alephfrance.com
Buy it here:
pricefarmer.com
His justification for his actions reads pretty much like our justification for staying in Iraq, in that the neocons claim that most of the Iraqis really are supporting us and we are therefore somehow justified in killing the ones who do not. But he further concluded that you have to fight terror with terror (a thought not completely unknown on this thread), and that killing a few terrorists without a trial is better than having innocent people killed by terrorists. He oversaw mass executions of hundreds at one time. Amazingly, he even includes in the book a photo of a pile of bodies (who were either civilians suspected of crimes against the state, or prisoners of war with little evidence against them, depending on how you want to try and dance around the Geneva Convention) that he claims responsibility for.
If he had had the bad luck of having done these things for the Germans, rather than the French, and then published a book about it, he would have been prosecuted and hung for war crimes. What's fascinating is that he is, in his love of learning, reminiscent of the Nazi theoreticians who were also well educated in the best universities of the western world. And of course also a creepy resemblence to our better educated neocons.
It must be tough to live with the blood of that many people on your hands. The little jokes he makes in the book are frankly disgusting. I shan't repeat any, you will just have to read it to understand the depths of the man's cruelty, even towards French soldiers. I can see why he would be psychologically unable to resist justifying his crimes.
Of course his version of reality is rife with contradictions. On the one hand he says that there were so many Algerians making terror in the FLN that it was impossible to legally execute the thousands of them (the Frenchies used the guillotine back then so I guess that it would have made a mess). So instead he ordered soldiers to kill them where they stood. And eventually the FLN won, and still rules Algeria today. Given these facts, it is difficult to give much credence to his claim that the FLN had little support from even Muslim Algerians.
As far as lessons for the Iraq occupation, the book is bleak. His description of the early problems in Algeria, which eventually spun sufficiently out of control that the French had 25,000 soldiers killed there, is so mild (in terms of statistics such as number of attacks per day, or in terms of bombings per month) compared with what is going on now in Iraq, that it is stunning. We are in deep doo doo of a nature that few nations have bumbled into.
Some who have read his book say that his way is the only way to eliminate terrorism. But the historical fact is that France lost the war, and lost it bloodily despite truly caring about Algeria. Iraq is a far distant place of little concern to the US. Our politicians had to blatantly lie to us to get our population to support even a short and easy war. Algeria was a very near and important place for France. Our inclination to let monsters run loose in Iraq so that we can continue to have our soldiers slaughtered there, is far less than the French inclination to do the same in Algeria.
-- Carl |
