Re: Would you have done the same?
I guess I would not.... but then again, just see how your decent Joe-Six-Pack can turn into Dr Mengele's apprentice:
Torture in Algeria Returns to Challenge an Undecided France
William Pfaff International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, December 19, 2000
PARIS-- France has suddenly and unexpectedly been confronted with a divisive and long-repressed issue: that of the use of torture by the French army during Algeria's war of independence. A historian has remarked that it is rather as if "the Dreyfus case suddenly resurfaced 50 years after it had been covered up."
Senior army officers have avowed that there indeed was torture, conducted officially, and that the government in Paris knew how its orders to prosecute the war were being carried out. Guy Mollet, the Socialist who was prime minister early in the Algerian war, said that any instances of torture were "isolated cases." That has remained the official position, so far as one exists.
Last month, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was still maintaining that torture was the affair of a "corrupted minority" of officers.
While the war was being prosecuted, the interrogation methods being used were widely known, not only in the army and in political and press circles, and were the subject of public debate. As early as April 1956, a letter appeared in Le Monde saying that the army's methods resembled those of the Gestapo. The analogy was to be used by others.
During the Battle of Algiers, in February 1957, when paratroopers were ordered to clear the Algerian resistance out of the city's Casbah, the Catholic weekly Témoignage Chrétien published two young soldiers' accounts of torture.
The next month, a former Free French military hero, the general commanding the Atlas Mountains region, resigned because of an order demanding intensified "police efforts." In a letter published in a Paris weekly he spoke of the "terrible risk that on the pretext of military efficiency we will abandon the moral values" of France and of the French army.
The general was arrested, as was an officer who publicly supported him. However, other senior officers resigned. The secretary-general of the prefecture of police in Algiers, who had been a wartime deportee in Germany, resigned in protest.
The controversy continued in Paris, in books and the newspapers. The editor of Le Monde asked if Hitler had not, after all, conquered the French. The government repeatedly seized issues of Le Monde and of magazines demanding the truth.
Robert Barrat, a Frenchman who served as correspondent of the New York liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal, was arrested and briefly imprisoned. Another journalist, Henri Alleg, published a book of personal witness of torture.
Torture was acknowledged in the 1960s' historical accounts of the war, and in the film "The Battle of Algiers." General Jacques Massu, who commanded in that battle, published a book in 1971 admitting that torture had been employed, and justifying its use.
The French government never admitted what was done, and the French public, by and large, remained silent.
Then last June Le Monde published an account by an Algerian professional woman and former Algerian Liberation Front militant describing how she had been held by the army for days, kept naked and repeatedly tortured for information. She described the officers who did it, and the French army doctor who finally rescued her.
After that there were protests and attempts to exploit the affair politically. General Massu, 92, said he was distressed by what had happened, but that it had indeed happened. "My name has ever since been associated with torture, which has been very hard to endure."
He said he now believed that torture "is not indispensable in time of war, we should have found another way - but how?" He and his wife adopted two Algerian children.
Another general spoke out at the same time, Paul Aussaresses, who as a major had been head of intelligence. He said that, acting on orders, he had personally murdered 24 Algerian activists, and had no regrets. He was also responsible for disposing of prisoners too harmed by torture to be allowed to live, and others too important to be let free. Some were shot or knifed, others dropped into the sea from helicopters.
There are proposals for parliamentary inquiries and public avowals of state guilt. There are those who say the facts should be set out and then the past wiped clean. Others cite the barbarous horrors that Algerians have inflicted upon themselves since independence, and say France should have kept Algeria.
Those who object to amnesty note that France has demanded the trial of General Augusto Pinochet, supports the Hague tribunal trying war crimes in Bosnia, signed the UN treaty establishing a permanent war crimes tribunal and has tried its own former officials, as well as the SS officer Klaus Barbie, for humanitarian crimes during the Vichy period. The uncut film of the entire Barbie trial is currently running on French cable television, to teach lessons about crimes against humanity.
France's president, Jacques Chirac, spoke last Thursday. He said atrocities were committed on both sides in Algeria but were the work of minorities. "We must not do things that would reopen old wounds," he said.
Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
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