FRANCE: "Bloody police repression" of Algerians remembered
01 August 2001
France has officially acknowledged the cover-up of a massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in a peaceful demonstration to protest at a curfew on their movements. Exactly 40 years after the events of 17 October 1961, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, unveiled a plaque near the Saint Michel bridge - from which many of the murdered Algerians were thrown by the police - which read: "To the memory of the Algerians, victims of the bloody repression of a peaceful demonstration". Successive French governments denied the extent of the atrocity, admitting only that only a few people had died in outbreaks of factional fighting among demonstrators. Their version of events was challenged by human rights groups who claimed that perhaps 200 or more people were killed (see Statewatch vol 9 no 2).
The French cover-up began to unravel when Maurice Papon lost his libel case against a journalist who had accused him of ordering the killing of demonstrators in 1961; he was chief of the Paris police between 1958-1967 when the French colonial regime was trying to maintain a grip on its eight-year occupation of Algeria. Papon had previously served as a Vichy minister and collaborated with the nazis during the second world war, organising convoys of Jews to be sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1984 and sentenced to a token ten years imprisonment.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the events of 17 October 1961 have been compared to the rounding-up of Jews by the Paris police in 1942. Up to 25,000 demonstrators had gathered to peacefully protest at curfews imposed on them as a result of police attempts to smother the Algerian Front de Liberation's war of independence, which they had taken to the streets of Paris. The prosecutor at Papon's libel case described a police "storm of hate" against Algerians, encouraged by Papon's instructions to shoot protesters engaged in criminal activities on sight. Police officers and other witnesses described a two hour "manhunt" during which demonstrators were assaulted, beaten and shot before being dumped into the River Seine by policemen.
French Interior ministry documents, released in 1997-98, confirm the details of the massacre. They say that "dozens" of people died in a police station while the bodies of other Algerians were found in the Seine or the Paris sewers, some with hands bound with evidence of strangulation or bullet wounds. Bodies were, the papers say, found downriver of Paris for several days. One government archivist alone was aware of 63 dead, 23 of whom were never identified. However, official records are certainly an underestimate as a third of the police files covering the events have "disappeared". In 1999 a judicial investigation concluded that at least 48 people were killed in the massacre, although the Ligue des Droits de l'homme said that hundreds had died, including some who were murdered over the following days at the police headquarters on the Ile de la Cite. Nearly 12,000 Algerians were detained, tortured and beaten after the march before their mass deportation disposed of potential witnesses.
Some commentators have described the begrudging French acknowledgment of the atrocity of 17 October 1961 as a country coming to terms with the painful events of its colonial past. Others ask why the French authorities have never held an independent public inquiry into an event that has been described as "revolting crime" by Patrick Baudouin, president of the Paris based International Human Rights Federation. Only last May a senior French general, Paul Aussaresses, boasted of torturing and murdering Algerian resistance leaders during the war of independence. The French judicial authorities refused to prosecute him because his admission was covered by a blanket amnesty declared by the Government in 1969.
The French police union has attacked the commemoration saying: "This kind of remembrance of a particularly painful peri