France: Government covered up police massacre
01 March 1999
In March, convicted war criminal Maurice Papon lost his libel suit against Jean-Luc Einaudi who accused him of ordering the killings of 200 Algerians participating in a demonstration while he was Paris police chief in 1961. Papon, backed by the state prosecution service, was seeking 1 million francs in damages from Einaudi. In the course of the trial a former defence minister and the state public prosecutor admitted the deaths of "dozens" of Algerians at the hands of the Paris police, while witnesses described the slaughter. The scale of the atrocity had been denied by successive French governments, who supported police claims that only six people died in outbreaks of factional fighting among demonstrators, and rejected claims by human rights groups that at least 200 people were killed.
Maurice Papon was no stranger to murder. As the secretary-general of the "Service for Jewish Affairs" in Bordeaux between 1942-44 he was responsible for organising four convoys of Jews - about 1,600 people, including over 200 children - to Auschwitz. Most of them died. He went on to became a government minister in the collaborationist Vichy regime. In April 1984 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to a symbolic 10 years imprisonment. He is appealing against the sentence.
Papon was also the Paris chief of police from 1958-1967 at a time when the French colonial regime was struggling to maintain a grip on its eight year occupation (1954-1962) of Algeria. From an Algerian people, subjected to a daily regime of imprisonment, torture and murder the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) emerged to engage the colonialists in a bloody war of independence that they took to the streets of Paris. According to prosecutor Lescloux, in 1961 the Paris police force was "submerged by a storm of hate" towards Algerians, a state encouraged by a memorandum issued by Papon prior to the Paris demonstration which instructed his officers that protestors engaged in criminal activities "should be shot on sight".
The events of 17 October 1961 have been compared to the round-up of Jews by Paris police in 1942. Up to 25,000 Algerian's took part in a peaceful demonstration to protest at a curfew on their movements. Accounts of the events are limited because many of the 11,500 Algerians who were tortured and beaten in holding centres after the march were part of a mass deportation to hastily dispose of potentially incriminating evidence. The events were described by one police officer who participated in the massacre who told L'Express magazine:
"We went to the upper floors of the buildings and we fired at anything that moved...It was horrible, horrible. The manhunt went on for two hours - it was terrible, terrible, terrible. We finally all went home because there was nothing left to fight"
Other witnesses described to the court how they had seen demonstrators assaulted, beaten and shot before being dumped into the River Seine by the police.
In court Papon denied these accounts:
"I totally deny that the deaths resulted from policemen losing their control. Can you imagine a policeman strangling or castrating someone? This happens everyday in Algeria but not in France" (Reuters 5.2.99)
His testimony was contested by the Defence minster at the time, Pierre Messmer, who attributed the police murders to revenge:
"The deaths were a result of the hate of the security forces against the demonstrators...resulting from the deaths of several dozen policemen by the FLN that year." (Reuters 5.2.99)
Interior ministry documents, originally scheduled to appear in 2021 but released in May 1998, also confirm details of the atrocity. They disclose that bodies were found drowned in the Seine or the Paris sewers with their hands bound and with evidence of strangulation or bullet wounds. Corpses were recovered downriver from Paris for several days and it was likely that "dozens" (a precise figure is not given) of people died. Governmen