Breaking the silence on the war in Algeria – the fight for truth and reconciliation

In 1954 the Front de Libération National (National Liberation Front) was formed and it launched a revolution, carrying out disruption tactics, ambushes, assassinations and bomb attacks on colons and the French forces in Algeria. The French army retaliated brutally, forcing millions of Algerians into concentration camps, torturing and murdering the ‘rebels’. By the end of the 1950s the army’s actions had aroused strong opposition in France and in 1961 peace talks began.

On 3 July 1962 France finally granted Algeria independence. By that time, more than 250,000 Algerians and French had died in bitter fighting. Most colons fled Algeria during or after the war and in 1963 one of the rebel leaders, Ahmed Ben Bella, became Algeria’s first President.

More than 40 years later, the role of the French army during Algeria’s war of independence remains a controversial issue in France. The role of courageous individuals and the mass media in bringing to light what took place and in publicly debating the issues involved has been crucial. The following article discusses how the media can help sway public opinion towards the search for truth, justice and the possibility of reconciliation. The questions it raises are, of course, those facing Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda and most countries in Latin America where comparable terror reigned in the course of those same 40 years. They are also questions that haunt Europe, the former Soviet Union, and increasingly the USA.

The outbreak of the Algerian war in 1954 only surprised those, and they were many, who had not paid attention to or who had tried to ignore the massacres of colonised peoples in rebellion that took place after 1945. These had happened in Madagascar, Morocco, Vietnam and already in Algeria (Sétif) following the end of the 1939-45 War. The French were completely focused on reconstruction, ravaged by the occupation, wishing to forget the deep division between resistors and collaborators or admirers of the Vichy regime while, in the words of Georges Bernanos, ‘the world queued up at the door of a new war.’

Now, and following the example of France’s will to affirm its national identity in resistance to Nazism and to win back its freedom, the dominated peoples began proudly to reclaim their right to self-determination. Among certain people in the mother country this engendered the secret fear of losing profitable sources of enrichment together with the cachet of empire.

The Maghreb1 had already ostentatiously cropped up in the French press in 1952 when François Mauriac, prestigious winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and talented journalist, whom one could never accuse of being a ‘revolutionary’, carried away by a great evangelical anger on learning from direct Christian witnesses of the massacres at Casablanca (7 and 8 December 1952) exclaimed: ‘I am on the side of those that mistrust the pretexts and excuses that might invents to assure its reign and to make people believe it is the law.’

It will come as no surprise to learn that it was this controversial Christian writer who, in his Bloc Notes of 1956 provocatively dared to claim: ‘History will say that torture has been reinstated in France by those who have kept quiet.’ The debate around telling or keeping quiet raises the whole question of the role, power and responsibility of the media, and the commitment of journalists and writers. In 2002 one has the right to ask the question: Why have the French taken so long to agree to discuss the scandal of the systematic use of torture in Algeria, if not of the war itself?

Debate begins
It was a media event that allowed the question to be relaunched in public: the publication by the newspaper Le Monde on 20 June 2000 of the painful testimony of an Algerian woman, Louisette Ighilarhiz, a former FLN militant, whose testimony was recorded by Florence Beaugé.2 This victim recounted in detail the agony she suffered in 1957. Her story was followed two days later by the publication of interviews with General Bigeard and General Massu, who were both facing court cases. Massu’s interview contains an astounding statement: ‘No,’ he said, ‘Torture is not essential in times of war… In Algeria, we could have done things differently.’

The debate was under way: testimonies, memories, petitions, calls for hearings, the intervention of, on the one hand, General Aussaresses, who recognised the systematic practice of torture without in the least regretting it,3 and on the other of the historian Pierre Vidal Naquet, so courageous since 1955. The media gave great space to these debates and solid works were published, notably L’armée et la torture pendant la guerre d’Algérie, by the woman historian Raphaëlle Branche.

It is to take up, 40 years after this ensemble of investigative journalism work, the gathering of news and archives, analytical debates and efforts at historical objectivity that characterised the era of the war itself (1955-62).

It is not a question of more or less sensational ‘stories’ that do not throw light on the heavy stakes involved or of hasty judgements on certain actors in history that might leave in the shadows the responsibility of politicians and behind them of public opinion. It is a question of the difficult and necessary ‘work of memory’, to use Paul Ricoeur’s expression.

I would like briefly to highlight the participation of different actors at the heart of the discussions, the role that journalists played in wakening public opinion, the questions that emerged and the contradictions that had to be overcome, the ever watchful and often decisive presence of Christian voices, the difficulty of provoking dialogue and of changing partisan passion into passion for truth, even across a tortured memory.

Decisive testimonies
One part of public opinion, a minority for sure, was so shocked right from the start of the war by what was reported by witnesses, that it mobilised and expressed itself at the political level. Since I was among them, I must underline the decisive role of those who were the first to take to the ramparts to alert and mobilise people.
Everyone, members of civil society, Christians and non-Christians, were very dependent on the truthfulness of news gathered and careful to avoid hasty generalisations. From this point of view certain prestigious signatures who had influence weighed in decisively. I mean by this those of respected writers and journalists such as François Mauriac, Roger Martin du Gard, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux and Pierre-Henri Simon.4 Newspapers and magazines like Témoinage Chrétien, Esprit, France-Observateur, Le Monde, Les Temps modernes, that opened their columns to them and supported them while giving space to witnesses faced with the horror of war. We had, we who were trying to challenge public opinion directly in stormy and threatening meetings, to be absolutely certain of the veracity of our facts.

Indignation in the face of testimonies of abuse and serious violations of human rights were very often a clinching factor in awareness. Certain cases became emblematic, like that of journalist Henri Alleg, the Jean Muller file or the disappearance of Professor Audin. Happily, as Maurice Chappaz wrote, ‘Shame is like the dawn of another life.’
It was the subject of torture that first alerted public opinion, hence the decisive weight of Henri Alleg’s book La torture (Éditions de Minuit). But it was then difficult to make the greater part of public opinion understand that the systematic torture carried out by the French army was in no way justified by the behaviour of the FLN and above all that it was not limited, as propaganda would have it, to obtaining information. We had to show that the practice of torture was in keeping with the will to maintain colonial law on the basis of racist contempt for a people that they wanted to force into submission and passivity by means of terror.

We have not stopped warning of the evil that this policy did to French youth and the traumas that resulted from it. Unfortunately, a large part of public opinion sincerely believed in the good reason of France and refused to attribute any prejudice to the army, to the children of the working classes called up to ‘maintain law and order’ and who kept quiet, scared, traumatised by the barbarous acts they were forced to carry out.

Once alerted the press had to hit hard to make itself heard. Hubert Beuve Mery of Le Monde asked ‘Are we Hitler’s conquered people?’ in his introduction to P. H. Simon’s book Contre la torture, while Claude Bourdet asked if there was a French Gestapo in Algeria. It was necessary to say the unutterable, to respond to the duty of crying out, to make room for the misunderstood role of rebelliousness.
It was only little by little that the question of torture gave way to questioning the war itself, the lack of respect for the right to human dignity and self-determination for a people, which General de Gaulle would impose in the face of all obstacles (including the serious threat of a military coup d’état). The media thus leave the sole domain of facts and the place given to their authenticity in order to enter the political arena where basic values (respect for others, democracy and freedom, the right to self-determination…) are discussed alongside the real practices of politicians.

It is impossible to evoke these times of war without underlining the two logics that led citizens to the most extreme and antagonistic positions, especially the militants that pushed solidarity towards helping the Algerians in concrete terms. The press owes it to itself today still to let those speak who only ask to explain themselves. Symbol of those who have been called the ‘suitcase carriers’, the philosopher Francis Jeanson has expounded the logic of his attitude since 1960 by publishing Notre guerre (Our war), the one he believes he is leading with his network against colonialism. This was the reason for his condemnation in absentia to 10 years imprisonment. We shall retain his fight for consistency between speech and deed.
The role of the media became, therefore, essential to democratic debate. Official propaganda passed off the torture as accidental and non-systematic, or justified in order to avoid worse, and tried to gloss over it by means of the social record. Thus the extreme destitution of the Algerian population was stressed, the need for regrouping was given as a pretext, one wanted to take part in their instruction-management. As Nelly Forget would later write, ‘There will always be the permanent temptation to crush the political by doing the social, of hanging assistance programmes on the stick of repression.’

The discussions became more resolutely political. Taking a position came back to placing oneself on the political chessboard and distancing oneself somewhat from humanitarian and ethical protest in order to reaffirm our republican and democratic conviction in the face of threats that also weighed on the mother country. Every newspaper had a duty to take a position but underwent the limits of expression set by the convictions of its readers. It was rather in the magazines and the debate columns that the search for truth and paths towards a just solution were pursued. The French press was then just as divided as public opinion. Through each spiritual or political family passed dramatic fault lines.

Christians themselves went through debates all the more painful for having mixed into them much passion and affectivity brought to life by the human stakes involved. We must salute the Catholic Bishop of Algiers, Étienne Duval, who brought out the Gospel message when he stated that one’s neighbour is the person being persecuted, even if the persecutors call themselves Catholics, and by openly protesting as later Archbishop Romero did in El Salvador. A similar position of resoluteness was expressed both in Témoignage Chrétien and La Croix as in Le socialisme trahi by the Protestant André Philip.

The war is over, silence gets the better of it
The end of the war was accompanied by the massive exodus of French people from Algeria, by a hardening of the FNL, by a kind of great fatigue in public opinion together with many factors tied to the Cold War, to a social unease that May 1968 would bring out into the light of day. With the result that the French people fell silent. The soldiers kept quiet and hid their trauma; the politicians had no grounds for triumphing, amnesty seemed to close the file. Everyone wanted to be able to forget.

No one took any further interest in the fate of the harkis (Algerians who fought on the French side during the war) massacred in Algeria or abandoned in France. No one wanted to know anything about the situation of the Berbers, of forced Arabisation, of new relationships with independent Algeria. It was difficult for the media to open files that no one was interested in.

‘Would this great silence really assuage wounded and still smarting sensibilities? Was this a solution to sustain the emergence of a willingness to live together between French and Algerian?

The difficult work of memory
It is nevertheless vital that much needed justice pronounce its verdict and that the various crimes committed be identified as such. The victims of torture, the survivors of the legitimate struggles for independence, even the families of those who made mistakes demand it. But, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, ‘It’s for the judge to condemn and to punish, and for the citizen to militate against forgetting and also for the equity/fairness of memory; it remains for the historian to understand without indicting or exonerating’ (Le Monde, 15 June 2000).

With regard to the genocide in Rwanda, in a remarkable work titled Dans le nu de la vie that lets survivors speak, the journalist Jean Hatzfield writes, ‘In the depths of my being it is not a question of forgiveness or forgetting, but of reconciliation…’ and he evokes ‘justice that offers a place to truth, so that fear drains away, justice for reconciliation.’

I would like to underline that the often risky and courageous work of journalists has largely contributed to supplying the necessary information that work on memory needs. Now, in the situation described in this article, it is clearly reciprocal fear that has nourished reciprocal hate. There is also the official lies that tried to make people believe that the Algerians were French and were treated as such.
If I wholeheartedly agree with the idea, one that I would say is basic to Christian thinking, that reconciliation is the end goal, I would add that it is necessary, at the very beginning of the delicate work of memory and truth, to involve indissolubly the ‘will to live together’, that’s to say hope that yesterday’s can become the allies of tomorrow. It’s with this aim that since 1958 testimonies by religious people, politicians, university people, and journalists have been published under the title Témoignages et documents.

Unfortunately, such attempts at lucidity and honesty were too rare as far as the war in Algeria went. Hate was too strong, the colonial spirit not yet entirely eliminated, the trauma difficult to overcome. In addition this polarisation of opinions left little room for a double process of reconciliation: between the French themselves and between French and Algerians.

Legislation itself, by becoming harsher with regard to foreigners after 1974, continued to maintain a climate of suspicion or unjust aggressiveness in relation to immigrant Algerians. Despite so many years having passed since these tragic events, past reality has returned and attracts even more attention now that a new generation has grown into adulthood.

So, ‘the pessimism of intellect and the optimism of action?’ This phrase from Gramsci puts us on guard against an optimism that in our ‘spectacle’ society (so branded by Guy Debord) politicians would like to put forward by economising on critical analysis of the past. No, it is not easy to live in society, to attenuate injustices, to overcome barriers of all kinds and to accept others in all their diversity.
Yes, there is the risk of speaking too much about reconciliation without living it, without testing it in the fire of confrontations between those whom history, interests, and cultures have set up against one another. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us, ‘Bargain-basement grace is grace considered as merchandise to be sold off, forgiveness at a discount… grace used as an inexhaustible shop for the Church… In this Church the world finds bargains, a veil to draw over its sins, sins of which it does not repent and from which, with all the more reason, it does not wish to free itself’ (The Price of Grace).

Today’s events, which encourage the re-emergence of ready-made thinking and simplistic explanations, rise up to reactivate old divisions and hamper efforts at understanding undertaken in the framework of a peaceful resolution to conflict. I find very forceful the words of the Bishop of Oran, Pierre Claverie, murdered in 1996 after a long career devoted to reconciliation. He said, ‘I have gained the personal conviction that there is no humanity but in plurality and that the moment we pretend – in the Catholic Church we have examples of this sad experience throughout our history – to possess the truth or to speak in the name of humanity, we fall into totalitarianism and exclusion. No one possesses the truth, everyone seeks it…’

Isn’t the journalist at the risky outpost of this search for truth? The truth of events, certainly, but why not also the truth that leads us towards a just understanding of the world? François Mauriac, already quoted, wrote in 1963, ‘You wouldn’t believe how marvellous it is to end one’s life as a journalist… Journalism gives me the sense of still being able to serve the ideas that are dear to me – faith.’

Article translated from French by Philip Lee.

Notes
1. The Mahgreb is the term used to denote French-speaking North Africa.

2. The Front de libération nationale (FLN) was set up in 1954 with the specific aim of gaining independence for Algeria.

3. General Paul Aussaresses brought to light the army’s use of torture and summary execution during the Algerian war of independence in his book, Special Services: Algeria 1955-57, published in 2001. The League of Human Rights brought a court case against him and the retired general was found guilty not of torturing and killing 24 independence fighters (which he admitted to in his book) but for condoning war crimes. He was fined Euros 7,500 and his two publishers were fined Euros 15,000 (The Guardian, 26 January 2002).

4. To be fair it would be necessary to cite many others well known to the French public, such as Pierre Vidal Naquet, Claude Bourdet, Gilles Martinet, Jean-Jacques Schreiber, Françoise Giroux…

André Jacques is former Migrations Secretary of the World Council of Churches, former president of ACAT France and current president of ECPAT-France, against child prostitution.