“The diseases of the soul are transmitted through one's buttocks.  Having sat yours on the seats of the pieds-noirs, you have caught on their reflexes, and worse, their way of thinking.  In the name of democracy, you have cancelled democratic elections.  In the name of human rights and western-style modernity you have adopted the methods of terror, allowed not long ago by Guy Mollet and François Mitterrand.. mass arrests, arbitrary internment, systematic torture. It is from Vichy that you borrowed the 'special courts' and the monstrous principle of retroactive application of the penal law.
You will try to deny me the right to proclaim the truth: you have turned torturers or torturers' accomplices.  You could not have a worse fate pity you...”

THIRTY years ago, I denounced the practice of torture by the police and a section of the French army in Algeria.  If, at that time, I had been told that torture would be used again against Algerians amd by those who claim to be the heirs of the revolution, I would not have believed it despite my having no illusions about human beings.  I was, undoubtedly, naive.  So we all were.

But facts prove to be more obstinate than our desire not to see them.  As soon as independence was achieved, the beast showed again its hideous face on the same scenes of atrocities: torture reappeared here and there, practised on veteran resistance fighters by other resistance fighters, who had themselves been tortured.  The victims, even though they subsequently became ministers, have never been able to do anything against their torturers, although some of them were known by all.  This has been so, despite a constitution which, being unique of its kind and taking into account what the Algerian people had endured, explicitly prohibits torture.

We were prepared to believe that the cases at hand were mere blunders, albeit disturbing ones, and that they would eventually disappear owing to the vigilance and the reprobation of the majority. Today it is no longer possible to reassure oneself so easily.  Torture is back, it spreads, it prospers and it is becoming institutionalised.  We no longer have the right to remain silent.

Dear Ali Haroun, member of the Higher State Committee, do you remember the time when, as head of the French section of the FLN, you asked me to compile for Redha Malek, he, too, a member of the Higher State Committee and current Prime Minister, a register of all the torture cases I had to deal with for the Black Book he was preparing.  Time does fly!

To denounce torture, you would have us believe, would be tantamount to betraying the ideals which united us in the days of the revolution.  It would even amount - would it not? - to endangering human rights.  Because, according to you, in the universal struggle between modernity and obscurantism, the danger to human dignity does not come from the torturers but rather from their victims.

Bowing before the West, the supreme stage of civilisation, how would you not be won over to the idea that the corollary of human rights is misery, prostitution, unemployment, colonial domination and now torture?

Forgive me - you who, out of weakness, I still consider as my friend if I tell you that your discourse strangely rings like that held by a certain Guy Mollet, Prime Minister, or a certain [President] François Mitterrand, then justice Minister.

It was in the name of human rights French style! - that policemen and soldiers would practise torture at the villa Susini in Algiers as well as on the Ameziane farm in Constantine.

It was by hundreds that Algerian died then under torture, without the public authorities - who were well informed indeed - showing any sign of emotion.  Did the Muslims - as they were then called - not represent, for the secular-socialists, the return to the past, whereas the Pied-noir and Harki alliance represented modernity, this modernity which has become, against your people's aspirations, your only and fragile alibi?

I am not your enemy even if soon, spitting on the past, you will consider me as such and have me insulted by a lackey penpusher.  As I find myself in the same situation as 30 years ago, I cannot but act in the same way.

In 1992, the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front, including Abassi Madani, appointed me to defend them along with my Algerian colleagues.  Still trusting the ruling authorities, I paid you a visit, Ali Haroun, in what was your Ministry of Human Rights.  You insisted that I should attend the trial of Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj simply as an observer.  Being mindful of the consensus, I accepted.  On the day of the trial, at Blida, I was refused entry to the military tribunal.  So, I had been told a lie.

Faced with the armed policemen, I realised that, for some, the fraternity of yesterday had to become an unprincipled complicity.  That day, the scales fell from my eyes.

Today, appointed by two FIS activists, Rabah Kebir, FIS spokesman, and Oussama, son of Abassi Madani, both sentenced to death in Algeria, both arrested in Germany at the request of the Algerian authorities who demand their extradition, I want to warn the German authorities against the manner in which justice is dispensed in Algeria.

I make it my duty to alert the international opinion to which the FIS has been presented as an enemy of intelligence and human rights, whereas after the legislative elections which it had won, it was outlawed following a coup d'état, whereas among its 700 members arrested in 1992, 1224 exactly, on the very admission of the military officials, are members of the teaching profession, and that among the people wanted today as 'terrorists', there are 315 teachers.

Perhaps you are not aware of what is happening in the camps and prisons of Algeria?  Or, on the contrary, you do know, but as it is said in all the armies of the world, you do not want to know.
That the advocates of the new international order pretend like you not to see anything should give you food for thought.  Would you have forgotten that the new order is directed against the struggle for independence of the people of the South, as eloquently demonstrated by the war and the embargo against Iraq and the armed humanitarian interference in Somalia?

Can you not see that the agreement between the chancelleries and the blessing given by the media blinded by their hatred of Islam do not carry much weight in the face of the people's courage?

Already - listen to them - those who publicly support the current leaders of Algeria privately raise questions about their future.  They have learnt the lessons that history I has taught them, at their own expense.

As Andre Frossard [a prominent Marxist, and an author, who later converted to Catholicism and became adviser to the Vatican] wrote some time ago, I hope he will forgive me for quoting him: 'Torture in Algeria disfigured France ... When a country can no longer maintain its presence except by such methods, it is that history has given it its notice.'

Do you believe that a government alienated from its own country can escape a similar fate for long? Have you lost your memory and changed so much?  Have you lost your mind to the extent that you do riot see, that the same methods will lead You to the same disasters as the French democrats in the past?

I do riot bid farewell to our dreams but only to those of you who have betrayed them.  For my generation, Algeria has been that of free France and the Resistance, the touchstone of our sincerity.

Indeed, among those who pretended to fight against Germany in the name of the peoples' rights, how many managed, afterwards, to remain true to themselves?

On the very day Germany capitulated, settlers, gendarmes, policemen and soldiers were slaughtering civilians in the Constantine areas, including women and children, guilty of peacefully laying claim to independence.

In the decade that followed, Indochina, Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco and the other African countries had a taste of the same trail of horrors in their turn, until Dien Bien Phu.  And then there was a new Algerian insurrection.

For a Paul Teitgen, former concentration camp prisoner and former senior- secretary at the Perfecture of Police of Algiers, who compared the repression methods to those of the Gestapo, for a General de Bollardiäre, former member of Free France, who refused to practise torture against FLN prisoners, how many others went back on the oaths they had taken just before?

MM Soustelle and Lacoste, ministers in residence and advocates of taking a tough line against the patriots, were former members of Free France for the former and for the Resistance for the latter.  Bigeard and Massu, both generals who favoured strong-arm style of interrogation were a former member of the Resistance for the former and of Free France for the latter.

But were they really untrue to themselves?  In the days of Free France and the Resistance, did they really have that humanist vision which they claimed to draw their inspiration from and which we thought they had?

Had we not succumbed to the only too human temptation of idealising them simply because we were taking the same risks in the same struggles?
 
When I used to plead cases in military courts, I had one advantage over the judges: I anticipated their tropisms.  They did not understand my reasoning.  Have you become like them or will you manage to remain true to what you were?

Shall we make together an effort to be lucid?  Are you still capable of it?

You are not in the position of some current Algerian generals who waited until the die was cast to join the FLN in 1958, 1959, and 1960.  Those have never claimed to be humanists.  Soldiers by profession, they just switched from one camp to the other.  Likewise, the Petainist officers, in Algeria, 20 years earlier, in 1942, after the Allied landing, had switched from anglophobia to antinazism.

They had never been magnificent wretches and the contempt in which they hold members of armed groups today is the same as the one in which they formerly held the FLN fellah with whom they had never had anything in common.

Your problem, you fighters who have turned torturers or torturers' accomplices, is much more distressing.

Since I made you acquaintance when you were in your prime, I know that you did believe in the people and in the values which it vehicled.  Today, you do not understand it any better than the French in Algeria could in the sixties.  Because their world view was markedly different and their interests antagonistic, because replacing secular values with Islamic values as well as giving up their privileges was unthinkable, the pieds-noirs believed that the end of their world was nothing less than the end of the world.

Then followed a race to the abyss: this one, until recently a fervent supporter of integration, condoned a policy of genocide; that one, who voted for the Left, joined the OAS ranks.  The same panic reached France, muddled the brains of the leading politicians to the extent that Michel Debre envisaged to have me shot dead because I was denouncing torture.  The only thing to prevent him from doing so was the responsible attitude of the professionals that were General Grossin, head of special services, and Constantin Melnik, advisor to the Prime Minister, who did not have any particular sympathy for me though.

I see in your behaviour today the forerunners of that same insanity.

You have resorted to the ballot-box to deny its verdict, just because it did not agree with your wishes.

You have called on the French government to hunt the political exiles who have taken refugee on its soil, even if you were later on to deny it the right to interfere when it dares doubt the validity of your policies.

You have called on the national consensus at the time when you had initiated a policy of mass executions of prisoners on death row: seven executions on the same day.  Even Lacoste and Massu had not reached this figure. It is in this fever of violence and fear that men go back on what thev have stood for so far, even il'they have to be plagued for ever by the shame of a sullied soul.

Be careful, I can already see in your eyes that denial that causes for ever the sadness of those who survived the colonial wars: the Russians from Afghanistan, the Americans from Vietnam, the French who had fought the dirty Algerian war.

It was not without good reason that in its 23 September 1993 issue, ‘Jeune Afrique' ran the following headline to describe the events: 'The new battle of Algiers.'

In all fairness, I have to concede that there is a difference between Massu and you.  Massu was fighting men who were foreign to him in even, respect in a count that was not his.  You, in your own country, you consider as enemies men who are your brothers.

Giving up all ideals and reason, moved by the blind nature of things, this is what you have come to.  You could not have a worse fate.  I pity you.  Sincerely.

The diseases of the soul are transmitted through one's buttocks.  Having sat yours on the seats of the Pieds-Noirs, you have caught on their reflexes, and worse, their way of thinking. Whatever you may say, your lifestyle is western; your dreams ride in a Mercedes.  Thirty years ago, you read Saint-just: the poor people were the powers of the earth, they were its rulers.

Today, members of the armed groups for their so-called lack of culture, as if the people were not also a trustee of the national culture.  Today, you call your adversaries illiterate beggars because they do not speak French as well as you do.

Today, you say: Algiers will not be Kabul.  Have you carefully thought about what this means?  Would you prefer, Kabul occupied by the Russians, those second-class westerners , to a liberated Kabul?

Having sat on the seats left by the Pieds-Noirs, you have adopted their way of thinking and it is not surprising that in your special units the order are given in the language of Massu; it is not surprising that vour press releases utilise the words used by the occupying forces in 1957: combing, tight control, terrorists.

In the old days, even though the French dealt with the fighters as an enemy, they never used the word war, as they were prisoners of the legal myth that Algeria was France.  Now that Algerians are fighting their fellow-countrymen, the local press proclaiming to be socialist refers to the war in these terms: 'News from the front line.' It shows without doubt some progress in candour, or cynicism.

In the past, the colonial press described the fighters as louts.  Today, the Algerian press writes: 'The illiterate class is the one responsible for the most serious crimes.' This evaluation is supposed to result from a scientific

In the past, following a bloody confrontation, it would be said that the French soldiers had been murdered and the mujahidin shot down.  Today, the official reports use the same words: 'Tigzirt: two policemen murdered; El Makaria: five terrorists shot down.'

Using the words employed in the past by the occupier is not an innocent choice.  It is from Vichy that you borrowed the expression special courts, from the nazis you took the word terrorists.

Your brothers and sisters who fought in Algiers in 1957 have been victim of that hypocrisy.  Ben M'hidi had himself Masked Bigeard: who is the terrorist, the gunner or the pilot who bomb the villages indiscriminately, or the woman, who, defies torture and death all by herself, with a bomb in a basket?

One of the documents used against me in 1960, when I was suspended from the Paris bar, was a notebook found on the dead body of Ali La Pointe, in which he had noted my war code name, Mansour, and the address of a friend who was a blacksmith in Paris.

How, he asked with a pout of disgust, the reporter of the Bar council, can the named Ali La Pointe call you a brother?  Because we know each other through public rumour, I said, and we have respect for each other.

You know very well that there are between me and Algeria ties which you cannot break, even when tomorrow, switching from flaunted universalism to xenophobia, you will try to deny me the right to proclaim the truth.

Those ties are not only bonds between war veterans, they are living ties.  Not just bonds with men hunted by you, but also bonds with the humble people that you leave in oblivion.  I was seen more often than you by the side of teenagers wearing the 'hijab' whom the secular-progressives wanted to drive away from the schools of the I Republic ...

To those who are not true to themselves, I bid farewell!  To the eternal Algeria, that of the faithful, that of the outlawed, that of the humble, I say again good day, Salaam!
 

Jacques Verges - excerpted published in Impact International from Jacques Verges' forthcoming book “Open Letter to Algerian Friends Turned Torturers”.  A distinguished French lawyer he left the French Communist Party in 1957 because the Party opposed independence for Algeria.  Verges joined the FLN and defended Algerian revolutionaries many of whom he now finds have become torturers themselves.