Torture During The Algerian War - Torture and The OAS

Torture and The OAS

Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1930–2006), one of the leaders of the Comité Audin, had denounced the systematic use of torture by the 10e D.P. (10th Paratrooper Division), commanded by General Massu, during the 1957 Battle of Algiers. But he also denounced the non-systematic use of torture, mainly beatings, by the French Army on members of the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), a far-right terrorist group, which engaged after the March 1962 Évian Accords in a campaign of bombings directed against the civilian population in Algeria. He wrote a letter in L'Esprit in May 1962:

"Have OAS activists or sympathizers been tortured during these last months in Algeria?... far-right weekly newspapers, La Nation française, Rivarol, Carrefour have started to publish articles on crimes committed against supporters of French Algeria. Articles which are sometime strange: in the 1 November 1961 issue of Carrefour, for example, M. Vinciguerra, who was, with Kovacs, one of the torturers in the Villa des Sources, offered his indignation, and on the next page we could read the prose of ... Colonel Trinquier.... We certainly do not forget that torture is a system that has been established in Algeria by policemen and military men of whom many are today members of the OAS. But we do not forget either that torture is a gangrene which largely overhauls the frame of colonial war. Whoever are the victims, these torturers speak and act in our name; we do not have the right to allow, by our silence, the belief that we are their accomplices. The half-voluntary ignorance, the cowardy indifference, in which readers of the Figaro have basked for years do not justify themselves in any case, whatever may be the ensign with which one would pretend to cover them, and anti-fascism least of all.... Another few remarks impose themselves:

1. It is striking to observe that these tortures, more than the "scientific" technologies applied during the Battle of Algiers, seem to belong in most of the cases to beatings (passages à tabac) disproportionately aggravated by the responsible policeman.
2. ... any symmetry with the 1957 Battle of Algier would however be absurd; it was the whole of the 10th D.P. which, in 1957, controlled, arrested, tortured. The team of the "Tagarins" remains to the contrary isolated.... To our knowledge, nobody has accused the units charged with controlling Bab-el-Oued of torturing....

This having been said, there is no need to dissimulate against the truth; such facts are scandalous and intolerable. They also proceed from a ruthless logic. It was difficult for an army and a police force which has for years tortured Muslims to abandon such methods, on the pretext that the opponent is no longer the same. The struggle against the OAS must be directed with ruthlessness, certainly, but it is not with teams of torturers, even less with courts-martial that we will arrest what J.-M. Domenach called a "clandestine fascism." There still remain other methods. The arrest of Generals Salan and Jouhaud has just proved it.

Pierre-Vidal Naquet, Member of the Bureau of the Comité Audin.

PS: I do not want to be unfair towards all these right-wing men: some have been able to do their self-criticism and to recognize, as did Philippe Ariès in La nation française, that they had erred in their judgment against the campaign against torture.