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Son of Algerian War Rape Victim Compensated by French Court
PARIS, Nov. 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A French appeal court has ruled that an Algerian man, who was conceived when French soldiers raped his mother during Algeria's struggle for independence, was a victim of war and awarded him damages, news agencies reported Friday.
Addressing a painful period in France's colonial history, the pensions court in Paris recognized Mohammad Garne as a victim of Algeria's 1954-1962 war against French rule and awarded him disability benefits and a partial military pension for three years, said the British daily newspaper,
The Guardian.
"For 13 years I have been saying that my mother was raped, that I am a child of rape. Everybody hid, everybody pretended not to hear," said Garne after the hearing. "I fought and I am very pleased to have waged this battle."
"I am the first to have dared to defy the state," he added. "I am not totally satisfied, because I have not been awarded a life pension - but it is important to have reopened the file on the Algerian war."
Garne, who suffers from both physical and psychological infirmities, was born in April 1960 in the internment camp of Theniet el-Had, southwest of the capital Algiers.
He was the son of a 16-year-old local girl - identified only as Kheira - and an unknown French officer, one of 30 or 40 who raped her repeatedly and brutally during a period of several months, said
The Guardian.
The court accepted his argument that the fetus had suffered from continued violence inflicted on his mother by the French soldiers while she was pregnant, and ruled that, under the military pension system, he was entitled to partial benefits.
Kheira previously testified that in an attempt to provoke a miscarriage, the soldiers had hit her stomach with metal cables after discovering she was pregnant.
Despite attempts to make her miscarry, her son was born in April 1960. He was taken from her and placed in an orphanage. None of the facts are disputed by the French state, said the British daily,
The Independent.
Thirty years later, Garne traced his mother to a cemetery in Algiers, where, psychologically disturbed by her experiences, she was living in a makeshift shelter, insisting she preferred the company of the dead to the living.
Garne took her to court to force her to reveal the circumstances of his birth. While she initially insisted he was the son of an Algerian killed during the war, she finally broke down during a hearing in 1994 and said he was conceived during a gang rape by French soldiers,
The Guardian said.
In 1999 and 2000, two lower courts denied Garne any reparation, saying he could only be considered an "indirect" victim of the war.
Thursday's ruling, made after a psychiatrist testified that his troubles could be linked to the traumatic pregnancy and later shock of discovering his origins, overturned those decisions.
Garne, a caretaker in a Parisian department store, said he did not now want to find his father, nor see him punished.
"Recognition is all I seek," he said. "There are many of us in Algeria, children born of French army rapes. It is necessary that this is said and recognized in France. Otherwise it will be forever a stain on its history."
Whether France should officially recognize the barbarism of its troops in Algeria has become the subject of a heated and at times venomous debate during the past 18 months, according to
The Guardian.
"That terrible war ended without anybody being found guilty or held responsible," Garne's lawyer, Jean-Yves Halimi, told
The Guardian Thursday.
"Now we know that it left behind at least one victim."
Garne has become the first person recognized by France as a victim of the Algerian struggle for independence between 1954 and 1962. He is also the first person in France to be accepted as a war victim because of events that took place before his birth.
"I've been recognized as the first war victim of the Algerian war," BBC's online news service quoted Garne as saying as he left the court in the French capital.
"I'm happy for myself and for others who could come forward."
However, his victory was not complete. The court refused to accept he was a war victim by the very fact of being born after the rape of his teenage mother by French officers.
The judges accepted, however, that Garne's frail physical and psychological condition could partly be traced to the fact that his pregnant mother had been beaten by the soldiers in an attempt to make her miscarry, according to
The Independent.
But the French court firmly rejected other arguments that would have given Garne a full pension, and it took pains to make clear that it did not feel the decision to be one with potential historical repercussions.
"The court's role is not to write history or comment on controversies that history generates decades later," it said. Nonetheless, it acknowledged that "unspeakable acts" had taken place.
The ruling overturns two earlier judgments, which ruled that Kheira Garne was the only direct victim of the soldiers' abuse. In the latest hearing, a medical expert testified that her son's psychological troubles were directly related to the trauma caused when she told him the truth about his conception.
An expert appointed by the court recommended that Garne be given a 60% disability pension for life. The judges accepted he was a war victim, but gave him only a backdated pension for 30% for three years, expiring this month. Garne, who lives in Paris, will have to make an application to have the pension extended.
The court's landmark judgment might lead to scores of similar claims by other victims.
The ruling comes as France is being increasingly forced to re-examine its role in the eight-year war that led to Algeria's independence.
Former French General Paul Aussaresses is due to face trial on Monday, following a suit filed by France's League of Human Rights, BBC reported.
President Jacques Chirac stripped General Aussaresses of his Legion of Honor award in June this year after he published a book in which he admitted to ordering the torture and execution of Algerian citizens during the brutal war.
France has never formally acknowledged that it took part in atrocities, although it has long been thought that such crimes were widespread, said BBC.
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