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France Under Pressure After Torture Confession
PARIS, May 5 (News Agencies) - France faced growing pressure to react on Saturday over a retired French general's graphic and unrepentant account of torture and killings by French troops during Algeria's war of independence.
Politicians, rights groups, the media and murdered Algerians' families urged France to face up to its responsibilities and come clean after the confessions by 83-year-old General Paul Aussaresses.
Algeria, reacting for the first time, said the revelations had damaged France's moral authority on human rights' issues at a time Paris is trying to influence Algiers over its handling of riots in the ethnic Berber region of Kabylie.
In his book titled "Special Services 1955-1957" and published this week, Aussaresses describes how he and his "death squad" tortured and killed 24 prisoners with the full knowledge and backing of the French government.
"The declarations of the criminal general not only tarnish his country's history, but are anathema and a serious discredit to French politics in general when it come to giving lessons in democracy and human rights," El Moudjahid, the official newspaper of the Algerian government, said.
French communist party leader Robert Hue called on French President Jacques Chirac and his government "to take strong action for France, and in the eyes of the world, condemning what was done in its name during the Algerian war."
Aussaresses said the French government, notably the then justice minister Francois Mitterrand, who later became president, was regularly informed about, and tolerated, the use of torture, summary executions and forced displacements of people.
The general's chilling account drew a chorus of outrage from French politicians, including Chirac, who in a statement following the publication said he was "horrified."
He said the general should be stripped of his Legion of Honor, one of France's most distinguished awards, and called on the military to impose sanctions against him, while Prime Minister Lionel Jospin expressed "moral condemnation."
However, only the Green members of the government coalition have called on Chirac to recognize the French state's responsibility for the torture.
"Nevertheless, neither the president, nor the prime minister have broached the question of the responsibility of the political authorities at the time in the acts of torture," influential French daily Le Monde commented in its weekend edition.
"If Aussaresses has disturbed to this point, it is not because he has told us what we have known for some time...but because his account obliges us to address the question of political responsibility..." the left-leaning daily Liberation said.
Human rights groups compared the case legally to that of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, brushing aside suggestions that under French law Aussaresses is safe from prosecution.
The French League for Human Rights said it would take him to court, while the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples (MRAP) said it had lodged a complaint against him which will be heard next week."
Families of two Algerian anti-French leaders, whom Aussaresses has finally confessed to torturing to death in 1957, urged the French government to come clean.
"Tell us if it is effectively Mitterrand, justice minister at the time, who authorized you to do what you wanted with your prisoners?" Drifa Hassani, the sister of Larbi Ben M'Hidi, said in a letter published in l'Authentique newspaper.
The family of the second tortured leader Ali Boumendjel asked France to drop the official version of suicide and to acknowledge that he was executed after having been tortured.
"What we want is ..the recognition of torture and killing of Ali Boumendjel and of hundreds of other members of the resistance who disappeared," his widow Malika Boumendjel said.
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