"My testimony about torture"... General Paul Aussaurs and France's horrific crimes against the martyrs of Algeria

"I express my regret, but I cannot express remorse...I think I have done my hard duty as a soldier engaged in a difficult mission."

(General Paul Aussars)

In the week of December 1, 2013, in a hospital in the French capital, Paris, and in complete calm apart from the tumultuous and bloody life of a man, retired French general Paul Aussars (1918-2013) died at the age of ninety-five.

Ossars, who suffered from cataracts and blindness in his left eye, was one of the special operations officers of the French Resistance during the German occupation of his country in World War II. He was also a loyal soldier to General Charles de Gaulle, and loyal to his country. Where he worked in various jobs in Vietnam and Laos, before becoming responsible for special operations, including torture, murder, and information gathering in Algeria during the Algerian revolution against the French occupation between 1954-1962.

For 132 years, the age of the French occupation of Algeria, the French faced relentless resistance from the sons of Algeria in defense of their homeland, their sanctities, and their sanctities. On the other hand, the name “Country of a Million Martyrs” was not for nothing, as the French criminal machine shed the blood of tens of thousands of the people of this country without feeling guilt or remorse.

General Paul Aussars

Even after Algeria declared its independence, which it won after invaluable sacrifices, France began to protect its generals, soldiers and administrators who worked in Algeria during the occupation, those who poured the blood of the Algerian people under the pretext of protecting the national security of their country. The Algerian revolution and contemporary Algerian historians of those harsh years witnessed the crimes committed against their country and their people.

However, the truth will have another luster if it comes out from the executioner, and he acknowledges it publicly in the pages of the newspapers, after forty years have passed since his withdrawal from the country of martyrs and heroes. His predecessors, the generals and executioners of France, died, and they were surprised to see him appear in several interviews in the French newspaper "Le Point", mentioning the precise details of some of the bloody crimes committed by France during the French Revolution.

And Aussars went even further when he admitted for the first time that France had killed the famous Algerian revolution, and even killed him with his own hands of two militants and politicians opposed to the French occupation at the time, “Mohamed Larbi Ben M’hidi” and “Ali Boumenjel” after France refused for decades to recognize this fact, and it fabricated Instead, a fictitious account of their suicide and others whom they killed deliberately with premeditation, then concealed their bodies from their families, and obliterated the truth from history and people.

The road to Algeria

The truth is that the history of French torture and intimidation in Algeria was not confined to the time of the armed Algerian revolution led by the "Algerian Liberation Front" during the last eight years of the French occupation, but it is as old as the occupation itself.

On May 29, 1950, on the pages of the newspaper “Al-Basa’ir”, the sheikh and militant scholar Muhammad al-Bashir al-Ibrahimi (1889-1965), president of the Association of Muslim Scholars, enumerated the grievances of France in his country, in an article titled “Tell us about justice, we forgot it,” saying: "

The painful torment that France inflicts on the sons of Algeria did not leave the wound for a period to recover, but rather inflamed it with whip after whip, and murder after murder, until the people of this country decided to announce a general mobilization determined to expel this occupier, and in the face of these developments in Algeria, the French government in Paris decided to It is taking the path of firmness, until the French Minister of the Interior - and later the President of France - Francois Mitterrand said: "I do not accept negotiations with the enemies of the homeland, the only negotiations is war" (2).

For this reason, France sent military and intelligence supplies, as well as its children in crime and murder, whom Ossars called "shadow men", those who know how to fight France and how to take revenge on the "enemies".

"Aussaris" made his way to the world of secret agents since World War II when he decided to leave his field specializing in Latin and Greek in order to join the French resistance led by "Charles de Gaulle" against Germany, not only that, but he decided to become a "criminal" for the benefit of his country, He says: "They taught me how to open locks, how to kill without leaving a trace, how to lie, how to become indifferent to my own suffering or to the suffering of others, and how to forget and how to forget, all for France" (3).

In early 1955, months after the outbreak of the Algerian revolution, "Paul Aussaris", a secret service officer, who was still thirty-six years old, was sent to the coastal region of Skikda in eastern Algeria. The interrogation” that targeted the arrested members of the Algerian resistance, he says: “The torture with electricity was carried out through electric generators used in the countryside to charge wireless devices… The torture was carried out by electrocuting the ears or testicles, and then the current was released at a different concentration… For fear of By these means - or thanks to them - prisoners would begin to provide detailed information - and even names - that led to new arrests" (4).

torture and murder

The immediate killing was a regular thing within the interrogation and interrogation procedures in all the regions in which "Ussars" worked, and these bloody mechanisms leaked among the French regional leaders until they became a method followed, he says about this: "Our mission requires us to reach results, perhaps torture is the bridge The only thing that leads to it is a dirty war" (5).

With the consolidation of the organized Algerian resistance that was led by the "Algerian Liberation Front", which over time managed to control the countryside, in contrast to the urban areas and large cities that the French were able to control and station in thanks to their heavy forces, the air force and their armed European aides with "black feet". Several battles during which the resistance inflicted losses on the French forces and on European civilians who were settled by France at the expense of the Algerians.

These losses made "Usars" angry, and made him ignore something called "mercy", as he described it.

In one of the operations carried out by the Liberation Front in an area called "Al-Halia", 22 km east of the city of Skikda, in the summer of 1955, the death toll was 35 Europeans, and in return, the French took 60 prisoners from the Algerians, and "Aussars" decided to inflict a punishment on them. The execution took place at the time, saying: "They should have been killed, that's all, and I did it" (6).

Since then, killing has become the easiest and fastest way to get rid of those arrested who joined the Algerian Liberation Front or their sympathizers, and after the bloody torture, Ossars would appoint - as he says - “teams made up of non-commissioned officers, and I gave them orders to finish off the prisoners. I was the most careful Provided that I never assign the men themselves to perform this kind of task...unless they have been trained for at least one year of service, in the sense that they have no remorse” (7).

Paul Aussars was collecting the bodies of his dead after the mass executions of the Mujahideen of Algeria and digging for them mass graves, and from his "mercy and respect" for Islamic burial traditions he was digging "graves towards Mecca", he says: "I dug a hole of a hundred meters in length, two meters in width and one meter in depth, and they were buried The bodies… The authorities in Algiers were providing us with calcium oxide (lime) in order to hide the bodies (that is, to accelerate their decomposition)” (8).

Execution of Larbi Ben M'hidi and Boumenjel

In the middle of 1956, Paul Aussars was promoted to the rank of major, and became the commander of one of the teams in Algiers, which was witnessing at that time a steady increase in the armed military operations led by the Algerian Liberation Front against the French military and civilian presence alike, and the expansion of these operations and their abundance and diversity signed dozens of The dead were French, which made Aussars admit that what was happening in Skikda was nothing compared to the capital and its offensive operations.

The Kasbah of Algiers was the center of offensive operations against the French and their military forces and the military city that was called "Black Feet", and for this reason Aussars used all possible tools of torture against the arrested resisters, to the extent that he assigned a remote villa in the capital Algiers to this task, which began with the advent of night. After the interrogation, his men were "going out from the vicinity of the capital, about twenty kilometers away, in distant mountains, where the accused are killed at once with machine gun bullets, and then they are buried" (9).

Most of the operations of the Liberation Front in the capital, Algiers, were under the supervision of "Mohamed Larbi bin M'hidi", and he was a thirty-four-year-old young man with a great deal of religious and educational culture, familiar with the arts and literature, and at the same time believing in the necessity of armed resistance throughout Algeria to expel the French occupation, For this reason, the French intelligence and information services were active in searching for him throughout 1956, and until the end of February 1957, when they were able to arrest him by the battalion of General Marcel Béjart, the French commander responsible for liquidating the armed Algerian revolution at the time.

After long days of various interrogation methods, between enticement, intimidation and severe torture, Larbi Ben M'hidi did not provide any important information about his colleagues, nor did he show any submission to the demands of the occupation (10), as Aussars confirms in his memoirs.

The mission of Aussars, who came from the higher authorities in France at the time, was to quickly eliminate the leaders of the resistance and the Algerian Liberation Front, and since Mohamed Larbi Ben M'hidi was at the head of these wanted persons, the mission was to kill him. The trial of Ben M'Hidi through the judiciary is not desirable, because it would have caused an international resonance... Ben M'Hidi did not betray his companions, but we found valuable information in the documents in his possession."

Major Paul Aussars took the fighter Mohamed Larbi Ben M'hidi to a remote farm on the outskirts of the capital Algiers, and in one of its abandoned buildings "Ben M'hidi was entered into the room, tied him up and hung him in a way that opened the possibility of a suicide, and when I was sure of his death I took him down and took him to the hospital" (11) .

Just as Aussars oversaw the execution of Larbi Ben Mhidi by hanging, he oversaw the killing of the famous lawyer Ali Boumenjel, one of the famous Algerian lawyers supporting the Liberation Front with money and pen in the courtyards, and the French fabricated him for participating in the murder of a French family in the south of the capital Algiers when he handed - as They claimed - his own pistol for the perpetrator, and they arrested him in one of the tallest buildings, where they threw him from the sixth floor, to his death, before they falsely claimed that he committed suicide (12)!

On July 5, 1962, Algeria declared its independence after 132 years of popular, intellectual, kinetic and armed struggle. In this long history, Algeria made the pleasure of its liver in front of a brutal and merciless machine. Paul Aussiere came out as the French came out with hands stained with blood, and he remained in his military duties. Inside and outside France until he was referred to retirement, but after forty years in 2000 he decided to reveal his secrets to the French press, which were collected in his memoirs, which he titled “My Testimony on Torture.” And in the following year 2001 he said in an interview with the Associated Press: “I I express my regret, but I cannot express remorse...I think I have done my hard duty as a soldier engaged in a difficult mission"(13).

In December 2013, OSARS passed away bearing his crimes at the age of 95.

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