IRAQ:
How the French Inspired the Torture
Julio Godoy
PARIS, Jun 28 (IPS) - The kind of torture inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. army
followed methods France used during the Algerian war of independence in the late
1950s, several French historians and journalists say.
Both the U.S. and the French armies had obviously studied Islamic traditions in order to
devise torture methods aimed particularly at Muslims, they say.
"It is obvious that the U.S. army has been applying in Iraq knowledge the French army
picked up in Algeria in the late 1950s," historian Claire Mauss-Copeau told IPS.
Mauss-Copeau, professor of Maghreb history at the University of Sorbonne in Paris,
referred particularly to the pictures taken in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib showing U.S.
soldiers intimidating naked Iraqi men with dogs, or inflicting sexual harassment.
"Such humiliations are terrible for a Muslim," she said. "In Muslim tradition, dogs are
seen as impure animals. And nudism, especially of men before women, is the worst
form of humiliation."
Muslim scholars too speak of the shame around nakedness. "To be exposed naked
before other men is itself a big humiliation for a Muslim," one scholar said. To be
photographed naked before women is a shame words cannot express, he added.
Journalists who covered the Algerian war have found similarities between French military
doctrines and the U.S. army conduct in Iraq.
"As I saw the photographs taken by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib which shocked the world
a few weeks ago, I immediately knew that I had seen comparable documents in Algeria
in the 1950s," journalist Jacques Duquesne told IPS.
Duquesne, senior editor with the French weekly L'Express, covered the Algerian war of
independence (1954-1962) fought between the French army and the National Liberation
Front (FLN), the Algerian independence guerrilla movement.
The French army resorted to extensive torture and summary executions in a fruitless
effort to break the freedom movement. France accepted Algerian independence in 1962
under Gen Charles de Gaulle.
"In Algeria, the French army widely employed what our soldiers called 'la gegene',
electroshocks in the genitals," Duquesne recalled. "The photos from Abu Ghraib could
have been taken in Algeria."
The French military campaign in Algeria was seen by many as the first experiment in
anti-guerrilla warfare, and it influenced U.S. army methods in Vietnam and in Latin
America.
Marie-Monique Robin, TV journalist and producer of a documentary on the French hand
in counter-insurgency operations in South America in the 1970s points out that French
generals who had fought in the Algerian war went on to teach at U.S. military academies.
"Gen. Paul Aussaresses, the second highest French officer in Algeria in the late 1950s,
and responsible for most of the tortures, taught at Fort Bragg between 1960 and 1963,"
Robin told IPS. Fort Bragg is the headquarters of the U.S. Army special operations
command, the military unit specialising in psychological warfare, including torture.
Aussaresses also taught at Argentinean and Brazilian military academies during the early
1970s. Some years later, the armies of those countries launched Operation Condor, a
coordinated campaign to exterminate opponents of the right-wing dictatorships.
Aussaresses has publicly admitted that during the Algerian war French officers used the
term "death squads" to describe clandestine military units given charge of torturing and
executing Algerians considered to be terrorists.
"Torture was efficient," he said in a book titled 'Algeria - Special Services 1955-1957'
published in 2001. "The majority of people crack and talk. Then, most of the time, we
killed them. Did this pose problems of conscience? I have to say, No. I was used to those
things."
In 2002 a French court fined Aussaresses 8,000 dollars for making these statements.
The army also stripped him of all honours and banned him from wearing the military
uniform in public.
An amnesty in 1962 covering crimes committed by the French army in Algeria means
that the tortures and summary executions Aussaresses and his death squads carried out
will never be punished.
The U.S. army recently showed some experts a film 'The Battle of Algiers' on the French
anti-guerrilla campaign in the Algerian capital in 1957.
The film made by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo in 1965 with support of the
Algerian government is fictional but shows the growth of the urban guerrilla war against
French colonialism with hard realism. The script was by leading FLN activist Saadi Yacef
who was imprisoned in France.
Pontecorvo showed how the French army increasingly employed torture, brutal
intimidation and summary executions to crush the FLN.
But such methods only brought the French army a pyrrhic victory. They discredited the
French Army, and strengthened the independence movement.
'The Battle of Algiers' was shown to some 40 military officers and civilian experts at the
Pentagon last year. They were urged to analyse the core issues raised by the film on the
launching of a brutal war in an Arab society.
The flier inviting guests to the Pentagon screening declared: "How to win a battle against
terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range.
Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervour."
The flier goes on to say: "Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically,
but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film." It
showed also how the U.S. forces may have won the combat but lost the war. (END/2004)
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