Algeria
"Le Pen torturer in Algerian war"

afrol News, 4 June - The leader of the French far-right party National Front (FN) has been named by four Algerian liberation war veterans as one of the persons involved in torturing them. While Le Pen admitted to torturing forty years ago, he now denies the charges and is to sue the daily newspaper 'Le Monde', which quoted the veterans. 

'Le Monde' quotes one of four Algerians, Mohamed Abdellaoui, as saying that Le Pen in 1957 personally administered electric shocks. He beat me we an electric stick on the shoulders and on the knees," Abdellaoui remembered the treatment. A second Algerian veteran recalled Le Pen had "sit down on my body and forced me to drink water from the water closet."

While the French government has been reluctant to admit the use of torture in the Algerian liberation war (1954-62), the press has been able to document the systematic use of torture by French intelligence officers in Algeria. Members of the Algerian liberation movement (FLN) were "systematically tortured, abused and executed," according to increasing evidence collected from French war veterans. The Parisian archives containing the written documentation on these practices however remain unopened. 

Shortly after the war, the issue was less taboo, as the hatred was still strong. Also Le Pen at this time admitted he had participated in the torture of Algerian liberation fighters. "I tortured because it had to be done," he told the 'Combat' newspaper in 1962. Le Pen served in the Franco-Algerian war as a lieutenant in the paratrooper regiment, also in charge of intelligence. 

At this stage, however, the rightist party leader categorically denies any personal involvement in torture, dismissing it as "ridiculous" and "incredible". Only days before the parliamentary elections in France, Le Pen calls the allegations "a particularly unfair manipulation" and claims he "never participated personally" in the torture. 

Le Pen has announced he will sue 'Le Monde' for printing these "unfair" allegations. If he will go through with this law suit remains doubtful as the party leader lost a parallel case last year. A French High Court then established that it is not "a defamation of a public personality" calling Le Pen "a torturer during the Algerian war."

Le Pen's National Front has traditionally been associated with revanchist French veterans of the Algerian war, including the French terrorist Organization Armée Secrète (OAS), which carried out numerous killings of civilians in Algeria. Le Pen and ex-OAS terrorists - which all were granted an amnesty for their war crimes in the 1960s - now are front figures in denying the French war crimes in Algeria, calling it a "slandering of the French army."

Also the Gaullist Party of President Chirac vehemently opposed any new debate about France's activities in Algeria or the opening of archives.

Sources: Based on press reports, Le Pen and afrol archives

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