THE POLITICS OF TORTURE: THE CASE OF ALGERIA
Peters, Edward
What follows is reprinted from Torture, by Edward Peters, copyright © 1985 by Edward Peters, an important and (in a grisly way) fascinating book on the history and meaning of torture in Western...
...According to certain medical opinion that I was given, the water-pipe method, if used as outlined above, involves no risk to the health of the victim...
...suspending by the arms while tied behind the back...
...placing scratching insects, such as the carpenter beetle, on the navel, scrotum, and other sensitive parts...
...Some traditional forms of local authority were abolished and others were transformed by being placed in the service of colonial authorities...
...Seventeen years before, in 1855, there appeared in Madras the Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency...
...nipping the flesh with pinchers...
...Although Soustelle rejected the Wuillaume Report, torture continued in Algeria, and beginning in 1957 enough word of it had got back to France for a number of very diverse writers to take up the issue...
...it is a plague infecting our whole era...
...rather, the very circumstances in which they governed populations that became increasingly restive during the 20th century led to the abuse of authority, which included torture and later became routine in places such as Algeria...
...In the following several years all of the rationalizations collapsed except those of the torturers, and these were eventually repudiated by a vast majority of French citizens...
...Torture was first abolished in South Africa with the English conquest of 1795...
...Maree and the other defendants were sentenced to prison terms of from three to nine years, and questions raised in Parliament about police brutality elicited further information indicating the truth of many of Maree's generalizations...
...Pierre Vidal-Naquet in particular among French intellectuals relentlessly pursued his investigations...
...Among the advisers to Jacques Soustelle in 1955 were Germaine Tillion, the sociologist of Algeria, who had survived torture by the Gestapo and worked on a war-crimes commission in New York, and Vincent Monteil, who violently objected to the strict reprisals undertaken by the French army in Algeria after 1954...
...Police, normally under conventional restraints in Britain, were less strictly bound to those restraints when they were members of a society whose traditional power relationships had been transformed by the colonial experience...
...The lesson was sobering, and the answers to its questions have not yet been found...
...In Dutch South Africa, for example, torture was routinely used on both blacks and whites from 1652 bn, "not primarily to get information or to punish the prisoner, but to get him to confess his crime out of his own mouth," that is, in a manner generally consistent with Dutch legal procedure, which did not abolish 306 torture until 1798, and a mid-17th-century statute even fixed the fee for the torturer...
...Immediately, the case of Algeria takes on a powerful role in the colonial question...
...Was it that "Asiatic" brutality which, for many 20th-century Westerners, appears to have become a universal explanation for anything un-European and unpleasant...
...The news of torture in Algeria, brought first to France by those returning from military service—particularly, as Sartre notes, by returning priests, and later by scholars and political officers like Germaine Tillion and Francois Mitterrand—was widely circulated in several key books, most strikingly, in 1958, in Henri Alleg's La Question, with an anguished essay by Sartre...
...THE DISCOVERY OF ALGERIA COMPLETED a lesson that finally had to be learned by the world of the late 20th century: torture had not died with the Enlightenment legislative and judicial reforms and their optimistic view of human nature...
...dipping in wells, and rivers, till the party is half-suffocated...
...Even earlier than Hobson, however, there is evidence of torture in colonies even committed by native police upon natives...
...The government itself prevented the printing of Alleg's La Question, and the American edition of that book has as an appendix an open letter to the president of the Republic signed by Andre Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, Francois Mauriac, and JeanPaul Sartre, asking that the government investigate the case of Alleg and openly condemn the use of torture, "in the name of the Declaration of [the Rights of] Man and of the Citizen...
...The publicity attendant upon the revelations of 1957 and after brought the question of torture out of the arm's-length land of despised and subhuman enemies into the streets of Paris and the prisons of Algiers...
...From the early attacks upon European colonial policies by John Atkinson Hobson in 1902 through the criticisms of revolutionaries of the 1960s, charges of European officials using or permitting the use of torture, especially upon native populations, have occurred with great frequency during the 20th century...
...It could no longer be dismissed, written off, or ignored...
...By the Paras [shock troops] or the detectives...
...We thank the publisher, Basil Blackwell, Inc., New York, for permission to print this excerpt...
...As Jean-Paul Sartre bluntly put it, In 1943, in the Rue Lauriston [the Gestapo headquarters in Paris], Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain...
...Sartre's remark raises another important point: to what extent had the Nazi and Soviet —and now the Algerian—experience simply been the earliest indications of a worldwide 20th-century phenomenon: Sartre's "plague infecting our whole era...
...As Sartre stated in his preface to La Question: "Torture is neither civilian nor military, nor is it specifically French...
...After 1957 the news became a flood that eventually contributed substantially to the demise of the Fourth Republic, the creation of the Fifth Republic, and the independence of Algeria in 1962...
...Nothing in French law had changed, the French army had been given no extraordinary powers, and the French public, if anything, prided itself upon the humaneness of its institutions, even in the colonies, especially in the light of France's own experience under German occupation and the Vichy government that had occurred so recently...
...In 1963 he published in English the influential work Torture: Cancer of Democracy (Baltimore: Penguin Books), a work that examined for the first time the civil consequences of such evidence as he had discovered in Algeria...
...But was it the "laziness" of native police alone that permitted these acts...
...What follows is reprinted from Torture, by Edward Peters, copyright © 1985 by Edward Peters, an important and (in a grisly way) fascinating book on the history and meaning of torture in Western society, from ancient Greece to the contemporary world...
...It is necessary, therefore, to consider the general problem of European colonization policies, in which legal safeguards well entrenched in the homeland turned out to be less well entrenched in the colonies, and not merely in Indochina and Algeria, nor exclusively among the French...
...It was practiced by Europeans upon Europeans and non-Europeans alike, in spite of legislation forbidding it and reformers intent upon exposing it...
...It was no longer likely to turn up only in the fragile circumstances of Marxist revolutions, and it was not an importation from barbarous non-European peoples...
...In 1955, Premier Mendes-France reiterated the prohibition, as did Jacques Soustelle, the new governor-general...
...Yet it also raises another issue, hinted at obliquely by Mellor among others: to what extent were the practices described in Algeria not the result of any sequence whose first two members were Germany and the Soviet Union but the appearance of yet a third area in which, under special circumstances, torture could once more be practiced...
...Specifically, to what extent did the history of European powers' relation with colonized peoples (as in Algeria) constitute a third modification of traditional civil government restrictions against torture, after the Nazi exaltation of the Volksgewissen and the Soviet exaltation of the defense of the Revolution...
...prevention of sleep...
...that, according to the notorious Wuillaume Report of 1955, duress was indeed being used, but it was "not quite torture...
...Only one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: that one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name...
...The date of the Bulfontein case is important, because the legal historian Albie Sachs regards the 1960s as a period in South African history in which "the law began to lose much of its more tolerant liberal aspect" (Albert Louis Sachs, Justice in South Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973...
...all France could hear them...
...and that, as Sartre reported in 1957, there were denials of its use in the National Assembly at the same time as there were rumors spreading "that the Question [questioning under torture] is applied in certain civil prisons of the Metropolis," these observations stunned not only France but the whole world...
...if there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves, then, why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or to remain, human...
...Everyone understood perfectly by 1957 how torture had come to be used in the Third Reich, and even (Krushchev had delivered his speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956) in the U.S.S.R...
...searing with hot irons...
...lifting up by the moustache...
...The question is thus raised: were practices used by non-Europeans on each other adapted by colonial administrators and returned with them to home countries...
...beating with sticks...
...In 1964, however, at the trial of three constables and a clerk of the court of the community of Bulfontein, testimony emerged from one of the constables that torture had been used in the interrogation of one of the accused, Izak Magaise, who died from the ordeal...
...Three other defendants had also been tortured and survived: they had been beaten, subjected to electric shocks, struck with a sjambok (a dreaded whip made of rhinoceros hide), and partially suffocated by plastic bags...
...putting pepper or red chillies in the eyes, or introducing them into the private parts of men and women...
...It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper into a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence...
...Ens...
...The cancer was not the torture itself, but the public indifference to it that eroded and rendered meaningless even the most explicit protections afforded by civil rights and public law...
...With the rationalizations dispersed, much of the world had to face the question put by Sartre: how had France come to do this, so recently after her own political agony and with a legal tradition aligned more closely and more explicitly to doctrines of human dignity and civil protection than that of any other country...
...As the works of George Orwell reveal, the relationship between colonial administrator and native was full of dissonance, just as was the relationship between legal authorities and criminals in Europe...
...The impact of the work of Alleg, or rather his testimony, along with that of Pierre-Henri Simon, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Alec Mellor, and others after 1957, focused at last upon the return of torture under conditions few were prepared intellectually or emotionally to accept...
...In 1972 this book was published for the first time in French, and it was followed in 1977 by Les Crimes de l'armee francaise, a documentary account of the horrors of French repression of the Algerian revolution...
...The Roman Catholic writer Pierre Henri Simon published his Contre la torture (Paris: Editions du Seuil) in 1957...
...Additional circumstances— racial differences, ethnocentrism, the violence of revolutionary movements and actions, and the legal powerlessness of colonialized populations—intensified a problem whose root causes were the unique circumstances and personnel of colonial rule...
...Evidence is slight for the colonial administrators of other areas, but it seems clear that whatever practices non-Europeans employed upon each other, nothing in local repertoires matched the kind of authority and the disregard for nonEuropean populations that colonial administrators, particularly low- and middle-grade administrators, found themselves empowered and inclined to use...
...that the torture reports were exaggerated...
...In that voluminous report, it was noted that: Among the principal tortures in vogue in police cases we find the following—twisting a rope tightly around the entire arm or leg so as to impede circulation...
...The constable who made the most extensive confession, Jacob Barend Maree, also gratuitously remarked that in virtually every police station in South Africa the same practices were used...
...Does this explain Algeria...
...In the case of Algeria, it took a long time for the early accounts of torture to find a place in the French press and to be discussed in the National Assembly...
...Most liberal-democratic states took a long time to appreciate the juridical inventiveness of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union...
...Countercharges of terrorism and torture were exchanged by African revolutionaries and whites, and indeed since the 1960s reports of torture have become routine...
...Not necessarily European colonizers themselves, but the institutions of power among colonized peoples that they created may have been behind the discoveries at Madras in 1855 and the concerns attending the preparation of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure in 1872...
...Henri Alleg, The Question (New York: Braziller, 1958), p. 3.] Once again, there appeared a number of rationalizing "theories": that the torture was an aberration carried out by the Foreign Legion, and hence by non-Frenchmen (a modernized variant of the "fascist" infiltration theory...
...Many of the military personnel in Algeria, and many of the police, had experience elsewhere in French colonies, most conspicuously and most recently in Indochina...
...In 1962 he published Raison d'etat, a carefully researched account of systematic army torture...
...Early on in South Africa, torture was clearly brought by the Dutch and applied according to European standards and procedures...
...But the colonial circumstances offered none of the controls that the legal practice and theory of European countries offered...
...But with the case of an independent South Africa we have reached the extreme of colonialism: an independent colonial state with a dominant population of colonizers who reintroduced a practice that had, in the law and in general report, ended during an earlier state of colonization...
...In 1949 the 308 governor-general had explicitly forbidden torture...
...In 1958, besides the devastating effect of Alleg's book with its essay by Sartre, the classical scholar Pierre VidalNaquet published L'Affaire Audin, the account of a mathematics professor at the University of Algiers who had died under army interrogation...
...THE FIRST EUROPEAN SETTLERS of the world outside Europe brought with them in the 16th and 17th centuries the legal procedures of the lands they had left...
...The colonial experience indeed seems to have contributed to the reappearance of torture, but not because colonial administrators and police learned such practices from the populations they governed...
...In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and we did not want to think about the future...
...Many of the Paras of Algeria had been in service in Indochina, and many former colonial police and military personnel returned to service in other colonies or in France and other European countries themselves...
...307 In many cases, the colonial experience appears to have created novel kinds of power relationships, not only between colonizers and colonized, but among colonized peoples themselves...
...Among these at that date was procedural torture, and in most cases this seems to have been routinely used in the colonies of countries that used torture at home, not merely upon white Europeans, but upon natives as well, and eventually upon natives exclusively...
...The first victims of torture in Algeria were Arabs, lessthanhuman "others" not inside the territory of the nation (as it was with the Jews in Germany), but indigenous to the colonialized territory...
...during the Revolution and the period 305 of Stalin's solidification of his own rule...
...The police officers here described are native police acting, so the report states, in defiance of commands issued by European superiors...
...The work was quickly published in the United States also in 1958...
...Once they had perceived, among other things, the reappearance and justification of torture, their first response was to dismiss it as an aberration of psychotic or degenerate governments, lacking popular support, and in clear violation of all universally recognized principles of justice and public law...
...Even after the independence of South Africa from Britain in 1961, there is considerable evidence that methods of torture were not reintroduced immediately, and that the judiciary, at least, maintained a relatively tolerant attitude toward blacks accused of crime, even of political crime...
...In the same year appeared the Wuillaume Report, which admitted that some violence had been done to prisoners suspected of political connections with the Front Liberation Nationale, but that this was "not quite torture," and that some of the violence might even be institutionalized under the present extraordinary circumstances: The water and the electricity methods, provided they are carefully used, are said to produce a shock that is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty...
...One of the standard explanations that account for the reappearance of torture in the 20th century (and is explored in Mellor's work, La Torture, Paris, 1949), has been that a peculiarly non-European form of violent treatment of other human beings was imported into Europe, according to Mellor after the RussoJapanese War of 1905 by the canal sovietique, and according to other writers via the network of colonial administration...
...Fitzjames Stephen observed that during the preparation of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure in 1872, there was some discussion about the Indian police's habit of torturing prisoners: during the discussion a colonial civil servant remarked: "There is a great deal of laziness in it...
...Rough handling of those in their power was hard to stop, particularly when the judiciary was unaware that it was happening and the public and legislators were hard to convince of the fact...
...PierreHenri Simon and Henri Alleg both note earlier cases of torture in French Indochina...
...Novel forms of authority, like native police forces, were also introduced, and it may well have been the existence of new forms of power among native peoples that permitted such practices as were reported in the Madras report...
...309...
...Among the most articulate and pressing of those questions is one asked by Sartre himself in his preface to La Question: Suddenly, stupor turns to despair: if patriotism has to precipitate us into dishonor...
...these cruelties occasionally persevered in until death sooner or later ensues...
...THE NEWS FROM ALGERIA had indeed taken a long time to come home to France...
...Even the democratic West was no longer immune from what Sartre called the plague of the 20th century...
...In 1955, Monteil resigned after having found himself unable to prevent the continued persecution and torture of several Algerian rebels from Ighil-Ilef...
...The argument of "Asianism," in short, does not hold up well...
...In 1957 and 1958, however, slowly and hesitantly at first, rumor, then news began to circulate in France that the French army and colonial police forces had begun to use torture in dealing with Algerian rebels, at least since the launching of the Algerian revolt in 1954...
...But Stephen's civil servant had had other evidence available to him than simply his own estimation of the energy of Indian police officers...
...The case of Algeria clearly struck the consciousness of a part of the world that had believed itself immune at least to torture...
...Nor was it exclusively the eccentric practice of deranged and psychotic governments...
...But that French officials should practice torture upon Algerians and French citizens, that it was not merely the military but the police who used it (Alleg, in The Question, notes the first questions asked of new detainees by fellow prisoners: "Have you been tortured...
...Public orders were issued by the commissioner of police to cease torture during interrogation...
...squeezing the testicles...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
