A TALE OF TWO TERRORS
GOLDBLOOM, MAURICE J.
A TALE OF TWO TERRORS by MAURICE J. GOLDBLOOM On November 1, 1956, Soviet tanks surrounded Budapest; a few days later they thundered through its streets, drowning the Hungarian revolution in...
...one of its great virtues, in their eyes, was that it revoked the citizenship of Algerian Jews...
...of the two Arabs on its mainly French staff, one was imprisoned...
...The total destruction of villages has become a normal mode of warfare for the French...
...The Arab majority were not even nominal citizens prior to 1945...
...The Paris bar protested, and the former Gaullist cabinet minister Rene Cap-itant withdrew from his law classes, declaring: "As long as such methods . . . are prescribed or tolerated by the government of my country, I do not feel that I can continue to teach in a French law school...
...There are about ten million Hungarians, and almost as many Algerian Moslems...
...Hungary's intellectuals and workers sparked the resistance to Soviet rule...
...Yet, as Raymond Aron, the distinguished French writer, says in another connection: "It is certainly true that one can and must forgive a revolution crimes which one would not excuse if they were committed by stabilized regimes...
...Andr...
...In his book Le Socialisme trahi, Professor Andre Philip, former Socialist cabinet member and a leading French Protestant, wrote last year: "The concentration camps have filled up with the entire Moslem elite and a growing part of the French elite...
...there are also Parisian papers to which they can offer potent arguments...
...All the offices of the UGTA, including its headquarters in Algiers, have been ransacked and closed by the authorities, the trade union press has been suppressed, and the UGTA National Secretary, Noureddine Skan-der, has been arrested, tortured, and exposed in public places...
...with the exception of a few very minor incidents, they did not...
...None surpassed France's representatives in vehemence...
...His articles have appeared in Commentary, The Reporter, the New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the New Republic...
...some have simply disappeared...
...In April, 1956, the police prevented the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, from printing an announcement of its formation, and arrested a number of distributors of its organ L'Ouvrier Algerien...
...Even apart from this, Algeria has been subject to a special regime in which the guarantees of French law have not applied...
...the pictures later helped the Kadar government to convict those whose faces could be identified...
...Pierre Mendes-France has declared, "Not the government, but fascism, rules in Algeria...
...Le Monde, whose relative standing in France approximates that of the New York Times here, and L'Express have been frequent victims...
...Repression of the Algerian trade union movement has continued for years...
...The latter possess full French citizenship, while the Moslem majority have a status roughly comparable to that of Negroes in rural Mississippi...
...They have close ties with like-minded groups in mainland France...
...In the spring of 1957 the protests reached a climax, as the result of the books of Servan-Schreiber and Simon, and of some particularly gruesome incidents in the city of Algiers itself, where they could not be altogether concealed...
...Women and children, left without food or shelter, join the throngs of refugees in neighboring countries...
...On May 9, 1956, the French president of the Algiers Junior Chamber of Commerce, Guy Gomis, was expelled from Algeria on a charge of collaborating with Irving Brown of the AFL-CIO in helping to establish the UGTA...
...Even there, however, he is subject to official and unofficial discriminations several degrees worse than those the Northern Negro suffers here...
...In population, Algeria and Hungary are nearly equal...
...One may recall the Suez Canal Company's habit of enclosing substantial checks with its news releases...
...the number of Algerians killed by the French is twenty times the number of Hungarians killed by the Russians, and French military losses are four to six times Russia's probable losses in Hungary...
...Poujade's agitators took a major role in the Algiers riots of February, 1956...
...This led to the refusal of several Asian and African nations to join in the repeated resolutions condemning Russia and demanding her withdrawal from Hungary...
...But by carefully sifting the statistics arrived at by the U.N...
...thus the more "victories" the French win, the larger the revolutionary army becomes...
...the "bathtub," in which the victim is repeatedly held under water until he is just short of drowning...
...Arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder have been used by French authorities in Algeria against not only Moslem intellectuals but the liberal minority among the French colonists who seek friendly relations with the Arabs...
...In a petition to President Coty, 357 of the most illustrious French writers, scholars, religious leaders, and others—men such as Francois Mauriac, Abbe Pierre, David Rousset—denounced "actions which would arouse every human conscience . . . .; we refer to the torture of prisoners, captured with their weapons in hand, but who, because they are 'rebels' are refused both the guarantees given by the Geneva Convention to enemy soldiers, and the rights which our law confers on French citizens...
...There is a large turnover, particularly in these local and semi-official camps...
...Thus Brady quotes a policeman, watching a European mob lynching a Moslem, as remarking: "That's one less of them...
...The periodical Espoir, devoted to Franco-Arab rapprochement, was suppressed...
...Some 200,000 refugees fled Hungary...
...rostrum one after another to hurl anathemas at Soviet cruelty and perfidy, and to denounce the use of armed force to deny a people its right to freedom and self-government...
...Yet the facts were and are painfully clear...
...We refer also to the summary execution of innocent hostages, to brutalities, pillage, and the destruction of entire villages as measures of intimidation or reprisal...
...it was finally made public—without the details of specific atrocities, covered in the still secret preliminary reports—only after Le Monde had secured a copy unofficially and published it...
...The protests forced the French government to appoint a commission to watch over the preservation of human rights in Algeria, but with such limited powers and terms of reference that Rene-William Thorp, president of the Paris bar, refused to serve on it...
...Hungary's workers no longer have a voice...
...But Premier Janos Kadar's policy has been intimidation by selective action against actual leaders...
...But we do know that in 1956, when Lacoste announced a Christmas amnesty of 600 prisoners— mostly held without trial or charges —French sources estimated that there were another ten thousand left...
...the Russians saw to that...
...There is also abundant proof of the killing in cold blood of prisoners, hostages, and other unarmed Arabs...
...In most instances, but not all, the inhabitants have sufficient advance warning to escape annihilation by fleeing...
...instead of punishing the bombers, the police arrested the new leaders who had replaced the union officials imprisoned in May...
...On May 26, the entire executive staff and many other leaders of the UGTA were sent to concentration camps without trial...
...and other devices for persuading the Algerian Arabs of the superiority of French civilization...
...The Geneva Conventions, to which France is a party, specifically provide that in civil wars and revolutions persons not actively engaged in fighting —including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms for any reason—shall be treated humanely, and without distinction because of race, religion, sex, or similar criteria...
...In reprisal, many leading intellectuals have received long prison sentences or have been held without trial...
...Attempts have been made to intimidate editors by prosecutions for "slandering the army" and similar offenses...
...But no town in Hungary was subjected to aerial attack or indiscriminate artillery bombardment...
...In Hungary, some of them were photographed by Life for the delectation of American readers...
...This is true of both the gros colons —the big landlords and industrialists who make fortunes out of Algeria in peace and war—and the petits blancs, or "poor white trash," whose social and economic status is threatened by any challenge to racial and religious discrimination...
...Many of the most notable figures in French public life have spoken out in condemnation of the proven crimes of the French authorities in Algeria—but the crimes still continue...
...humiliating or degrading treatment...
...in addition, there are in Algeria a million "Europeans" of various ancestries...
...But this did not include the so-called "clandestine camps" and "screening camps," reported by the French Catholic periodical Temoignage Chretien to be run by local authorities, ostensibly and perhaps actually without the knowledge of the central government...
...This disparity is now being removed, not by bringing traditional French liberties to Algeria, but by destroying them in France...
...Interference with the press has been a bit more subtle in Paris than in Algiers...
...The state...
...Foreign Service...
...in at least one communique they even boasted of discovering a clandestine hospital and killing the patients and medical personnel...
...They sometimes regard Minister-Resident Robert Lacoste as a quite passable substitute for the late Admiral Darlan, but even his feeble attempts to introduce minor reforms have evoked their immediate wrath...
...Western spokesmen ascended the U.N...
...France is of course a party to various international conventions guaranteeing the right of workers to organize and strike...
...The Communist daily, Hu-manite, has often been seized for reporting specific atrocities in Algeria, but confiscations of non-Communist papers are still fairly infrequent...
...Such advantages are worth fighting for, and the colons are ready to fight by every means...
...some have received semiofficial status and government subsidies...
...Since then they have been citizens in name but not in fact, because of discrimination in applying the laws (e.g., the Moslem religion alone is subject to state control), and to administrative and electoral systems rigged to deny them any effective part in their own government...
...Some of those who did accept membership later resigned, declaring that the commission had the power to investigate but not to act, and that the government did nothing about the abuses they reported...
...Goldbloom is the author of the book, "American Security and Freedom...
...There was no question as to the truth of the story or the restraint with which it was told...
...such a prosecution was initiated against Servan-Schreiber for his articles on his experiences in Algeria...
...From this it is easy to go on to the attitude described by Thomas Brady of the New York Times: "There is a good deal of loose and unthinking talk in Algiers about how the best way to settle the problem is 'to kill three million' Moslems with mass weapons...
...To cite one case: editions of Le Monde and two other Paris papers were seized in Algeria because they reported the machine-gunning of a seven-year-old girl by paratroopers searching the Algiers Casbah...
...if they survive this, they are turned loose—or they "commit suicide," or are "shot while attempting to escape...
...Finally, the ICFTU Information Bulletin of April 15, 1957 reported: "The ICFTU general secretary has written to the director-general of the International Labor Office calling his attention to the latest repressive measures of the French authorities which have deprived the Algerian trade union movement organized in the UGTA of the last possibilities of carrying on normal trade union activities...
...the taking of hostages...
...Soviet troops in Budapest shelled buildings from which shots had been fired, or where revolutionaries might be hiding...
...Most Americans neither knew nor cared about events in Algeria, any more than they had known or cared what was happening in Eastern Europe in 1945...
...Jacques Peyrega, dean of the law faculty of the University of Algiers, revealed that he had himself seen a paratrooper shoot an unarmed Arab in the back —and for his honesty was prevented from continuing as dean...
...There are no completely reliable casualty figures for either Hungary or Algeria...
...The European colony holds most of the best land, confiscated from the Arab peasantry...
...a few days later they thundered through its streets, drowning the Hungarian revolution in blood...
...This last process, the "corvee du bois," is attested to by many witnesses quoted in Simon's book, in Temoignage Chretien, and elsewhere...
...a number have been priests and nuns...
...The government tried to bankrupt Le Monde by refusing to let it raise its price to meet expenses...
...Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, the French Defense Ministry, French writers and journalists, and the Algerian revolutionists, some reasonably accurate estimate can be made...
...Even there, however, they are not safe...
...There is not one item in the Geneva Conventions which the French authorities in Algeria have not systematically violated...
...After mentioning previous ICFTU protests to the International Labor Organization against violations of trade union rights in Algeria, the Bulletin added: "The ICFTU general secretary says that this latest information makes it clear that trade union freedom in Algeria has, in fact, been completely suppressed...
...With equal accuracy, the French claim that Algeria is an integral part of metropolitan France, and its inhabitants French citizens...
...The French victims of this repression have been drawn chiefly from the professions...
...The colonists' lobby has great power in the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies, where its funds are well integrated with those of such powerful industrial groups as the Comite des Forges...
...Another trade union federation, the unaffiliated but anti-Communist USTA, received similar treatment...
...And it shared with Suez responsibility for the failure of many Asians and Africans to feel the same horror as we did at the Hungarian events...
...There are great material interests at stake in Algeria...
...Philip shows how the interest of the colons determines even the nature of Algerian agriculture...
...Both groups look back nostalgically on the Vichy regime...
...Just as the Southern Negro may improve his lot by moving North, the Algerian Moslem can find a better job and more of the rights of man by migrating to European France...
...The Conventions require that the "wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for...
...Servan-Schreiber, Simon, Le Monde, the New York Times, and other similar sources give detailed accounts of the "field telephone," in which a prisoner is subjected to repeated electric shocks, usually to the genitals...
...This is not the official French position, but it influences many French officials...
...The uncontrolled part of the Paris press has repeatedly been banned in Algeria for carrying "objectionable" material...
...Prisoners are held until the desired information has been extracted from them...
...Thereafter, despite protests from the ICFTU, there were repeated raids, arrests, confiscation of trade union funds, and suppressions of trade union publications...
...Others believed that France was in the wrong and that Algeria must eventually become independent, but refused to regard the Algerian evil as comparable in character or scale with the Hungarian...
...Why the figure three million is chosen nobody seems to know, but it is a standard conversation piece...
...They do at least give Algerians the same franchise as Europeans—if and when elections are held...
...On that same day, November 1, 1956, the Algerian revolution was two years old...
...The local press has been overwhelmingly under the influence of these ultra-reactionary elements...
...In this sense, there is validity in the remark Servan-Schreiber quotes from one French officer, "Treat every Arab as a suspect, a possible fellagha, a potential terrorist—because that, my dear sir, is the truth...
...Austria feared that the Russians would commit similar outrages during the Hungarian revolution...
...Prohibited in respect to these non-combatants, at any time or place, are acts of violence, murder, mutilation, and torture...
...The commission's report remained in the hands of the government for months...
...Some who did—especially government officials and newspaper editors—talked about "unity of the free world" and urged that we give France our full support...
...The Ku Klux type organizations they have formed to terrorize the Arabs have ties with groups in the police, army, and civil administration...
...at one point there were that many Algerian fugitives in little Tunisia alone, and an almost equal number in Morocco...
...there has been no mass roundup of intellectuals as such...
...the Sakiet bombing of refugee camps and Red Cross and Red Crescent relief trucks was only the worst of a number of French violations of Tunisian territory...
...It may be applied to those who fail to talk even under torture, to those whose bodies show the effects of torture so clearly that it is impolitic to let them return to society, or simply as a means of terror...
...The Russians claimed that their intervention in Hungary was help to an allied nation which had requested it...
...Nevertheless, Claude Bourdet's Ob-servateur, Servan-Schreiber's Express, Temoignage Chretien, and several other papers have had issues confiscated...
...The latest reforms give an "autonomy" less than that of most American cities, since it does not include such fields as police and education...
...and passing sentences and carrying out executions without previous judgment of a regularly constituted court affording all judicial guarantees to the defendant...
...The policing of the city was entrusted to these men, many of them Foreign Legionnaires formerly in Hitler's SS, because of their dependable ruthlessness...
...The Cardinals and Archbishops of France felt it necessary to warn in unmistakable terms against "complete disregard of all respect for the human personality" and "bloody manifestations of counter-terrorism...
...In Algeria, the slaughter of whole French families, including little children, and the bombing of public places, are in their way comparable to the acts of the French regime, though they have claimed far fewer victims...
...On June 20, UGTA national headquarters in Algiers was bombed by French terrorists...
...The other, winner of various French literary awards, was forced into hiding until French writers' organizations got him permission to seek refuge abroad...
...In one case a leading Algerian lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, committed suicide after some weeks in the hands of the parachutists...
...Imprisonment without trial is an essential part of the Communist system of government...
...Now the workers' councils are suppressed altogether...
...it is just as important an aspect of French rule in Algeria...
...When Algerian workers have struck, they have been rounded up at gunpoint and herded to work in Army trucks...
...It did not go unmentioned in the United Nations...
...year by year during the century and a quarter of French rule, per capita wheat production has gone down, while large areas have been devoted to the production of wine which the Moslem peasants who produce it would not drink even if they could afford to...
...The relation of France's Algerian policy to fascism does not stop in Algeria...
...With homes and crops destroyed, the men of these destroyed villages have no possibility of resuming a peaceful life...
...The mass arrest of intellectuals in Algeria has been described in the Times by Brady and Homer Bigart...
...Leaders of the workers' councils, which led the general strike after the fighting ended, have met similar fates...
...Hungary's Janos Kadar and France's Robert Lacoste are both reticent on such matters...
...This has some factual basis...
...In Algeria, as in Hungary, there have been rebel atrocities too...
...Torture has long since become standard operating procedure in Algeria, publicly denied and privately defended by responsible French officials...
...There is probably some prop-agandistic distortion in both the French and the Algerian figures, but using only the minimum numbers on both sides for purposes of comparison, MAURICE J. GOLDBLOOM, formerly associate editor of Common Sense and once editor of the foreign affairs department of the American Jewish Committee, has served in the U.S...
...The torture of prisoners in Hungary and other Communist countries is well known...
...The dominant groups among the French colons in Algeria have always been pillars of French reaction and anti-Semitism...
...French policy has so solidified Algerian Moslem opposition that every Moslem organization and every politically conscious individual Moslem will probably at least sympathize with the revolution...
...It is not feasible to compare the number of prisoners held in Hungary with the number in Algeria...
...The presence of these million colons produces complications in Algeria which do not exist in Hungary—but it no more justifies French rule over Algeria than the presence of German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia justified Hitler's conquest of those countries...
...And there is not even a suggestion that the Algerians, as a fifth of the population of metropolitan France, might be permitted to elect anywhere near that proportion of its parliament...
...It enjoys preferences in employment and the advantage of exploiting Arab labor kept cheap by permanent mass unemployment, and receives the full benefit of the French government's investments in the country...
...In Algeria, France has assumed that any labor organization is sure to become a center of political resistance, and that all intellectuals and members of the liberal professions are potential revolutionary leaders...
...But Lacoste has stated that prisoners and detainees— most of the leaders of the Algerian people—will not be allowed to take part in these elections...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
