© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. INTRODUCTION E N THE COURSE OF A discussion about the Algerian war, a disen­ chanted man in his twenties who worked in the mailroom of a gov­ Iernment institution where I had been employed in the early years of independence when I was still a student said to me: “The French army broke my testicles! And here I am recording mail day in, day out.” A shy young woman at the time, I had not quite grasped the enormity of the pain and suffering that this man had experienced, nor had I understood his trauma, although I glimpsed the depth of the anger that gleamed in his eyes. It was my first encounter with a person who had been tortured dur­ ing the war. I often remember that look. Years later, it helped me to un­ derstand the sexual core of torture and, by implication, the silence in which it had been wrapped in Algeria: that men, just like women, had been systematically raped. In the summer of 2001, while I was in Algiers carrying out interviews for another research project, two publications appeared. The first one was by an Algerian woman, Louisette Ighilahriz, a former revolutionary, who broke silence about the torture and rape she had endured during her in­ terrogation by Colonel Graziani and his men in 1957.1 This was the first time since the independence of Algeria that a woman wrote about her sex­ ual abuse at the hands of paratroopers. The other book was by a retired French general, Paul Aussaresses,2 who not only admitted to having tor­ tured numerous Algerians, but also described the methods he used in a detached manner, expressing no regrets and making no apology. A num­ ber of war memoirs had already been published by retired Algerian gen­ erals, to which were added young deserters’ accounts of torture commit­ ted by the Algerian military against Islamist suspects, and confessions to assassinations by former Islamists. I grew intrigued by these tales of tor­ ture and war from both sides of the Mediterranean and was unsure of their significance. In France, Aussaresses’ confession created a stir, sparking a flurry of legal actions against him, and renewed interest in a chapter of French his­ tory that government and public opinion had wished to bury in silence. It occurred to me that the Evian Accords that put an end to the Algerian War in 1962 had not mentioned torture, but had declared a moratorium on legal actions for all acts of violence committed during the war. There For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 2 INTRODUCTION was to be no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. I thought again of the man in the mailroom. Oddly, writers dealing with French veterans of the Algerian War often think that Algerian combatants had an easier time of it.3 They claim that Algerian combatants did not suffer, as French soldiers allegedly did, from having to keep their involvement in a problematic war silent. Unlike their French counterparts, the story goes, Algerian combatants returned home victorious and were celebrated for their success. They were able to put the war behind them and move on with their lives, while French soldiers re­ turned to a life in the shadows, resented by their society for having de­ famed it, and abandoned by a government that had failed to treat them in the manner that it did veterans of previous wars. Perhaps this is a case of the grass looking greener on the other side, or a circuitous way of be­ moaning defeat. The memory of torture and other atrocities has fed a steady stream of French narratives that unburden the self as they shed light on the core of a dishonorable war. Memory retrieval has been aided by professional studies made possible by the opening of the military archives in 1993.4 The cumulative effect of this speaking and writing about the war has re­ sulted in a trivialization of the significance of torture as glossy pictures turn war into an orgiastic intellectual entertainment.5 Speaking authori­ tatively about both sides of the war, a new generation of French histori­ ans felt entitled to change its name and the identity of its initiators: It was a “war of independence” they asserted, not a “revolution” as Algerians who won it have claimed; and nationalists are turned into “independen­ tistas.”6 Thus a long-standing monopoly over meaning enables the em­ pire to reproduce itself by deconstructing itself with one hand, and re­ composing itself with the other. In this climate of recovery of the colonial past, French legislators passed a law on February 23, 2005, that attempted to rehabilitate colonialism by proposing (in Article 4) that school curricula present it as a positive sys­ tem of rule, especially in North Africa.7 They also rehabilitated formerly convicted and deported citizens (an oblique reference to members of the clandestine Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) opposed to the indepen­ dence of Algeria who became eligible for monetary compensation.8 The management of what French historians have of late called “la mémoire,” has become a political affair.9 Torture and related atrocities cast serious doubt on the plausibility of the ongoing revisionist history of “empire,” French as well as British, which seeks to extol the benefits of colonial domination for the colonized and downplay its cost as collateral dam­ age.10 This relegitimation and rehabilitation of the French “civilizing mis­ sion” elides a discussion of whether the colonial empire was inevitable. It eschews the fundamental core of colonial ventures: the extension or For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. INTRODUCTION 3 preservation of the interests of the colonists not the natives. Had colonial systems been motivated by an alleged gift of “civilization,” a cultural charity, it is incomprehensible that the gift failed to reach the majority of natives. In this book, I take a different approach. I examine torture as an ana­ lytical category and practice (that is, a conscious and rule-bound activity) through which to understand how, between 1954 and 1962, the milita­ rized colonial state normalized terror to forestall the collapse of the em­ pire in an age of decolonization. In tracing the etiology and methods of state terrorism, I explore the justifications that allowed for the routiniza­ tion of torture in a “total” war of decolonization-recolonization. From this perspective, the book seeks to uncover torture’s layered meanings for practitioners and victims; the role it played in techniques of population screening11 and social engineering; and its use as a catalyst for imperial identity formation and crystallization. Torture was not, as was often claimed by military officers, an epiphenomenon of the war. It was central to the army’s defense of a colonial empire in its waning years. The sys­ tematic use of torture was the logical outcome of revolutionary-war the­ ory (guerre révolutionnaire) and doctrine developed in the 1950s by a group of veterans of colonial wars, especially in Indochina. Many had also fought in World War II. They were men who had suffered a loss of honor and relevance in fast-changing postwar France. The Algerian War offered them a last opportunity at recouping both. In this context, systematic tor­ ture was not just an instance of violence committed by uncontrolled sol­ diers; it was part and parcel of an ideology of subjugation that went be­ yond Algeria’s borders.12 Algeria became a testing ground for fighting “revolutionary” wars in Africa and Latin America.13 Torture was intimately linked to colonial history and to the nature of the colonial state. It had been used in the aftermath of the invasion of Al­ geria in 1830 when rape, beatings with a matraque, exposure of naked bodies, and starvation were frequent.14 Thereafter, it was not uncommon at the hands of colonial policemen and gendarmes who used the methods of electricity and water on communists and nationalists. But it had not risen to the level of a system as it did after 1954.15 Rather, it was part of a general pattern of police brutality exercised on a native population that lacked the legal protection enjoyed by French colonists. Algeria was invaded in 1830, but French control was not established securely until the 1870s. Resistance was first organized by Emir Abd-El- Kader, who set up the first native government since the incorporation of Algeria into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. After his defeat in 1844, a series of tribal-based uprisings took place episodically until 1871, when the last one of significance was crushed in the Grande Kaby­ lie. After each uprising, land was confiscated by the colonial state, and For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 4 INTRODUCTION heavy fines exacted from the insurgents. The military administered the countryside through the Arab Bureaus until their demise in the 1870s. Throughout this period, tensions arose between the settlers who had been given land confiscated from the native population, and the military.