France acknowledged for the first time it was responsible for systematic torture during the Algerian war of independence in the mid-1950s.
President Emmanuel Macron said on September 13 that Maurice Audin, a communist pro-independence activist who disappeared in 1957, “died under torture stemming from the system instigated while Algeria was part of France.”
Macron, who paid a visit to Audin’s widow on Thursday, was also set to announce “the opening of archives on the subject of disappeared civilians and soldiers, both French and Algerian.”
Macron told Audin’s widow: “The only thing I am doing is to acknowledge the truth.”
Josette Audin told reporters at her apartment in the east Paris suburb of Bagnolet: “I never thought this day would come.”
Starting with former President Jacques Chirac in 2003, French leaders have at various points denounced the suffering that the occupation of Algeria caused the indigenous population, before walking back or tempering their statements.
But none until Macron, however, acknowledged France’s responsibility in the torture of Algerian detainees.
During the war, the French government censored newspapers, books, and films that claimed it had used torture. After the war, atrocities committed by its troops remained a taboo subject in French society.
Rim-Sarah Alouane, an international human rights jurist and a PhD candidate in public law at Toulouse University, told Al Jazeera that justice was finally being served.
Source: Aljazeera
