MARSEILLE, FRANCE // Fifty years after a peaceful demonstration by Algerians in Paris led to a massacre that left hundreds dead, France stands accused of being in official denial of an event that casts lasting shame on the country.
Algeria yesterday issued a new stamp marking the anniversary of the slaughter of protesters, which occurred on October 17, 1961, nine months before the North African country won independence from France.
The official death count was given at the time as just three. Although subsequent statements have acknowledged the figure to be much higher, historians, human-rights activists and Muslim groups have estimated that at least 200 and perhaps many more died at the hands of police intent on avenging the murder of colleagues in the preceding months.
The Algerian stamp has a face value of 15 dinars (Dh0.76), bears the number 50 in red and white and shows the Seine with its waters reddened by the blood of people beaten to death and dumped from the bridge and the river banks.
In the background, other Algerians are seen falling from a bridge and behind that is the Eiffel Tower and flag of Algeria. The 1961 protest brought up to 30,000 men, women and children, predominantly from France's Muslim population in the suburbs, on to the streets of Paris.
The immediate grievance was a curfew imposed by the police, then headed by the Paris regional prefect, Maurice Papon, but stalled negotiations on Algerian independence also weighed heavily on the minds of Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) leaders when they called for the rally.
Papon, whose curfew had the declared aim of "stopping the criminal activities of terrorists", ordered his men to halt the demonstration as it neared the banks of the Seine.
Officers, their passions inflamed by a series of attacks that had killed 29 officers in France in the months leading to the demonstration, allegedly used pickaxe handles and rifle butts as they stormed into the ranks of protesters.
The violence erupted in grand boulevards and at Parisian locations familiar to millions of tourists. "I arrived at L'Opéra at around 6.30pm," said one witness, named Ouaz, in an account published by the Collectif 17 Octobre 61 group. "Armed police were waiting for us with batons to force us down a long tunnel that connected the metro station to the police station... We were scared."
A historian, Olivier Lecour Grandmaison, said officers were "animated by a spirit of revenge … and felt covered by their superiors".
Mr Grandmaison does not believe the government would make official recognition of the massacre "given the position of Nicolas Sarkozy on colonisation", a reference to the president's past comments that while France "took" as a colonial power, it also gave.
Although the official archives have never been opened for public inspection, it was widely assumed that the casualty figurers given at the time were grotesquely false. One inquiry in the 1990s found there had been 48 drownings on the night of October 17, and more than 140 other deaths of Algerians in the weeks before and after that date, with 110 of their bodies also being recovered from the Seine.
A discreet plaque, installed on the Saint-Michel bridge in 2001 by the socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë, commemorates the events, as do two new films, Yasmina Adi's Here We Drown Algerians, and Jacques Panije's documentary, October in Paris, which uses footage from the demonstration.
Among commemorations yesterday, the Algerian ambassador to Paris, Missoum Sbih, and Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, joined Mr Delanoë on the same bridge and heard the mayor describe the events as political and moral error, "a crime covered up or decided on by the French authorities".
Another historian, Jean-Luc Einaudi, author of the 1991 book The Battle of Paris, has estimated the number of dead at 300 or more, but says damningly that the official version of events is essentially "as expressed by Maurice Papon, according to whom there were three deaths caused by police officers acting in legitimate self-defence".
In 1997, Papon was tried for crimes against humanity, but in connection with the deportation of Jews during wartime, when he was secretary general of police in Bordeaux, and not the events of October 1961. He was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, but served less than three before being freed on health grounds. He died in 2007.
[ crandall@thenational.ae ]
* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse