French doctrine

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The French doctrine is a collection of methods developed by France and used for the first time in the Algerian War in the 1950s, which are used by the state or its security forces ( military , police or secret services ) to systematically combat militant resistance groups or opposition groups . It includes, among other things, the mostly secretly executed mass arrests, systematic torture and illegal killing of suspects, the so-called " enforced disappearance "". The French military fought with these methods militarily successful in the underground fighting liberation movement FLN , which force the state independence of Algeria wanted to force of France. However, the discovery of the human rights violating methods with which the military had decimated the FLN sparked outrage in parts of the French public and subsequently led to a significant domestic and foreign political weakening of the country. On November 1, 1954, the Algerian War began; direct negotiations between the French government and the FLN began on May 20, 1961; on March 18, 1962 the Treaties of Évian were signed and on September 25, 1962 the Democratic Republic of Algeria was proclaimed.

The doctrine is thematically closely related to the concept of dirty war and belongs to the military-theoretical field of asymmetrical warfare . Such methods are since then in many other countries in the context of so-called counter-insurgency measures (Engl. Counterinsurgency ) been used. Massively and with a total of around 400,000 civilian deaths, they were used in Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to suppress broad sections of the population. French veterans of the Algerian war played a key role as advisors and trainers for the military and secret services there, see also Operation Condor . Such crimes mostly went unpunished until the end of the 20th century for a variety of reasons. In the new millennium, developments at the national and international level have led to an increase in the prosecution of such human rights violations .

Drawing by Roger Trinquier, paratrooper officer and theorist of French doctrine.

Development and characteristics

The French officer Roger Trinquier (1908–1986) developed the doctrine and wrote a book about it called La Guerre moderne . In terms of military strategy , it addresses the case that the opponent of its own forces is not another state, represented by a regular army , but an underground or guerrilla movement whose members are recruited from the civilian population and are therefore difficult to identify. The background and motivation of their development was that France was confronted with militant liberation and independence movements in its colonies from around the end of the 1940s , especially in the Indochina War and the Algerian War . Because of their extensive roots in the local civilian population and their character as guerrilla movements, whose fighters went underground when necessary, these opponents could hardly be fought with conventional military methods. Such military scenarios and the corresponding military strategies are now under the terms asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency (Engl., On German counter-insurgency ) is known.

The officer Trinquier was one of the first to recognize the impotence of conventional military strategy in the face of such situations and subsequently developed methods that he collectively called modern warfare and which in his 1961 book La guerre moderne ( French , in German, for example: The modern war , or Modern Warfare ). Because the French military quickly adapted the methods and radically implemented them for the first time in Algeria, they became known as the French Doctrine .

The main features of the French doctrine and of Trinquier's modern warfare are:

  • Predominantly nocturnal, mostly unofficial or secret arrests of people who are suspected of belonging to the group to be fought. This is done by members of the military, police or secret police , who usually remain anonymous , in order to bring suspicious people into their own area of ​​violence (see Disappearances and Desaparecidos )
  • Systematic use of torture on the arrested person to obtain information, that is to say above all to obtain new names for other suspects who are then also to be arrested and tortured; at the same time with the aim of intimidating and deterring the resistance movement as a whole
  • Illegal killing of a large number of those arrested in order to remove the base of the resistance movement
  • Optional: Committing terrorist attacks under the “ false flag ”, that is, for acts committed by members of the security forces in the strictest of secrecy, the enemy group is deliberately falsely responsible, for example to justify an intensification of the persecution.

application

First use in the Algerian war

US Newsreel 1956: France Digs In for Total Algerian War (France digs for a total war into Algeria)

The best known, albeit not the most extensive, application of these methods took place by French paratrooper regiments ( Paras ) during the Battle of Algiers in the 1957 Algerian War and was then expanded to include all of Algeria . The 10th French paratrooper division under General Jacques Massu tried to "clean" the kasbah (old town) of the capital Algiers of insurgents from the Algerian liberation or underground movement FLN . Previously, in September 1956, the FLN had begun several heavy bomb attacks to relocate its main activity to the capital, Algiers. She expected attacks there to have a greater political impact. Among other things, an Air France office and several bars and cafés popular with the French were affected by attacks, leaving numerous dead and injured. The French countermeasures were characterized by ruthless action against the Arab civilian population, the massive use of severe torture and extrajudicial executions of FLN suspects. As a result, the FLN fought in this way was almost completely destroyed by the overwhelming killing or capture of the majority of its members.

The strategy did not bring France the hoped-for success, but led to defeat. After the inhumanity of the methods had become known at home and internationally, massive political protests led to a significant weakening of France's domestic and foreign policy position with regard to the Algerian question. Prominent French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Algerian-born Albert Camus have publicly stated that doctrinal counter-terrorism methods are unworthy of French democracy. This contributed to the fact that France withdrew from its hitherto largest colony, Algeria, in 1962 . Algeria gained independence on July 5, 1962.

Exported to Latin America and used there in the 1970s and 1980s

The French journalist Marie-Monique Robin has published extensively to the French doctrine that even during the Algerian War from about 1959 from France to Latin America was exported, where they in the 1970s first in a big way in the military dictatorships in Chile in 1973 and Argentina from 1976 was applied. French military advisers and secret service advisors played an important role in the training of some of the secret services involved in Operation Condor , as did the US- run School of the Americas in Panama .

The background to this was that in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s almost all countries were ruled by right-wing military dictatorships, often politically supported by the USA. Almost all of them used violence to suppress the mostly left-wing opposition, some of which had organized itself in militant underground organizations such as the Argentine Montoneros , in so-called dirty wars . A common means of doing this was the secret disappearance of suspicious or even unpopular people by members of the security forces who remained anonymous. The victims were mostly tortured and humiliated while imprisoned in secret prisons , and in very many cases subsequently murdered (see Desaparecidos ). In some cases it could be sufficient for arrest and murder if the name appeared in a “suspicious” context or if the victim happened to know a (already arrested) suspect who had mentioned the name under the distress of torture. Robin found evidence and witnesses that French intelligence and military advisers in Chile and Argentina were directly and operationally involved in implementing the systems of repression. From there, the methods were in turn exported to other countries on the continent such as Honduras , Guatemala and El Salvador , for example by the Argentine secret service unit Batallón de Inteligencia 601 .

During the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 alone, up to 30,000 people disappeared in this way without a trace. According to estimates by human rights organizations, the total balance of Latin American repression policy in the 1970s and 1980s was around 50,000 murdered, 350,000 permanently "disappeared" and 400,000 prisoners.

Renewed application in Algeria by the former victims

According to widely varying estimates, between 60,000 and 150,000 people died in the Algerian civil war that began in 1991 between the Algerian government and various Islamist groups. The Algerian government, which sees itself in the tradition of the underground movement FLN of the 1950s (see above), applied the methods of the French doctrine against its own people. These processes have not yet been clarified; At the end of the conflict, the government staged a general amnesty in 2005 , which was intended to put an end to the events of this period without any efforts to clarify the situation .

More cases

The basic methods of the doctrine are still used today in asymmetrical conflicts, i.e. in cases where a state or a regular army is faced with an asymmetrical conflict situation with opposing underground fighters. A selection of cases is presented in the Dirty War article . Because of the above-described dramatic political disadvantages that France experienced as a result of these militarily "successful" activities in the Algerian war becoming known, the strictest secrecy of such measures became a central feature for later users.

High-ranking representatives of the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983), trained by French officers in the doctrine, consistently contested until the end of their rule and for a long time afterwards, with the "disappearance" of up to 30,000 people (" Desaparecidos ") for which they were responsible. to have even the slightest thing to do. The Argentine ex-dictator Jorge Rafael Videla only admitted in court in 2012 that his government had actually been responsible for the clandestine violent "disappearances" and the subsequent murder of thousands of people, but presented this as a "necessary military means" at the time.

CIA's Phoenix Program in the Vietnam War

The Phoenix program of the US secret service CIA during the Vietnam War from around 1968 onwards was also inspired by Trinquier's methods . Its aim was to identify members of the FNL ( Vietcong ) resistance movement in South Vietnam and to capture or kill them. Evan J. Parker, a senior officer on the program, had worked closely with Trinquier during the French Indochina War in the 1950s, and the teachings of his book became one of the foundations of the program. Barton Osborne, a Phoenix officer, testified to the US Congress that he had witnessed cases of torture, such as the one in which a six-inch wooden pin was driven through the ear of a suspect and into the brain. In his year and a half at Phoenix, "not a single suspect survived an interrogation." Then-CIA director William Colby testified that the program resulted in the deaths of 20,000 civilians; the South Vietnamese government estimated the number at around 40,000.

Long-term consequences

The events in France are taboo

In France , especially in the state apparatus, it was long considered taboo to speak of the “ Algerian War ” ( Guerre d'Algérie ) at all . Rather, one spoke euphemistically of "événements d'Algérie" (for example: events in Algeria). It was not until 1999 that a law was passed that officially allowed the expression Guerre d'Algérie . Part of this repression was that the 1961 massacre in Paris , in which it is estimated that at least 200 Algerians were killed, was not officially investigated until 1998. A noteworthy social debate about the French doctrine, i.e. the systematic use of torture, illegal executions and other war crimes against Algerians of non-European descent during the war, took place for the first time in the years 2000 to 2002. Especially in conservative circles, the events are still often negated or played down.

Legal classification / further development of international law

The building of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has been able to prosecute enforced disappearances committed since 2002 internationally.

Because of their political explosiveness and the at least partial illegality, such methods are mostly used in the strictest of secrecy , so their full extent is usually rarely or only with a long delay known. Because of the massive state human rights violations against civilians, which because of the procedure in principle include the torture and murder of a large number of innocents as military " collateral damage ", such a procedure is now often referred to as state terrorism or also as state terror .

With the gradual end of the dictatorship phase in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, many countries, under pressure from the military, initially passed extensive amnesty laws that made criminal prosecution within these countries practically impossible, such as the Argentine Closing Line Act . At the same time, in the second half of the 20th century, international law ( international law ) did not in fact provide for any means of prosecuting crimes such as torture, the systematic disappearance of people or extrajudicial executions outside the country of the crime itself, e.g. through the courts of another country . As a result, the events in Latin America had no consequences for the perpetrators for a long time, as they had little or nothing to fear in their home countries. However, this has fundamentally changed in the meantime. In many Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Chile , the relevant events have now been and are being dealt with in court and many of those responsible at the time have been convicted; others, such as El Salvador were truth commissions used for their education. In France itself, these historical events have been largely ignored, socially and legally, or have been tabooed until recently . In other cases, such as after the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, such incidents were subsequently declared to be over by state general amnesties without any efforts to clarify the situation.

The unsatisfactory situation - with regard to impunity for the perpetrators - in the 1980s and 1990s led to considerable international political and legal efforts to make such crimes prosecutable under international law in the future. With the entry into force of the so-called Rome Statute in 2002, which forms the international legal basis of the International Criminal Court in The Hague , enforced disappearance was codified as a crime against humanity for the first time in international law . In addition, at about the same time as the Rome Statute, bodies within the UN gradually developed the UN Convention against Enforced Disappearances from around 1980 , which was passed in 2006 and came into force in 2010.

Current legal processing of the events in Latin America

Protest poster against the Argentine "line of closure law ", which was finally repealed in 2006 . Since then, many former torturers, and ultimately the dictators in charge, have been sentenced to long sentences.

With a long delay, legal processing of such crimes began in many Latin American countries around the year 2000 and is still in full swing today. Numerous former officers and dictators have recently and recently been sentenced to life imprisonment, mostly for murder, torture, the disappearance of people or for crimes against humanity . This includes the then Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. In early July 2012, Videla was sentenced again to a 50-year prison term by the Buenos Aires Federal Court , but had previously served a life sentence for other offenses.

Films on the subject

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Christiane Kohser-Spohn, Frank Renken (ed.): Trauma Algerian War : For the history and processing of a taboo conflict . Campus, 2006, ISBN 3-593-37771-3 .
  2. ↑ a b c "Operation Condor" ( Memento from September 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) - Terror in the name of the state. tagesschau.de, September 12, 2008.
  3. ^ Giles Tremlett: Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorized South America. During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice. Retrieved April 13, 2021 .
  4. ↑ "When the men of the DRS grew their beards, I knew they were preparing for a 'dirty job' in which they pretended to be terrorists." Habib Souaïdia: Dirty war in Algeria. Report of an ex-officer of the special forces of the army (1992-2000) . Translation from French. Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2001, p. 113.
  5. ^ For example, the journalist and FLN fighter Henri Alleg published the report La Question in February 1958 after he himself had been imprisoned and tortured.
  6. ^ A b Marie-Monique Robin: Death Squads - How France Exported Torture and Terror. In: Arte program archive . September 8, 2004, archived from the original on September 29, 2007 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from May 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Insightful tracks in the sand. Retrieved March 12, 2019 .
  9. ↑ The dirty war. In: 3sat.online. May 16, 2001, archived from the original on February 13, 2005 ; Retrieved December 16, 2008 .
  10. ↑ Algeria's dirty war. Secret service agents unpack. In: Le Monde Diplomatique . March 17, 2004, archived from the original on June 4, 2008 ; Retrieved December 16, 2008 .
  11. ^ Algeria Watch. Algeria: The Murder Machine (PDF; 1 MB).
  12. ↑ a b Bernhard Galichon: line from above. Referendum in Algeria: crimes should be covered by general amnesty. from: Junge Welt , September 29, 2005, quoted on: Homepage of the Peace Research Group, University of Kassel, accessed on October 17, 2013.
  13. ↑ Rafael Videla Admits His Government Killed and Disappeared Thousands. ( June 18, 2012 memento on the Internet Archive ) Fox News Latino, April 16, 2012.
  14. ↑ Alexander Cockburn , Jeffrey St. Clair : Phoenix And The Anatomy Of Terror. counterpunch.org, November 8, 2001.
  15. ^ Marie-Monique Robin in the documentary Death Squads - French School. (orig. Escadrons de la mort - l'école française ).
  16. ↑ Jeremy Kuzmarov: The Phoenix Program Was a Disaster in Vietnam and Would Be in Afghanistan - And the NYT Should Know that History News Network, George Mason University , September 6, 2009.
  17. ↑ Loi n ° 99-882 ​​du 18 October 1999: Loi relative à la substitution, à l'expression "aux opérations effectuées en Afrique du Nord", de l'expression "à la guerre d'Algérie ou aux combats en Tunisie et au Maroc "
  18. ^ Daniel Mollenhauer: France and the Algerian War. In: www.sehepunkte.de. Retrieved March 12, 2019 .
  19. ^ Coalition Against Impunity. ( Memento from August 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) "Truth and Justice for the German Disappeared in Argentina".
  20. ^ "Junta members in court for child robbery", Deutsche Welle, March 1, 2011
  21. ↑ Argentina: Ex-dictators Videla and Bignone convicted of baby robbery at zeit.de, July 6, 2012 (accessed on July 6, 2012).