Action directe (underground organization)

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The Action directe (AD) was a left-wing extremist terrorist organization in France , among other things, for the murder of General Rene Audran and Renault boss Georges Besse was responsible. The group was founded in 1979 and was broken up in 1987. Their self-designation is derived from the practice of direct action .

history

background

At the end of the 1970s, there were three types of terrorism in France: the separatist in Brittany , Corsica and the Basque Country , the Middle Eastern and the radical left through the Action directe (AD). The AD emerged from a coalition of autonomists , anarchists and Spanish emigrants who had fled the Franco regime , not directly from the student movement of 1968.

Radicalization and actions

Similar radical tones were struck as in Italy ( Brigate Rosse ) and West Germany ( RAF ), but in actions the propagated potential for violence was only expressed later and not as pronounced as there. During the years 1979 to 1980 the AD caused a sensation with nightly bomb attacks and machine gun salvos against buildings. The aim was public institutions such as the headquarters of the counter-espionage authority DST , the development aid ministry , the gendarmerie or the transport ministry. The first murder attempt occurred in 1983.

Only later did the AD become radicalized with targeted attacks on René Audran in 1985 and Georges Besse in 1986. René Audran was shot on January 25, 1985 in front of his house in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Paris . George Besse was shot dead on the street in Paris on November 17, 1986. General Audran held a high position in the French Ministry of Defense and was responsible for a number of arms deliveries to Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran .

The bomb attack on Rhein-Main Air Base in 1985 was carried out jointly by the West German RAF and Action directe. In addition, commands from both groups named themselves after members of the other organization. No further cooperation between the two groups has been proven. However, the RAF's contacts with Action Directe were probably more intense than with any other group. On January 15, 1986, the RAF and the AD published a joint ideological document: "The essential tasks of the communist guerrillas in Western Europe" .

When the group first took public action in the early 1980s, the socialist government and President François Mitterrand initially reacted relatively cautiously: unlike in the Federal Republic of Germany, neither the political elite nor the public saw the state as a direct threat to terrorist groups; after all, the French communists were involved in government at the time. In addition, France took in leftists who were persecuted in Italy at that time in order to protect them from state persecution. All of this resulted in anarchist and other left-wing prisoners benefiting from an amnesty and being released in the fall of 1981 , including Jean-Marc Rouillan , a leader of Action directe.

However, when Action Directe commandos were responsible for the first deaths from 1983/84, the public in particular kept their distance: The big left-liberal daily newspapers such as Le Monde and Liberation condemned Action Directe and criticized the lack of reference to the working class , in which Name the group allegedly acted. After the murders of René Audran in January 1985 and Renault boss Georges Besse in November 1986, the state also gave up its previous stance on the Action Directe: the police wrote the lead group around Jean-Marc Rouillan and Nathalie Ménigon to be wanted .

Strike against the core group

A few months later, a major blow was struck against Action directe: On February 21, 1987, the founders of the group, besides Rouillan and Ménigon, Régis Schleicher , Joëlle Aubron and Georges Cipriani were arrested on a farm near Orléans , and Action directe fell apart.

On November 27, 1987, Max Frérot was arrested in Lyon . He was later sentenced to life imprisonment for various terrorist offenses. On June 12, 2007, after years of trial, Frérot was awarded € 12,000 in compensation because he was repeatedly treated in a humiliating manner while in custody.

Detention actions and conditions

A hunger strike by prisoners was called off in late January 2001. Rouillan was transferred to a prison near his relatives, Ménigon and Cipriani received medical help for the consequences of long-term isolation . On the part of the supporters and prisoners, this hunger strike was rated as a partial success. In 2004 Aubron was released from prison for health reasons, she died of cancer in 2006. In the same year the remaining inmates applied for parole after serving a minimum sentence of 18 years. However, it was denied to them for lack of remorse. Ménigon was released on August 2, 2008. Two years later, Frérot and Schleicher were released. Cipriani received a release from prison in 2010 that allowed him to leave prison by the hour. After Cipriani was released in 2011, Rouillan was also freed in 2012.

Sympathizers in Germany

In Germany in 1988 were letters claiming the arson attacks on the Franz Heinrich Ulrich house (Kronberg / Ts.) And the office of the company Renault -Landmaschinen in Rosbach called support of the Action directe.

literature

  • Michael Y. Dartnell: Action Directe: Ultra Left Terrorism in France 1979-1987. Frank Cass Publishers, London 1995, ISBN 0714642126 .
  • Roland Jacquard: La longue traque d'Action directe. Albin Michel, Paris 1987, ISBN 2226031464 .
  • Philip Gursch: Revolution as Tradition: The Action Directe in France. In: Alexander Straßner (ed.): Social revolutionary terrorism: theory, ideology, case studies, future scenarios. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15578-4 , pp. 177-188.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^  Matthias Naß: Terror against NATO. In: zeit.de. August 23, 1985. Retrieved December 8, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Herbert Henzler: Always at the limit. Ullstein eBooks, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8437-0088-7 , p. 142. Limited preview in the Google book search
  3. ↑ NATO - the highest form of the bourgeoisie . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1985 ( online ).
  4. ^ Armin Pfahl-Traughber : Left-wing extremism in Germany. 2014, p. 211
  5. ↑ We can kill anyone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1989 ( online ).
  6. ↑ David Styan: France and Iraq. IBTauris, 2006, ISBN 978-1-84511-045-1 , p. 143. Restricted preview in Google Book Search
  7. ↑ Court judgment of June 12, 2007 ( Memento of February 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Relatives Info No. 242 of February 16, 2001, p. 12
  9. ↑ www.dw-world.de
  10. ↑ www.lemonde.fr
  11. ↑ www.lemonde.fr
  12. ↑ www.lemonde.fr