Henri Alleg

Henri Alleg
( Fête de l'Humanité , 2008)

Henri Alleg (born July 20, 1921 in London as Harry Salem ; died July 17, 2013 in Paris ) was a French-Algerian communist journalist and fighter for Algerian independence.

Life

Harry Salem's Polish-Jewish parents moved from Great Britain to France in the early 1920s. In 1939 he moved to French Algeria , which was administered from Vichy France during the German occupation of France and conquered by the Allies in 1943. Alleg became a member of the Communist Party of Algeria (PCA) in 1942 . In 1946 he married Gilberte Serfaty, with whom he had two children, André (* 1946) and the later philosopher Jean Salem . He worked since 1950 under the name Alleg as an editor and from 1951 as editor-in-chief for the daily Alger républicain , which agitated against the colonial rule of France in the Maghreb . After the outbreak of theDuring the Algerian War of 1954, the newspaper and the Algerian KP was banned in 1955. Alleg went into hiding in 1956, but continued to write for the French communist newspaper l'Humanité . During the Battle of Algiers in 1957 he was captured by Jacques Massus paratroopers .

Torture and La Question

After a month of torture and interrogation, Alleg was transferred to a detention center and then to the civil prison in Algiers, where he secretly drafted a report on the torture, which he smuggled out through his lawyers. He saw Maurice Audin in captivity shortly before his death.

The La Question report focuses on the portrayal of torture with electric shocks , fire and waterboarding , the injection of a truth serum and the description of the psychological pressure caused by the threats to Alleg's wife and children . A first preprint was supposed to be published in L'Humanité in July 1957, but fell victim to press censorship and the confiscation of the relevant edition. Alleg was handed over to a civil court after public protests, possibly saving his life. Jérôme Lindon , the publisher of the resistance publishing house Éditions de Minuit , published the document as a book on February 12, 1958. Over 60,000 copies were sold within two weeks. Despite protests from André Malraux , François Mauriac and Jean-Paul Sartre , the book was banned on March 27 and the remaining copies of the first edition were confiscated. The reason given was the undermining of the military will and the defense of France ( participation à une entreprise de démoralisation de l'armée, ayant pour objet de nuire à la défense nationale ). The book was reprinted in Switzerland, and 162,000 copies had been sold in France by the end of 1958.

Despite the censorship, La Question continued to be printed and distributed in France. The French government contradicted Alleg's account and exonerated the accused officers.

The report, kept in a sober language, opened up a glimpse of the methods of combating underground and resistance movements by the state, later known as the “ French doctrine ” . This included, above all, the so-called " disappearance " of suspects, which included the massive, often secretly carried out arrest of suspect civilians, their systematic torture and often subsequent illegal killing. Despite the considerable domestic political criticism, France exported these methods, which were largely developed by the officer Roger Trinquier , by sending military advisers to Latin America after the war in Algeria . From the 1960s to the 1980s, they played a central role in the forced disappearance and murder of tens of thousands of people ( Desaparecidos ) by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile , the Argentine military dictatorship and the military governments of numerous other states .

In France, especially in the state apparatus, it was long considered taboo to speak of the “ Algerian War ” (Guerre d'Algérie) at all . It was not until 1999 that a law was passed that officially allowed the expression Guerre d'Algérie . A social debate about the systematic human rights violations - reported by Henri Alleg also by many other witnesses - 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. Some of the methods described by Alleg are still used to this day in the fight against resistance movements, for example in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. The government that emerged from the earlier resistance movement FLN of the Algerian war - which had driven Alleg into exile in 1965 - fought various Islamist terror and guerrilla groups in a " dirty war " ( Le Monde Diplomatique ).

Detention and return to France

Alleg was sentenced to ten years imprisonment by a military court in Algiers and imprisoned in a prison in Brittany . With the help of Breton communists, he escaped from custody in October 1961 and stayed in Czechoslovakia . After Algeria's independence , he was able to return to Algiers in 1962, where he was again able to work as a journalist and politician.

In 1965 he was forced to leave Algeria by a new Algerian regime under Houari Boumedienne and moved to France. There he was still journalistic, journalistic and politically active in the French Communist Party (PCF), wrote various political books, edited a book about the Algerian war and wrote an autobiography. In 2001 he testified as a witness against Paratrooper General Paul Aussaresses for his involvement in the torture in the Algerian war.

Fonts (selection)

• Mémoire algérienne: souvenirs de luttes et d'espérances . Stock, Paris 2005.
• Requiem pour l'Oncle Sam . Messidor, Paris 1991.
• URSS et les juifs . Messidor, Paris 1989.
• (Ed. :) La Guerre d'Algérie . 3 volumes. Temps actuels, Paris 1981.
• Prisonniers de guerre . Editions de Minuit , Paris 1961.
  • Prisoners of war . From d. Franz. Transl. by Elisabeth Eichholtz. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1962.
• La Question . Introduction v. Jean-Paul Sartre. Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1958.
  • The torture . With a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugen Kogon . K. Desch, Vienna 1958.
  • The torture . Translated from the French by Albert Feith. Publisher: Association of the German Press. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1958

Web links

Commons : Henri Alleg  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Henri Alleg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Henri Alleg in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Henri Alleg in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marc Zitzmann: The writer Henri Alleg died. Torture victims and fighters for the truth . In: NZZ , July 18, 2013.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Henri Alleg . In: The Daily Telegraph , July 23, 2013.
3. ↑ Biographie de Gilberte Serfaty, épouse Salem (Henri Alleg) , from: Alger republicain, accessed on August 8, 2013
4. ^ ^{A b} Algerian revolutionary journalist Henri Alleg to discuss torture in war. Tuesday April 17, 2007 from Vassar, accessed August 23, 2013
5. ↑ La Question. Un film against the torture pendant la guerre d'Algérie. In: Canope . January 2006, archived from the original on March 13, 2013 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 . 
6. ^ Books and Authors. New York Times (1857 - Current file); ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851-2002), pg. 27
7. ↑ Lewis Nichols: In and Out of Books . New York Times. January 25, 1959.
8. ^ Change Of Mind By Algerian Leaders Reported Readiness For Talks (News) , The Times, Nov. 18, 1959, p. 10
9. ↑ A Tactical Success For M. Gaillard Independents Brought To Heel . The Times, March 29, 1958, p. 5
10. ^ Marie-Monique Robin: Death Squads - How France Exported Torture and Terror. In: Arte program archive . September 8, 2004, archived from the original on July 21, 2012 ; accessed on March 9, 2018 . 
11. ↑ 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 "
12. ↑ www.sehepunkte.de
13. ↑ The dirty war. In: 3sat.online. May 16, 2001, archived from the original on February 13, 2005 ; Retrieved December 16, 2008 . 
14. ↑ Algeria's dirty war. Secret service agents unpack. (No longer available online.) In: Le Monde Diplomatique. March 17, 2004, archived from the original on June 4, 2008 ; Retrieved December 16, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
15. ^ Algeria Watch. Algeria: The murder machine (PDF; 890 kB)