Algerian victims of French torture seek recognition

Mohamed Garne was 29 when he finally found his mother, Kheira, in 1989. She was living in a hole between two graves in an Algiers cemetery, which she had covered with a tarpaulin and a door. She came out of her hovel brandishing a hatchet and Mohamed cried out: "I am your son." "If you are really my son, come close and put your head on my shoulder," Kheira answered.

"Don't go. This woman is mad. She'll attack you with the hatchet," local people told him. But Mohamed went towards the woman who had abandoned him in an orphanage as a scrawny, sick baby when she was a child of 15. He rested his head on her shoulder and she sniffed him like an animal, then kissed him.

The shame of Mohamed's life was the blank space next to the word "father" on his birth certificate. Kheira led him to believe a fighter from the National Liberation Front (FLN) who married her before dying in the 19541962 independence war was his father. But the dead man's family refused to give Mohamed his name. Kheira was dragged into an Algerian court in 1994 where a judge said: "Tell us the truth about your son's birth or I'll throw you in prison." She tottered forward, blurted out: "They raped me" and then fainted. For 35 years, Kheira Garne had kept her terrible secret. In August 1959, at the height of the war, French soldiers found her hiding in a tree during a bombardment. They took her to their barracks in the mountains southwest of Algiers, tortured her with electricity and water and repeatedly raped her. When she became pregnant, they beat her in the hope of destroying evidence of their war crime.

For her part, Louisette Ighilahriz at 20 was an FLN fighter known as Lila when she was captured by the French army and taken to the 10th parachute division headquarters. "I was lying down naked, always naked," she told Le Monde. "They would come once, twice, three times a day. As soon as I heard their boots in the corridor I started trembling. Time seemed interminable. Minutes seemed like hours, hours like days. The first days were the hardest, getting used to the pain. Later, you detach yourself mentally, as if your body were floating."

Lila says she was tortured daily for three months, sometimes in the presence of Gen Jacques Massu and Gen (then Colonel) Marcel Bigeard. Most of her family, including her mother, were also arrested and tortured. One day a military doctor named Richaud lifted her blanket. "Little one, you've been tortured! Who did this? Who?" he asked. She was quickly transferred to prison. After the war, Lila tried to find Dr Richaud to thank him for saving her life.

Thirty-eight years after the Algerian war, the wounds of Kheira and Mohamed Garne, Lila Ighilahriz and thousands of others have not healed. The French newspapers Le Monde and L'Humanite - both of which were punished for reporting the truth at the time - have again taken up the cause, publishing a petition by 12 intellectuals who opposed the war and who now demand that French leaders condemn the torture carried out in Algeria.

On November 4th, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced his support for the 12, saying the "search for truth" must continue and that France must make a similar effort to bring to light "other dark moments of our history".

Mohamed Garne now empties rubbish bins in a Paris department store. He wants French authorities to acknowledge his ruined life by granting him a war victim's pension. French courts have twice admitted that French officers raped his mother but concluded that he was "not the direct victim of the violence".

Lila Ighilahriz's testimony prompted a denial from Gen Bigeard. "Bigeard remains a model for France," he said, speaking of himself in the third person and accusing Lila of trying "to destroy everything that is clean in France".

But Gen Massu recalled having seen Bigeard give electric shocks to prisoners. "Torture is not indispensable in war," he said, negating an argument often used. "When I think of Algeria, I feel deeply sad . . . We could have done things differently."

Gen Massu had kept in touch with Dr Richaud, who saved Lila Ighilahriz, until Richaud's death in 1997. Lila remembered Richaud telling her: "I haven't seen my daughter in six months. You remind me so much of her." This year the remorseful commanding officer of Lila's torturers helped her contact Dr Richaud's two daughters, to thank them for their father's courage. Lila says she feels relieved of a great weight. "I have obtained justice through truth; I asked nothing more. This will free me of my anxiety and already makes me feel more at peace. More than ever, I see France not through Massu and Bigeard . . . but through Richaud."