Retired general stuns Chirac with remarks on efficacy of torture

Gen Paul Aussaresses is the sort of old codger you meet on Bastille Day at the Elysee garden party. It's easy to imagine the 83-year-old decked out in his medal-laden uniform, wearing a patch over the eye he lost in the second World War, clutching a champagne flute and reaching for the canapes.

He'd be happy to tell you how he joined Gen de Gaulle in London, where British officers trained him in special operations. He'd boast about parachuting behind German lines, his later service at NATO headquarters and his civilian career as an arms salesman for the French firm Thomson.

So why did President Chirac, whom Gen Aussaresses claims to know well, suddenly demand that the retired soldier be stripped of the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honour? Why has he lost the right to wear his uniform? The general's own children, he told French radio, "renounce me; one of my daughters even wants to stop carrying my name."

Gen Aussaresses is an apologist for torture in a country that claims to be the land of human rights. He made some shocking revelations about the Franco-Algerian war in an interview with Le Monde last autumn.

But now he has gone much further. "Torture is efficient," Gen Aussar esses boasted, again to Le Monde, when his book Services Speciaux, Algerie 1955- 1957, was published by Editions Perrin this month. "Most people crack up and talk. Then, most of the time, we finished them off."

President Chirac said he was horrified. French Communists and Greens demanded a parliamentary inquiry. Three human rights and anti-racism groups filed lawsuits against Gen Aussaresses for apology for crimes against humanity and crimes against humanity.

So did Josette Audin, the widow of the Communist mathematician, Maurice Audin, who was arrested by French paratroopers in Algiers in 1957 and never seen again. The present-day Algerian government remained silent, no doubt fearing calls for an investigation into its own use of torture, but Algerian groups representing survivors of the war said they, too, would sue.

Responding to the outcry raised by his confessions, Gen Aussaresses asked what the government would do if bombs were exploding every day in Paris. "People would like me to carry out an act of repentance," he said. "Well, I'm not going to, because such behaviour is contrary to history."

Opinion polls show that 56 per cent of the French population now want their leaders to publicly apologise for French atrocities in Algeria. After all, the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, forgave the 1917 mutineers of the battle at Le Chemin des Dames. And President Chirac sought the pardon of Jews for French complicity in their deportation by the Nazis.

Mr Chirac fought in the Algerian war; Mr Jospin opposed it at the time. Strangely, it is Mr Jospin who now refuses to make amends. "It is pointless stoking the fire," the Prime Minister told Le Parisien. "A war is never clean. We have to stop chewing over the past. We must turn the page."

Gen Aussaresses' book resolves the mysterious deaths of several Algerian heros. Larbi Ben M'Hidi, the FLN chief for Algiers, was hanged by Gen Aussaresses and his men, who reported the murder as a suicide. The general also ordered the killing of the lawyer Ali Boumendjel, who was pushed from the sixth floor of the building where he was interrogated.

The testimony of Mrs Malika Boumendjel, the lawyer's widow, gives a small idea of the suffering caused by such actions. "My life as a woman stopped on March 23rd, 1957," she told Le Monde, recalling the day her brother told her that her husband, then 38 years old, had allegedly committed suicide, leaving her to raise four children.

Mrs Boumendjel's brother and father - who lost both arms and was decorated for fighting with France in the first World War - were also tortured and murdered by French forces.

A previously unpublished letter, written by the late president Francois Mitterrand when he was justice minister in 1957, shows that he knew of the torture of Algerian prisoners, but merely lodged a weak private protest with the prime minister, Guy Mollet.

Gen Aussaresses describes how Judge Jean Berard was sent to Algiers by Mitterrand to keep him informed of the minutiae of France's "battle against terrorism". Historians speculate that Mitterrand kept silent because he hoped to become prime minister. Much later, in 1974, Mitterrand said that giving the military carte blanche in justice matters in Algeria was "the only error I admit to in my life".