TORTURED BY BOUMEDIENNE GOVERNMENT
Paris
At a large press conference at the Maison du Mutualité September 27, Albert Roux, a well-known Trotskyist of French nationality, who was serving in Algeria as one of the country's badly needed technicians, described how he had been arbitrarily arrested by Boumedienne!s political police, hauled to headquarters and there subjeceted to torture. When the police failed to get him to "confess" to working with the underground revolutionary-socialist opposition to the Boumedienne regime, he was taken to a villa on the outskirts of the city where he was submitted to increasingly severe degrees of torture in an attempt to break him down.
Immediately after being arrested, he said, he was taken down to the basement of the police headquarters. "tT was stripped naked | and beaten," he said. This beating was so severe that when a doctor was brought in to examine him some days later, he found the victim's torso still black and blue.
But this was only the beginning. “One of them told me," said Roux, "'You'tll regret not cooperating,'" . oo
At the villa he was again stripped naked. The first stage of the torture consisted of being forced to bend over, legs kept — straight, one forefinger touching the floor, and then walking in a circle endlessly, keeping his finger all the time in touch with the floor. He was forced to keep this up until he dropped from exhaus-= tion. Thereupon blows were not spared, The questioning was constant throughout the torture.
When this failed to produce the desired brain-washing, the next stage of torture began. “I was stretched, still naked, on my back, arms stretched out. A man stood on each of my hands. A third man then put a piece of rubber tire across my throat and pressed it down with his feet, cutting off my breath. Each time, I felt like I was dying. -,
"This was varied from time to time by something else. They grabbed my sex organs and twisted them,"
The next attempt to force a "confession" from Roux was elec= tric torture, Use of electricity by the French colonial forces dur= ing the Algerian war drew outraged protest from the entire world, Roux learned now exactly how it felt when applied by Boumedienne's police. Two electrodes were attached to his naked body, he was sloshed with water to increase the conductivity, and the switch was turned on repeatedly.
Finally came the worst siege of all, "I was placed naked, feet and hands tied together behind my back, in a shower stall, One
of the torturers held my undershirt over my face, while the other, using a water hose attached to the faucet, flooded my nose and mouth with water. While doing this, he pressed. his foot into my stomach. It felt exactly like I was drowning. The electric shocks and the water hose were applied by turns during the whole night of Wednesday, September 1,
"T was then taken to meet Le Goff, and a young Algerian whom he had given refuge in his room, and Goasdoué and Mazitére. I learned that both Mazisére and Le Goff had been tortured in the same way.
"The next day I discovered that I could no longer hear out of my right ear. This deafness lasted for more than two weeks.
"T should make clear that I was arrested without a warrant, that my home was searched without a warrant and in my absence and that no listing was made of things seized at my home or which I had on me,
When Boumedienne's cops searched the apartment, Roux said, they tore down a Cuban flag on the wall, spit on it, trampled it underfoot, and did the same with portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, .
Two other members of the Fourth | International, Simonne Minguet and Pierre Meyers, also at the press conference, told how they had been arbitrarily arrested in Algiers, They were not tortured them selves but they said that they saw plenty of evidence of the torture of other French nationals.
A fourth supporter of the Algerian Revolution, Monique Laks, a school teacher, confirmed the accounts given by the other three, She was not a member of the Fourth International, she stated.
All four told of seeing many Algerians in the jails they were held in, all arrested on the same blanket charges of "collusion" with the underground opposition to the Boumedienne regime.
The Parti Communiste Internationaliste (French section of the ‘Fourth International), issued a press release giving additional facts concerning the arrests.
"Four of the first people of French nationality to be arrested in Algeria beginning August 28 were Trotskyist militants of the ‘Fourth International: Jean-Yves Le Goff, Albert Roux, Simonne Minguet and Pierre Meyers, At the same time, three other people of French nationality not belonging to our organization were arrested, After that, the arrests increased, involving in particular former members of the editorial board of Alger Républicain. An unknown but large number of Algerians have been arrested. ,
"On September 21, the Algerian Minister of Information Mr,
‘ ~Ga
Bachir Boumaza, in the course of a press conference printed in the September 22 issue of El Moudjahid, accused these first prisoners of constituting the bulk of the membership of the Organisation de Résistance Populaire [ORP]. With their arrest and the arrest of Hocine Zahouane and Bachir Hadj Ali, former secretary of the Algerian Communist party, the ORP, he said, had been dismantled.
"The facts and the arguments suffice to show that these statements constitute nothing but a gross police amalgam, the aim of which is clear: (1) To try to discredit the ORP among the Algerian masses through 'tproof! that this oppositional organization has a foreign origin. (2) To get rid of Europeans whose sympathy for independent Algeria is inseparable from their attachment to its socialist options, and thus suppress bothersome witnesses of the 'Thermidorian! course of. the Boumedienne government."
The statement of the French Trotskyists continues, offering facts to expose the police amalgam and slanders.
"On August 28, Jean-Yves Le Goff, carrying out his military service as a 'cooperator! under the Plan [through which France makes it possible for French nationals to help out in Algeria]...was arrested. His crime? He had let a member of the youth of the FLN, whom he knew to be in opposition, sleep in his room overnight. There is no law that makes this a crime....Was he a member of the network ‘supporting the ORP? No. He had on him a letter he had written to one of the leaders of our organization. El Moudjahid reproduces fragments from this message, but we have no way o nowing whether or not they were 'planted.' In any case, far from proving 'collusion,' this document, such of it as has been reproduced, shows reservations with regard. to the ORP. It could constitute evidence only of a crime of opinion, at the maximum a crime of intention of engaging in ‘colusion,! Nevertheless, Jean-Yves Le Goff was submitted to 'questioning.'!
"On August 31, on leaving work, Albert Roux, a 'cooperator! in the Office des Céréales, was arrested in turn. Like the others, this was done in a completely illegal way, without a warrant.e.ee Goasdoué was arrested the same day. A neighbor of Le Goff, he went to tell Roux about the latter's arrest. Having no political affiliation, this television technician escaped ‘questioning! probably only because he is a cardiac case.
"On September 1, the school teachers Michel Maziére and Monique Laks, likewise without political.affiliation, were arrested....
"On September 2 Simonne Minguet and Pierre Meyers were arrested in the street as they were returning home about eleven o'clock at night after seeing a show. Their shouts aroused the neighbors, who passed the information on to the French embassy.
"Neither on them nor at their homes could the police find any-
= Tum
thing that might constitute ‘evidence! of connection with an underground.:network. This did not prevent Minister Boumaza from claiming that through these arrests a ‘network of adventurers seeking to foment trouble in Algeriat had been dismantled. At the time he said this, the police dossier on the first cases had been closed and he could not be unaware of the fact that it was empty."
The prisoners were held incommunicado. Not even the French embassy was permitted to communicate with them. For more than twenty days they were not permitted to see a lawyer or to know what the charges were.
As for the records of these people in the Algerian struggle for independence, the facts speak for themselves,
Albert Roux was the treasurer and one of the principal figures in the Committee of Solidarity with the Victims of the Repression Due to the Algerian War. Because of his outstanding role in helping the Algerian freedom struggle, he was among those singled out by the ultrareactionary OAS [tne terrorist Organisation de ltArmée Secrdte] for a bombing attack,
Simonne Minguet was the first French _ woman to be imprisoned in France on the charge of helping the FLN [Front de Libération Nationale]. Together with Albert Roux she was one of the signers of the famous “Manifesto of the 121" that denounced France's "dirty war" in Algeria,
Pierre Meyers was active throughout the Algerian war, helping the anticolonial fighters. When he returned to France September 24, after being deported like the others from Algeria by the Boumedienne government, he was at once picked up by the French police. He was still on their “wanted" list for having helped the FLN in 1960! He was. jailed by the French authorities and it took two days to secure his. release pending trial.
ROUX