| Paul Aussaresses | |
|---|---|
| Born | 7 November 1918 Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, France |
| Allegiance | France |
| Service/branch | French Army |
| Years of service | 1941–1975 |
| Rank | Brigadier General |
| Commands held | 11e Choc 1er RCP |
| Battles/wars | World War II First Indochina War Algerian War |
Paul Aussaresses (born 7 November 1918) is a retired French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War. His actions during the Algerian War, and later defense of those actions, caused considerable controversy.
Aussaresses was a career Army intelligence officer with an excellent military record when he joined the Free French Forces in North Africa during the Second World War. In 1947 he was given command of the 11th Shock Battalion, a commando unit that was part of SDECE, French intelligence.
Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000, when in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he defended the use of torture during the Algerian war. He repeated the defense in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, further arguing that torture ought to be used in the fight against Al-Qaeda, and again defended his use of torture during the Algerian War in a 2001 book, The Battle of the Casbah. In the aftermath of the controversy, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his army uniform and his Légion d'honneur. Aussaresses remained defiant, he dismissed the latter act as hypocritical.
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Paul Aussaresses was born on 7 November 1918, just four days before the end of World War I, in Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, Tarn department, in Languedoc. His father, Paul Aussaresses senior, was serving in the French military at the time of his son's birth because of the war.
In 1941, Aussaresses served a year as an officer cadet in Cherchell, Algeria. The next year, in 1942, he volunteered for the special services unit in France. He wound up in the Jedburghs and member of Team CHRYSLER which parachuted into France behind the German lines in August 1944. The Jedburghs worked clandestinely behind enemy lines to harness the local resistance and coordinate their activities with the wishes of the Allied Commanders. CHRYSLER deployed from Algeria via an American aircraft to work with the local French Resistance in Ariège. On 1 September 1946 he founded 11th Choc Battalion and commanded the battalion until 1948, when he was replaced by Yves Godard. Later, he served in the First Indochina War with the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment.
In 1955 he was transferred to Philippeville, Algeria to be part of the 41st Parachute Demi-Brigade as an intelligence officer. He restarted his demi-brigade's intelligence unit, which had been disbanded during peacetime but was deemed necessary by the French Army who wanted to quell the insurgency of the 'Algerian rebels'. On 20 August 1955 the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) staged an attack against the police of Philippeville. Aussaresses states that he had information about this attack well beforehand and therefore he was able to prevent much of the possible bloodshed. The members of the FLN had also convinced many of the men, women, and children of the countryside to march in with them without weapons. Aussaresses reports that his battalion killed 134 of these men, women, and children, and that hundreds more had been wounded. He reports that two men from his own side also died, and that around one hundred others had been wounded. (Aussaresses, p. 41)
In the spring of 1956, he attended a top-secret training camp in Salisbury, England for a one-month training to prepare for the battle at Suez Canal. He returned to Bône, Algeria in May 1956 to continue exercises with paratroopers on their way to the Suez Canal. On 1 June 1956 he received a spinal fracture from a parachuting exercise, which prevented him from participating in the Suez operation.
General Jacques Massu, who had noted Aussaresses' repressive work against the insurrections in Philippeville, ordered Aussaresses to work under him in Algiers as an agent to control the FLN in Algiers. Aussaresses reported for duty in Algiers on 8 January 1957. He was the main executioner and intelligence collector under Jacques Massu during the Battle of Algiers. On 28 January, he broke a city-wide strike organized by the FLN using repressive measures. Soldiers forcibly dragged all public utilities workers to their jobs. Store fronts were torn open so that the owners had to open the store for fear of being looted. Later in 1957, he ordered his men to hang Larbi Ben M'Hidi, an important member of the FLN, as if he had committed suicide. In a separate incident he ordered that an officer throw Ali Boumendjel, an influential Algerian attorney, from the 6th floor of the building he was held prisoner in, claiming that Boumendjel had committed suicide. France decreed that both deaths were suicides, but Aussaresses admitted both assassinations in 2000.[1]
Aussaresses contends, in his book, that the French government insisted that the military in Algeria "liquidate the FLN as quickly as possible".[2]
Subsequently, historians debated whether or not this repression was government-backed or not. The French government has always claimed that it was not, but Aussaresses argues that the government insisted upon the harsh measures he took against Algerians - measures which included summary executions of thousands of people, hours of torture of prisoners, and violent strike-breaking.
Aussaresses was quite candid in his interview in Le Monde thirty years later (May 3, 2001):
"Concerning the use of torture, it was tolerated, if not recommended. François Mitterrand, the Minister for Justice, had, indeed, an emissary with Massu in judge Jean Bérard, who covered for us and who had complete knowledge of what went on in the night." [1][3]
Aussaresses justified the use of torture by saying how shocked he was by the FLN's massacre at the El Halia mine. He suggests that torture was a small but necessary evil that had to be used to defeat a much larger evil of terrorism. Aussaresses also claims that he used these methods because it was a quick way to obtain information. He also defends its use by saying that the legal system was meant to deal with a peacetime France, not a counter insurgency war that the French army was faced with in Algeria.
In an interview to Marie-Monique Robin, Aussaresses described the methods used, including the creation of death squads (escadrons de la mort), the term being created at this time.[4]
Following Aussaresses' revelations, which suggested that torture had been ordered by the highest levels of the French state hierarchy, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Jacques Chirac (RPR) to indict Aussaresses for war crimes, declaring that, despite past amnesties, such crimes, which may also have been crimes against humanity, may not be amnestied.[5] The Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, Human Rights League) deposed a complaint against him for "apology of war crimes," as Paul Aussaresses justified the use of torture, claiming it had saved lives following the Necessity Defense [AKA: Choice of Evils] and/or the Self-Defense (although he did not explicitly use this expression). He was condemned to a 7,500 Euros fine by the Tribunal de grande instance court of Paris, while Plon and Perrin, two editing houses who had published his book in which he defended the use of torture, were sentenced each to a 15,000 Euros fine.[6] The judgement was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in April 2003. The Court of Cassation rejected the intercession in December 2004. The Court of Cassation declared in its judgment that "freedom to inform, which is the basis of freedom of expression" does not lead to "accompany the exposure of facts ... with commentaries justifying acts contrary to human dignity and universally reproved," "nor to glorify its author." Aussaresses had written in his book: "torture became necessary when emergency imposed itself."[7]
Aussaresses did not fight till the end for French Algeria, unlike the officers who joined the OAS militant group. He had a successful career after the war, being named in 1961 military attaché of the French embassy in Washington DC, along with ten veterans of the Algerian War under his orders. He then joined Fort Bragg, North Carolina, seat of the 10th Special Forces Group. Pierre Messmer, Minister of Defense from 1960 to 1969, and Aussaresses himself explained that to Marie-Monique Robin.[8] There, he taught the "lessons" of the Battle of Algiers, including torture.[8] The Americans started by reading Colonel Trinquier's book on "subversive warfare" — Aussaresses had worked under Trinquier's orders. The inspiration for the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War came from students of Aussaresses, who sent Trinquier's book to the CIA agent Robert Komer.[9]
Aussaresses then went to Brasil in 1973 during the military dictatorship, where he maintained very close links with the military.[10] According to General Manuel Contreras, former head of the Chilean DINA, Chilean officers trained in Brazil under Aussaresses' orders.[11] There, he advised the South American juntas on counter-insurrection warfare, also on the use of torture (widely used against leftist opponents to the military regimes in Argentina, Chile and Paraguay).
The character of Julien Boisfeuras in the novels The Centurions and The Praetorians by Jean Larteguy was according to Larteguy not based on anyone, but many believe that he was at least partially inspired by Aussaresses and Roger Trinquier.[12]