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lchic
- 01:04am Nov 8, 2003 EST (#
16828 of 16832) ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has
to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong
foundation
MORAL RESPONSIBILITY (war) - Minister sued
----
Former French minister sued for crimes against humanity
PRINT FRIENDLY EMAIL STORY The World Today - Friday, 7
November , 2003 12:32:06 Reporter: Hamish Robertson DAVID
HARDAKER: Staying with questions of tyranny and democracy,
France's rather murky record in its former colony of Algeria
is once again coming under scrutiny. More than 40 years after
the French Government granted independence to Algeria, a
member of that government is now being sued over the deaths of
thousands of Algerians.
Pierre Messmer was the Armed Forces Minister in President
Charles de Gaulle's Administration of 1962 and is one of the
few members of that government still alive today. He's now
being sued by representatives of pro-French Muslim Algerians –
thousands of whom were killed after allegedly being abandoned
by the French authorities.
Hamish Robertson reports.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: If the allegations are true, they would
place the French Government of the early 1960's in the same
moral category as the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
It's claimed that France allowed 100,000 pro-French Muslim
Algerians to be massacred – rather than let them be resettled
– because President Charles de Gaulle believed there were
already too many Arabs in France.
According to the author Georges Marc-Benamou, President de
Gaulle described the pro-French Algerians, also known as the
Harkis, as "a rabble that should be disposed of as quickly as
possible".
Pierre Messmer, who was France's Defence Minister at the
time, is now being accused of implementing this alleged
decision by General de Gaulle to abandon the Harkis to their
fate.
The legal action, which is being taken by a group of Harkis
and their descendants, accuses Pierre Messmer of complicity in
crimes against humanity, by carrying out ethnic cleansing.
The lawsuit has triggered a furious row, with de Gaulle's
supporters insisting the President wasn't a racist, and the
Evian independence agreement had guaranteed there were would
be no reprisals.
They also point out that large numbers of French settlers
were also massacred after independence, when the Evian accords
were effectively torn up by the new Algerian Government.
This interpretation is supported by French political
analyst Dominic Moisi.
DOMINIC MOISI: Well, there's a new book, which has just
come out in France called, A French LieUn Mensonge Français,
describing in the most negative terms, the behaviour of
General de Gaulle and of his close advisers.
I think there is a lot of exaggeration there. De Gaulle was
clearly not a racist and de Gaulle clearly didn't deliberately
left these people to die. But we are forced to look back at
our past in a way that is, of course, not a very flattering
one.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: But whether or not those allegations are
exaggerated, the that fact they're being made at all more than
four decades after France withdrew from North Africa,
underlines the extent to which the French are still haunted by
the legacy of their former colony of Algeria.
DOMINIC MOISI: We're still haunted by it. We never fully
came to terms with it, because we never clearly dealt with it
openly, unlike the Americans after Vietnam, we tried to keep
that in a rather grey environment, and we are being punished
for that. So, the allegations are extreme but the reality is a
climate of self-doubt.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: For many French people – especially those
over the age of 40 – the emotional scars caused by the loss of
Algeria have still not completely healed. But there are also
around two million Muslims of Algerian origin now living in
France, many of whom are young, unemployed and marginalised
from mainstream French society.
So what kind of impact will this case have on race
relations in France, which are already brittle?
DOMINIC MOISI: Well, it's not going to help and it's not
making the integration of t
lchic
- 01:46am Nov 8, 2003 EST (#
16829 of 16832) ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has
to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong
foundation
from ABC Australia 'The World Today' ... the implication
being that folks ARE responsible for irresponsible decision
making.
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