Verges.

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Here is what a Frenchman WHO FOUGHT ON THE SIDE OF THE ALGERIAN REBELS IN THE 1950's NOW has to say to the current government of Algeria. The government that Saadi Yusef is a member of.

"Friends who have turned torturers"

"“The diseases of the soul are transmitted through one's buttocks. Having sat yours on the seats of the pieds-noirs [of course, the French colonialists in Algeria], you have caught on their reflexes, and worse, their way of thinking. In the name of democracy, you have cancelled democratic elections. In the name of human rights and western-style modernity you have adopted the methods of terror, allowed not long ago by Guy Mollet and Francois Mitterrand . . . mass arrests, arbitrary internment, systematic torture. It is from Vichy that you borrowed the 'special courts' and the monstrous principle of retroactive application of the penal law [ex-post facto, specifically prohibited by the U.S. Constitution!!].

You will try to deny me the right to proclaim the truth: you have turned torturers or torturers' accomplices. You could not have a worse fate pity you..."”

THIRTY years ago, I denounced the practice of torture by the police and a section of the French army in Algeria. If, at that time, I had been told that torture would be used again against Algeria and by those who claim to be the heirs of the revolution, I would not have believed it despite my having no illusions about human beings. I was, undoubtedly, naive. So we all were.

But facts prove to be more obstinate than our desire not to see them. As soon as independence was achieved, the beast showed again its hideous face on the same scenes of atrocities: torture reappeared here and there, practised on veteran resistance fighters by other resistance fighters, who had themselves been tortured. The victims, even though they subsequently became The victims, even though they subsequently became ministers, have never been able to do anything against their torturers, although some of them were known by all. This has been so, despite a constitution which, being unique of its kind and taking into account what the Algerian people had endured, explicitly prohibits torture."

Jacques Verges - excerpted published in Impact International from Jacques Verges' forthcoming book "Open Letter to Algerian Friends Turned Torturers". A distinguished French lawyer he left the French Communist Party in 1957 because the Party opposed independence for Algeria. Verges joined the FLN and defended Algerian revolutionaries many of whom he now finds have become torturers themselves.

Read the entire text from Verges by clicking here.

Also see the home page for Verges and his polemics by clicking here.

Read about Jacques Verges by clicking here.

coolbert.