Abstract
Torture is a thing of the past in Algeria, says novelist
The place is charming. Luxury, peace and pleasure are the words that spring to mind as one walks down this peaceful street in the hills of Algiers. This shady peak affords a magnificent view of the bay of Algiers which Algerians claim is the most beautiful in the world. We feel proud to be from these shores, born in the cradle of civilisation that is the Mediterranean. What gods have presided here, what conquerors have passed this way, what wonders were conceived in these comings and goings, and what tragedies, too, vast and unforgettable.
The villa I want to talk about is located in this romantic setting, at the highest point of the popular neighbourhood of Belcourt where the quartier of Cervantès ends and Diar El Mahçoul begins, not far from the Stalinist Memorial of the Revolution which children in Algiers call Houbel, after a god from the pre-Islamic Arabic pantheon, protector of thieves and murderers.
Passing this magnificent Hispano-Moorish palace which recalls the finest moments of mythical Andalusia, one feels a longing to own it, to live the high life there, dreams which would require too much money, too many influential connections. The palace is a listed monument and the headquarters of a very useful public service. Not much is visible from the road — the high surrounding walls afford only a glimpse of the upper storey of the building, the stepped terraces, the frieze of decorative green tiles and tops of the many majestic trees. The grounds are lush and filled with multi-coloured flowers whose heady scents carry far on the breeze. The rest is easy to imagine. Algiers has more than its share of prestigious Hispano-Moorish villas. Not all are ringed with walls of stone – it is possible to admire the finely carved doors and windows, the spiral staircases, the verandas, the glinting mosaics, the covered walkways of pink gravel, the pools shimmering in the sunlight, the ancient trees, the banks of flowers. With a little luck, one might see young women in long gossamer dresses like princesses from the Thousand and One Nights, or even a genie in a djelleba, with a goatee beard, appearing from a lamp or through a wall. Perhaps he is the guardian of these beauties. Type ‘Villa Sésini’ into Google and this marvel will appear in all its white, mysterious splendour.
The palace does indeed bear this name: Villa Sésini. It was the French, when Algeria with its people and chattels belonged to them, who gave it this name and it has remained in our memories. This villa is famous the world over. Older Algerians shudder at the very name. So many of their families, their childhood friends, died in the cellars here in excruciating agony. During the Algerian War (1954–1962) the villa was a torture centre run by the legionnaires, the famous Leopards of the 1er REP (1st Foreign Parachute Regiment), who spearheaded the fight against the Algerian rebels. Here, dashing colonels like Aussaresse, Bigeard, Trinquier, not forgetting the young lieutenant Jean-Marie Le Pen – the future founder of the Front National and Holocaust denier before the Almighty – made their names.
There were dozens of torture centres around the city, hundreds scattered throughout the country. Many were bigger, better equipped, more terrifying, more efficient, run by this or that army unit or police division, but it is the Villa Sésini which has lived on in memory and in history books. It is a symbol of the torture carried out on a massive scale by a state, and not just any state – by the French state, by France, the birthplace of human rights. Undoubtedly its fame owes something to the villa’s exceptional beauty, to the terrifying murderous reputation the legionnaires made for themselves in the djebels, to the efficacy of their interrogation techniques and the results obtained. It is because the French won the Battle of Algiers by these methods, by torturing the inhabitants of the city, sparing neither women nor children, that they lost the Algerian War. And it is because the Algerian rebels carried out terrorist attacks on civilians, including women and children, that their victory has a bitter aftertaste of defeat. They lost all notion of freedom, which led to the harshest, most miserable dictatorship imaginable. As a man sins, so shall he be punished: that is the lesson of history. Fifty years later, the two countries are still arguing over their bad memories. Here we talk of torture, there they talk of terrorism, the twin faces of dishonour.
Villa Sésini, the site of torture during the Algerian war (1954–1962)
Credit: Nicolas Tikhomiroff/Magnum Photos
After independence, it was decided to turn the villa into a Museum of Torture exhibiting the various devices used by the French army: the famous gégène (a hand-cranked generator for charging field telephones, adapted as a torture device for electric shocks), the electric chair, the bath, the bar, the bottles, the whips, together with eyewitness accounts from those unfortunates who were interrogated here. Then the idea was abandoned, for fear that in a diplomatic tit-for-tat, a Museum of Terrorism would be built in Paris; besides, the air was thick with greed – high-ranking officials who coveted this magnificent palace and dreamed of getting their hands on it quietly contrived for it to remain vacant. After several years of covert struggle, the dignitaries gave up and the palace was assigned to a new government department.
Then history returned to normal and torture returned to the fore. The government of independent Algeria quickly discovered it had the noble soul of a torturer. It could not bear for the populace to dream of freedom or talk of hope. It adopted the methods of its former enemy, methods that had proved their worth during the Battle of Algiers: random arrests of as many people as possible – in the streets, at their work, from their homes, on the strength of anonymous tip-offs, vague evidence. Take men, women, children, separate them using torture and, afterwards, make the corpses disappear. Places of torture multiplied endlessly, repression was legalised and classified as revolutionary public-spiritedness in order to facilitate the work of civil servants and increase productivity. In this way it could be practised openly, at any time, in any place – in police stations, in army barracks, in the offices of the government and of the ruling party and, when discretion is required, in secret locations. If the victim is a foreigner, or someone famous, the work is delegated, subcontracted to unofficial police units, to underworld thugs, to Islamists from the mountains, to death squads, to jobless young men from the suburbs. The guiding principle of the government is simple: think big, so big it seems incredible since the incredible has the power to fire the imagination and therefore truly terrorise the populace, to paralyse it and drown the truth in a torrent of hysterical rumours.
Techniques have not progressed, as one might assume. On the contrary they have regressed, and in this lies their success: people are tortured as they were during the Holy Roman Inquisition, flesh is flayed, skin burned, bones broken, nails ripped out. The tools used are banal: salt, acid, fire, water, sticks, kitchen knives, pliers, gimlets, garrottes, vices, ropes, chains, nails, in fact whatever comes to hand, whatever springs to mind. The government did not think it worthwhile to train specialist torturers or to resort to modern technology, chemistry, psychology, brainwashing – all the clean, efficient techniques Naomi Klein straightforwardly discusses in her famous book The Shock Doctrine.
In recent years, there has been a real revolution. People no longer believe in the power of torture. It is something that belongs to the past, to the Cold War, a period that is over. The new doctrine might be summarised thus: why waste time torturing poor wretches to terrorise populations who, in any case, know nothing, when you can kill the populace itself. Duly noted. The game is on a massive scale: people are killed by category: by age, by profession, by region. They are tortured by starvation, unemployment, boredom, despair, isolation, humiliation, they are shut away in moral misery, they are driven to suicide, to throwing themselves into the sea, to immolating themselves, to killing each other, to disappearing forever – they, and their children. The final act: the survivors are driven to riot so they can be slaughtered by canon in the name of the legitimate upholding of public order. Afterwards, they are discredited in the eyes of international opinion – they are portrayed as murderers, subversives, terrorists, mercenaries.
It is an infallible method, perfected year upon year. The Americans did this superbly in Iraq. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the secret prisons scattered all over the world, subcontractors working at every level, the whole world spied on, tapped – it beats everything. The Russians did not skimp in Chechnya, they turned that cheerful country into the Tartar Steppe. Arabic governments in turn have joined in, inspired by the Arab Spring: why bother to catch the fish when all you need to do is drain the sea? No life, no unrest, no trouble, the mud will suffocate them all. In 100 million years, they will be transformed into crude oil.
That is the conclusion of history.
Villas like the Villa Sésini, the dark, foul-smelling basements where suspects are abused, where the torturer exhausts himself interrogating some broken wretch, that is the past, it is history. Nowadays, whole peoples are wiped out, the sea is drained, the mountains levelled, the cities burned, memories erased, silence is imposed across the planet.
Times have changed.□