On October 17, 1961 over 600 Algerians were thrown into the river Seine by the Paris police and left to drown.
Twenty thousand migrant workers and their families converged to central Paris that evening to protest peacefully over their sub-human conditions and to demonstrate for their country’s independence from France.
Many historians, writers and journalists wrote about this massacre which is still not recognised as such, among them American writer, Laurel Berger.
On October 17, 2019, she wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books a piece entitled, ‘How to Forget a Massacre: What Happened in Paris on October 17, 1961.’ In it, she depicts the massacre after a detailed inquiry.
“People were coming from all directions and were meant to converge in columns at central points throughout the city, but in many cases, the police cut the marchers off at the pass. […] In fact, [the police] were capturing and bashing in the skulls of Algerian protestors throughout Paris, from the outlying suburbs to the Place de l’Opéra to the Champs-Élysées. At the Pont Saint-Michel Bridge and elsewhere, observers witnessed policemen throwing people from the stone parapets of bridges into the Seine. The current would bear away the dead, dying, and the unconscious.”
The man behind this massacre was Maurice Papon, who headed the Paris police from 1958 to 1966, well after Algeria’s independence in 1962—and nobody in France had sought to blame nor prosecute Papon for his alleged anti-Algerian crimes.
It was not until 1983 that charges for crimes against mankind were brought against Papon. But the charges were not over the drowning of over 600 Algerians in the Seine. Rather, they were related to claims of deportation of French Jews to Germany in 1942, during World War II under the puppet Government of Vichy under which Papon had served. However, the evidence presented then was not enough to impeach him and so legal wrangling went on until 1995 when Papon was charged with crime against humanity over the Jewish question and sentenced to 12 years in jail.
The commemoration of the 1961 massacre has repeatedly occurred, in the post-colonialism period, against a backdrop of mounting, engineered western Islamophobia that has been most noticeably active in France, the so-called country of human rights Declaration.
Anti-Islamic campaigns had been on the up-and-up, especially since the early 1980s in France where Maghrebi and African Muslims have lived for so many decades. After Bernard Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and, since then, Éric Zemmour, former Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, an erstwhile pro-Palestinian suddenly turned against Islam and Muslims. Valls, born to Spanish immigrant parents, was the first French official to officially open the way to outright official anti-Muslim rhetoric in France by uttering the phrase ‘Islamic fascism’ as PM.
Levy, the late André Gluksmann, Finkielkraut and Zemmour have had literary carte blanche to bash Muslims all over the media. Levy was the most prominent spokesman for the authors of the coup in Algeria in 1992, relaying a despicable anti-Islam rhetoric all over the media; his biased analyses in the 1990s were exposed in a double spread of the authoritative monthly ‘Le Monde diplomatique.’
On President Emmanuel Macron’s first visit to Algeria, shortly after his election, he said that what France had done in Algeria was a crime against humanity. On return to Paris Macron was duly reprimanded for apologizing and for mentioning it as a crime against humanity.
Darul Ihsan Media Desk