Global Policy Forum

By Jon Henley

An 83-year-old retired general went on trial yesterday for condoning the French army's use of torture and summary execution during the Algerian war of independence, and said defiantly that he "would do it again today".

"I didn't enjoy it, it gave me no pleasure," he said. "But I have no regrets."

General Paul Aussaresses, whose memoirs caused a furore earlier this year, may be jailed for up to five years, for his writings rather than his actions, even though he has said he personally tortured and killed 24 suspected rebels in the 1954-1962 conflict.

A second world war resistance hero, Gen Aussaresses is charged with "complicity in justifying war crimes". The actual crimes are covered by an amnesty offered in the 1960s to all French soldiers who served in Algeria.

He told the court yesterday that the late president Franí§ois Mitterrand, who was justice minister at the time, had been informed daily of his actions by another general.

Before the proceedings, Gen Aussaresses, who was stripped of his Légion d'Honneur by President Jacques Chirac and barred from wearing his army uniform earlier this year, said he was "entering this trial in serenity".

"I would do it [the torture and killings] again today if it were against Osama bin Laden," he said. "These were not reprisals... It was a case of stopping actions which were being prepared for deeds that would cause the deaths of French citizens in Algeria."

In his book, Special Services: Algeria 1955-57, Gen Aussaresses said that the government of the day was fully aware of those practices, and that he had only followed orders to eradicate terrorism.

"The best way to make a terrorist talk when he refused to say what he knew was to torture him," he wrote in one of the 19 passages singled out by the prosecution.

Of the hundreds of Algerian independence fighters summarily executed on his orders, he said in another passage: "I was indifferent. They had to be killed, that's all there is to it."

He and his two publishers, who are similarly charged, have called 15 witnesses, mostly former soldiers, to testify that torture and summary executions were routine and were implicitly approved by Paris.

The League of Human Rights, which brought the case, sees it as a vital step towards official recognition of the crimes committed in Algeria. France has never formally acknowledged the atrocities its forces committed there.

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