Deportation and expropriation of the Muslims of Messaoud Boudjriou by the Nazi Papon

MAURICE PAPON. 1945-1958. Prefect at Constantine.Sous IV Republic, Maurice Papon is back in the steps of the SFIO. In 1947, he was appointed prefect. After a muscular passage in Morocco, he began, from 1956, a ruthless repression in an insurgent Algeria.
With a biography reviewed and corrected by him, the career

Maurice Papon can take a new start. He joins Paris, since that's where everything is done. Another of his protectors, Jacques Soustelle, has just been appointed Minister of Information. On October 26, 1945, Papon became deputy director of Algeria at the Ministry of the Interior. He remains there for six months. He wants more.

Maurice Papon, who sticks his steps in those of the SFIO since that is the time, is appointed head of the cabinet of Socialist Jean Biondi. He is only under-secretary in the interior of the governments Georges Bidault and Leon Blum, but he made the resistance. And he is one of the 80 parliamentarians who refused to vote the full powers in Petain. It can be useful.

It's effective. On January 21, 1947, Maurice Papon becomes, for the first time, prefect in his own right. He left first for Corsica (1947-1949), then for Constantine (1949-1951). He won the honors and the respect of his family: a decree of November 16, 1948 named him knight of the Legion of Honor.

The quest for the resistant card. Maurice Papon found Paris at the end of 1951, appointed secretary general of the police prefecture. If he is still officially considered a friend of the Socialists, the newcomer gets along well with the prefect, Jean Baylot, who has joined the services of a far-right police commissioner, Jean Dides, and will shoot July 14, 1953 on a peaceful demonstration of Algerian nationalists. The former secretary general of the prefecture of Gironde does not forget his small business. On December 8, 1952, he wrote an application for the Resident Combatant Resistance Card (CVR). It will take six years and two failures before reaching his goals.

In May 1954, Papon, the new secretary general of the protectorate, left for Morocco. The climate is hateful; the newcomer does nothing for the Franco-Moroccan reconciliation. On the contrary: in the fight between the Moroccan nationalists and the French terrorists, Papon energetically takes up the cause of the second, reports a few years later the journalist Claude Estier, now Senator PS of Paris (1): "He undertakes to to train the forces of the order to the ruthless repression of the "nationalist pursuits." Hundreds of Moroccans have kept very personal memories of this period of the career of Papon. "To the point that in 1955, the new resident general in Morocco more cautious, as soon as he arrives, to remove the person concerned, it is the technical unemployment for six months.

Officer of the Legion of Honor. Business is picking up fast. After a brief stint as technical advisor to the cabinet of Marcel Champeix (SFIO), Secretary of State for the Interior in charge of Algerian Affairs in the government of Guy Mollet which allows him to pass the promotion of officer of the Legion of Honor, he returned to Constantine on May 17, 1956, as Prefect and Inspector General of Administration on Extraordinary Mission for the Eastern Region of Algeria (Igame).

The day after his arrival, the new prefect sets the tone: "The time is no longer to distinguish between civilians and soldiers." Algeria, in those years, is the repression against insurgents, Authoritarian "groupings", torture. Civil authority has lived, or almost, in the region of Algiers under military control. In Constantine, we also torture: "The presence of Maurice Papon does not constitute an obstacle, to say the least, to this form of repression," writes the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet in the Torture in the Republic. In fact, on April 11, 1957, the resident minister Robert Lacoste wrote a circular: "I point out the interest that is attached to the organization of common interrogation centers where the army as well as the various police services work together to speed up preliminary or unofficial investigations. "Constantine's center, located in the" Ameziane Farm ", will fulfill its role in a formidable manner.

Parisian promotion. At the National Assembly in Paris, Robert Lacoste pays tribute to Maurice Papon. These praises will be worth promotion: on March 13, 1958, the day after a police demonstration in front of the Palais Bourbon, Papon is appointed police prefect of Paris by Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, Interior Minister of the Government Félix Gaillard. Two months later, the Fourth Republic is dead. Before the return of De Gaulle, Papon, who has the sense of history, has time to refuse the ministry of Algeria proposed by Pierre Pflimlin, penultimate president of the Council.
In April 1958, the farm Améziane, which is located in the immediate vicinity of Constantine, is occupied - and looted - by the "red berets" of the 27th Infantry Battalion. It becomes, according to the official name of the army, a center of intelligence and action (C.R.A.), placed under the authority of the 2nd office of the staff of the corps. In fact, to put it more simply, the Améziane farm was, throughout the war, one of the most important and terrible torture centers in Algeria.

During his investigation, in Constantine, Algiers and France, Jean-Luc Einaudi met some of the survivors of this center, who had the strength and courage to talk to him. What they say is abominable. We do not know what raises the most disgust, the savagery, the refinement of organized torture, or the abject mentality of the torturers, officers or officers of the French army, taking pleasure in pissing in the bowls of their victims, and racketeering with impunity their families, before shooting them for "escape attempt" or throw them alive in the wells. Thirty years after the war, this explosive issue, if it finds the success it deserves, will not stop stirring waves.

Quasi-industrial torture
In a document first published in Truth Freedom 9, May 1961, the operation of torture on this farm is clearly explained. According to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, this report on the farm Améziane is not a document emanating from an official service. "It was written by a group of young people called on duty in Constantine. These young people called had access to official documentation and the figures they give, in particular, are of absolute authenticity ". Whatever the source of this authenticated document, its content remains eloquent. It translates the entire sinister organization set up by the special services in Constantine to practice large-scale torture: "At the farm Améziane, intelligence and action center (CRA) of Constantine, it is practiced at the scale quasi-industrial (...) It is on the farm Améziane that are led all the suspects taken by the units of the East of Algeria. The arrest of "suspects" is done by raids, on information, denunciation, for simple identity checks. A stay is made under the following conditions: on their arrival at the "farm", they are separated in two distinct groups: those who must be interrogated immediately and those who will "wait", to all one makes visit the places and in particular the torture rooms "in activity": electricity (gasgen), torture of water, cells, hangings, etc. Those who have to wait are then penned up and piled up in the old stables where they will not be given any food for two to eight days, and sometimes even more. "
In the same article, a surprising fact is revealed. Torture is practiced according to a guide duly written by the intelligence services: "The interrogations, conducted in accordance with the provisions of the provisional guide of the Intelligence Officer (OR), chapter IV, are conducted systematically as follows: in a firstly, the OR asks his questions in the "traditional" form by accompanying them with punches and feet: the provocative agent, or the indicator, is often used beforehand for specific accusations and ... prefabricated . This kind of interrogation can be renewed. Then we go on to the actual torture, namely: hanging (...), the torment of water (...), electricity (electrodes attached to the ears and fingers), burns (cigarettes, etc. .) (...) the cases of follies are frequent (...) traces, scars, consequences and consequences are durable, some even permanent (nervous disorders for example) and therefore easily detectable. Several suspects died at home the day after they returned from the "farm".
Interrogation-torture is often repeated several days apart. Meanwhile, the suspects are imprisoned without food in cells some of which do not allow to lie down. Note that there are among them very young adolescents and old men of 75, 80 and over. After interrogation and imprisonment at the farm, the "suspect" can be released (this is often the case for women and those who can pay (...) or interned in a center called "d". "accommodation" (in Hamma-Plaisance, in particular), or even considered "disappeared" (when he died as a result of interrogation or shot dead in "chore of wood" around the city (...)
The "interrogations" are conducted and executed by officers, non-commissioned officers or members of the CRA's services (...) The figures - because there are some - are eloquent: the capacity of the "center" started up in 1957, is 500 to 600 people, and it seems to be running at full capacity all the time. Since its constitution it has "controlled" (less than eight days in prison) 108 175 people; staked 11,518 Algerians as nationalist militants on the sector; kept for stays longer than eight days 7,363 persons; interned in Hamma 789 suspects. »»
 This report, taken up by Jean-Luc Einaudi, in his book La Ferme Améziane, Investigation of a Torture Center during the Algerian War, recapitulates and confirms the various testimonies collected by Einaudi in Constantine. This report, he points out, established "what already seemed obvious to me: the farm and the tortures that were practiced there were not bloody aberrations born of the spirit of some sadistic executioners. It was an institution operating under the control of the military hierarchy. The tortures that were practiced there were based on techniques taught, on a systematic method. "

Zeleikha Boukadoum
Among the testimonies collected by Jean-Luc Einaudi, that of Zéléikha Boukadoum remains the most moving. She suffered the torment of torture at the Ferme Améziane just after her arrest on August 10, 1959 in Constantine during a raid led by Commander Rodier. Zeleikha Boukadoum will suffer the most inhuman abuse for a month and two days. One day, says Einaudi recounting the testimony of this brave woman, "in the presence of the commander, she has her jaw fractured by blows. Blood flows from his mouth. The policeman El Baz is there. - Come see ! they say, dragging him into the laundry room on the farm. There, she sees a naked man, very tall, screaming, immersed in the boiling water of the boiler. It is burned. - If you do not speak, you will suffer the same fate as this one! the threat. She is bleeding profusely. - Take this bitch! orders the commander. I do not want to see her in this state! She is taken back to her cell, cell F. The victim she saw is in cell G. In the night, she hears him complaining faintly and then there is silence. About two o'clock in the morning, here are some steps. She is scared. She thinks it's for her. But they stop in front of cell G and she hears: - It's over. Go to Chettaba. At the farm Améziane, she will lose all her teeth and an infection will be declared. A military doctor is called. For, oddly, sometimes the torturers resort to medicine. - We must hospitalize, concludes the doctor. But she is put back in the cell and every day a nurse comes to give him an injection. She is confronted with a naked woman trying to hide her body with a blanket, which has a wound on her face, which is bleeding, with her hair standing on her head. Only after a while did she manage to recognize her. Once, she is taken to the shower. She meets two girls who cry. They were raped. Sometimes music is put to cover the screams of the victims. But Zéléikha Boukadoum hears them anyway and she closes her ears because they are unbearable. Twenty-eight years later, she will always hear them and some nights she will see the tortured again in the boiler. "
 The hell lived by Zéléikha Boukadoum at the farm Améziane, was shared by several other brave women and brave men. For more than 3 years, the farm Améziane worked at full speed like a real factory of torture.