FRANCE: The Guilty One

In the prisoner’s dock in Paris’ ancient Palais de Justice last week stood a pale, emotionless young Algerian named Mohammed ben Sadok, on trial for his life. Before the case got to judgment, France learned once again that the political assassin often carries his prosecutor with him before the bar of justice.

Last spring Assassin Ben Sadok, mingling with the crowd pouring from Colombes Stadium after a championship soccer game, shot and killed 60-year-old All Chekkal, onetime vice president of the Algerian National Assembly and one of France’s most vocal supporters in North Africa (TIME. June 10), as he walked toward his car with Paris’ director-general of police. In court last week 26-year-old Ben Sadok offered a highly literate defense (his favorite authors: Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Holland. Sartre, Camus). He denied that he had any connection with the rebellious Algerian F.L.N., explained that he had decided on murder the day Chekkal joined the French delegation to the United Nations: “I didn’t have anything against him personally, or against his opinions, because I am .naturally very tolerant. But I was against his political actions. I thought in suppressing him I would shorten the war in Algeria. True France understands my nationalism.”

Workers, intellectuals and clergymen leaped to Ben Sadok’s defense. Jean-Pierre Mayer, a member of the Young Catholic Worker movement, who had worked beside him as a plumber in Strasbourg, testified for the accused. He cried: “Ben Sadok, you are my friend, you are my brother, as we are all sons of the same God. Ali Chekkal would understand your gesture. No more bayonets between us.” Witness Mayer departed, weeping.

Emile Kahn, president of the League of the Rights of Man, urged the court to remember “that most noble French tradition which does not punish a political crime with capital punishment.” Author Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist and sometime Communist sympathizer, turned up garbed in a grey overcoat and moccasins, argued that “one has to distinguish between political crime and terrorism. Terrorism, practiced to inspire fear, despises human life. The political killer demonstrates his respect for human life when he seeks, by killing, to avoid vast slaughter. Remember Charlotte Corday [who stabbed Marat in his bath]. All the French are proud of what she did.”

From time to time. Prosecutor Charles Dubost protested wearily, “Yes, yes, but a man is dead!” But still the witnesses came. Abbe Pierre Mamet, who was a worker priest in Algeria from 1950 to 1956, cried: “The Moslems were so badly treated by the French that I. a French priest, felt hatred in my heart!” Protestant Daniel Parker was so appalled by French atrocities that “I returned my Legion of Honor.” General Paul Tubert, former mayor of Algiers, declared that the sort of Algerian elections in which Ali Chekkal and other French sympathizers won office had been rigged: “Fake bulletins, ballot boxes hidden in inaccessible ravines. The elected were not truly elected. They represent nothing and they create hatred. Old fighters of the resistance drew analogies between the Algerian war and the German occupation of France, recalled that Bonnier de la Chapelle, who shot the collaborator Admiral Darlan, was considered a hero. A French newsman observed wryly: “It’s lucky Ali Chekkal is dead, otherwise he’d be arrested.”

In his final address, Prosecutor Dubost confessed that he was against capital punishment. As a prosecutor at the Nurnberg trials, he explained, he had felt compelled to ask for the death sentence, but had sworn never to do it again. But now he demanded the guillotine for Ben Sadok. Turning to the prisoner, he cried: “You have torn me away from what I have sworn to myself. It’s you and your people who have made the war come back—the war and its crimes.”

The jurors deliberated only 50 minutes. They refused to condemn Ben Sadok to the guillotine; he got only life imprisonment at hard labor.

For three months the French government has been sitting on a report filed by a twelve-man commission set up to investigate “alleged excesses” committed by French forces in Algeria. Last week Paris’ Le Monde forced the government’s hand by publishing the commission’s unabridged report. Items:

¶On three occasions Moslem suspects were locked up overnight in disused wine cellars; a total of 68 were asphyxiated by the wine fumes. One French officer (later arrested) attempted to conceal the deaths by dumping bodies in the countryside. ¶Torture was “only too frequently” used to get information from suspects. ¶ Fourteen Moslem lawyers are still in jail in Algiers for alleged “conspiracy” to defend rebels on trial. One of the lawyers was arrested after he had been ordered by the senior barrister of the Algiers bar to defend a prisoner who had no legal aid. ¶There have been “mysterious and unexplained” disappearances in Algiers, usually after a visit by French paratroopers. The report cited the case of Professor Maurice Audin of Algiers University, who was arrested by paratroopers for having concealed a Moslem Communist. According to the paratroopers. Audin “escaped” while being taken to a detention center, but he is widely believed to have died under torture.

Day after Le Monde’s disclosure, the government made the report generally available. It conceded “occasional” French excesses but stressed that they were caused by rebel terrorists—men who “kill for killing’s sake, pillage, burn, slit throats, rape, crush infants’ heads against walls, disembowel women, emasculate men.”