Or, to return to my shock that evening seeing those black-and-white images of massacre – perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Maurice Papon, chief of the Gironde prefecture, who had organised the deportation of two convoys of Jews from Bordeaux in 1942, should in 1961 be the chief of police in Paris, responsible for the mass murder of the Algerian demonstrators.
I tried to imagine how a child whose mother or father had been killed that night would feel in the light of such a response from the state. Would it not be experienced as a second assault? First they have killed our parents, and now they deny it happened. I think back to Primo Levi’s despair at Trzebinia, having survived but knowing the truth of his experience had not been accepted. Only the persistence of the survivors, the courage of the photographer Elie Kagan and the filmmaker Jacques Panijel, eventually broke the silence. Panijel’s film Octobre à Paris had been seized in 1962 and banned from being shown for many years in France (being officially released only in October 2011). The work of the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi was also a crucial factor in France beginning to talk about this silence, with the publication of his book La Bataille de Paris in 1991.
In the weeks after I saw Drowning by Bullets I tried to find out as much as I could. I talked to many contacts, including activist friends, but nobody seemed to have heard about the events of 16/17 October 1961. When I next went to Paris I asked my friends there, but, again, little seemed to be known. I walked all around the Île de la Cité and the bridges, trying to find any monument to the victims of this massacre. In a city famous for its grands projets, surely there would be at least a statue, a memorial commemorating this episode? After hours of searching this is all I found, the only trace of that night’s terror – a single, rectangular plaque perhaps eighteen inches across, down some steps, on one side of the Pont Saint-Michel:
A LA MEMOIRE
DES NOMBREUX ALGERIENS
TUES LORS LA SANGLANTE
REPRESSION
DE LA MANIFESTATION PACIFIQUE
DU 17 OCTOBRE 1961fn8
My original shock was now replaced by anger. The language used, the cynical evasiveness of the state not telling us that the French police had murdered almost 200 peacefully demonstrating citizens – but using the passive construction ‘killed’ instead. And the terrible vagueness of that word ‘numerous’ – the fact that the French government has never bothered to have a full investigation into the massacre, the greatest post-war loss of life in the city of Paris. Even today, despite President Hollande’s belated acknowledgement of responsibility in 2012, in a terse, three-sentence statement which referred to ‘the bloody repression’ of 17 October 1961, it will be interesting to see whether this event makes it into the French school history syllabus.
Quite rightly, there are now monuments and museums in France to the 75,721 Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor.fn9And, finally, albeit belatedly, there seems to be a growing acceptance of French responsibility for the critical role the French state played in the deportations of its Jewish citizens. Indeed, in 2009 there was a ruling by the Council of State, France’s highest judicial body, that stated: ‘the Vichy government held responsibility for deportations’. The Council of State further ruled that ‘Nazi officials did not force them to betray their fellow citizens, but that antisemitic persecution was carried out willingly.’fn10
If it took the French state sixty-seven years to admit its role in the Holocaust (from its first organised transport from Drancy to Auschwitz in 1942 to the Council of State’s admission in 2009), then when can we expect a proper memorial to the murdered French Algerians?
*
Walking in the face of extinction. It’s a curious feeling. Especially in a country which has been known to call itself ‘the land of the free’. In October 2003 I was staying with associates in the Baltimore suburbs, together with a friend and colleague from Platform, preparing a keynote lecture we were due to give at a conference in Pittsburgh two days later. It was late afternoon, the house was quiet, my friend was working upstairs and I was writing in the back garden under a weeping willow. Surprisingly hot for October. My friend appeared at the window and asked how I was getting on. OK, but I could do with a break, how about a walk? So we decided to walk down to the shop next to the gas station, about twenty minutes away.
Suburban America. Churches, clapboard houses, some with flagpoles outside. Sycamores and maples in their autumn finery, rusted oranges and fiery crimsons. And swathes of green verges, the grass cut oddly short considering this was public land. We were the only people walking and got some curious looks from the passing cars, usually the driver the sole occupant. Station wagons, SUVs, the occasional yellow school bus. We passed a housing development, only recently completed and still advertising the few apartments not yet sold. My friend read the sign for ‘Susquehannock Apartments’ and then she said, ‘Every time I come to America I’m confronted with the knowledge that the country was built on genocide. I just cannot get used to it. And the silence about this disturbs me more each time I come.’ As she says this, for a split second I’m in the original forest on this slope, my ears pick up the pulsing of birdsong, I can see a clearing ahead, woodsmoke, the sound of voices. Then back to the rumble of traffic and this smoothly manicured grass and the narrow path leading down to the gas station and the shop.
Later that day, reading Arundhati Roy’s The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, I come upon this passage, describing Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on the founding of America:
During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park.7 We came across a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: ‘Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow.’
Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history … which we celebrate each October when we honor Columbus – a notable mass murderer himself – on Columbus Day.
Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples … They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone reading: ‘Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and prosper’.
Genocides which occurred before the twentieth century are inevitably more challenging to quantify, and more liable to differing estimates, according to the political and cultural bias of those making the calculation. But the respected anthropologist Henry Dobyns spent much of his working life looking into this question, and in his seminal work, published in 1966, Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate, he settles on a figure of between 9,800,000 and 12,250,000 Amerindians living in the geographical area which now constitutes ‘the United States’ in 1500. We know that by 1900 these numbers had been reduced to 237,000–250,000. So, using the median estimated figures gives us a fall in numbers from 11,025,000 to 243,500 – a catastrophic demise of about 98 per cent of the indigenous population of North America in just 400 years.