Recognition of the assassination of Ali Boumendjel: 5 minutes to understand this historic step

Emmanuel Macron admitted on Tuesday that the lawyer and nationalist leader Ali Boumendjel had been "tortured and assassinated" by the French army during the Algerian war in 1957, a gesture of appeasement recommended by the report of the historian Benjamin Stora.

This gesture "is not an isolated act", assured the French president in this press release.

"No crime, no atrocity committed by anyone during the Algerian war can be excused or concealed".

The first French president born after this conflict (1954-1962), Emmanuel Macron pledged to take “symbolic acts” to try to reconcile the two countries, but he ruled out any “repentance” and “apologies”.

What do we call the Ali Boumendjel affair?

In March 1957, the press announced the death of a "little Muslim lawyer" (sic).

“Who killed Master Boumendjel?

»Headline

France Observateur.

Algerian lawyer and political activist, member of the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA) created by Ferhat Abbas in 1946, Boumendjel became, after 1954, the lawyer of the nationalists.

He joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1955. At the time of his arrest, Boumendjel was the link between the leadership of the UDMA and the Algiers leadership of the FLN.

"He then combined French culture with an Algerian, republican and democratic nationalism," explains historian Malika Rahal in her book Ali Boumendjel: a French affair, an Algerian history.

Arrested on February 9, 1957, he was tortured and then assassinated on March 23 on the orders of Commander Paul Aussaresses, according to the latter's admission in his memoirs published in 2001. Boumendjel was thrown from the sixth floor of a building housing a torture located in El-Biar on the heights of Algiers, with the aim of disguising his assassination as suicide.

How to explain the extent of this affair?

"This assassination is symptomatic of the peak of the repression the Battle of Algiers", for Gilles Manceron, historian specializing in the Algerian War.

"He is one of the victims of an all-out repression against Muslim Algerians", adds the author of "Marianne et les colonies" (Ed. Poche La Découverte).

It is a pivotal moment in the war for this French department.

"We are just after March 1956, the government of Guy Mollet has just entrusted the army with police powers in Algeria".

With the excesses that we know today, in particular the massive use of torture by the paratroopers of General Massu.

The affair made less noise in France than the Maurice Audin affair, member of the Algerian Communist Party and Algerian independence activist who disappeared after his arrest in 1957. But some voices are raised against the disappearance of the brilliant Ali Boumendjel.

His friend and law professor René Capitant, lawyer and politician figure of the French Resistance, even resigned from the law faculty to alert public opinion in France.

"There were officials and soldiers who protested: General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, former resistance in particular, and he was forced to leave the army: the secretary general of the French police in Algiers Paul Teitgen, former deported ”, who even ended up resigning, specifies Gilles Manceron.

Awareness will be late, but "the horrors and torture really shocked public opinion," recalls the historian of decolonization.

What does that change today?

The truth was asked for a long time by his widow, Malika Boumendjel, who wrote letters to several French presidents, until her death in 2020 at the age of 101.

She would have been 102 on March 2, 2021: the recognition date chosen by Emmanuel Macron is therefore anything but anecdotal.

"Ali Boumendjel embodied a very political current of Algerian nationalism, which he could have continued to embody", insists Gilles Manceron, for whom the memory of the activist has been "erased from the official history of the FLN".

However, "the Hirak (editor's note, the protest movement against contemporary Algerian power) wants to rediscover these characters who were finally removed from independent Algeria" analyzes the specialist.

In France too, this recognition can have virtues.

“It is necessary work so that the French, of all origins, can understand what really happened.

This gesture is addressed to all parts of French society, of Maghrebian origin or others ”, assures the author of“ The Teaching of the Algerian War in France and Algeria ”

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The step is also important for Emmanuel Macron, who is taking a step forward compared to his predecessors.

"He undertakes to turn the page with Algeria, the task is important, given the delay, and the educational work to be done is even more", concludes Gilles Manceron.

“The proof is that no one today knows Ali Boumendjel.

"