A former officer, Jean Tenneroni was technical advisor to the Minister of Defense (2000-2001) and ministerial ethics referent of the Ministry of the Armed Forces (2016-2021). He is French from Algeria, son, grandson and great-grandson of French from Algeria.
On July 5, 1962, the city of Oran is no longer "the Radiant" that General de Gaulle greeted four years earlier when he returned to power. Almost two-thirds of its 220,000 European inhabitants have already left a devastated city cut in two since the rise to extremes in the struggle between the OAS and the FLN. They also fear the brutality of the methods of the corps commander, General Joseph Katz, who has been in contact with the representatives of the FLN since the Evian agreements, and who subjected the suspected Blackfoot population to violent repression. to enter into collusion with the OAS. Families are piling up at Sénia airport or in the port area, in a situation of great humanitarian precariousness, without Paris putting in place additional means of repatriation.
The French authorities, relayed by the loudspeakers of military vehicles, and the Algerian authorities are trying to reassure the Europeans who remain, sometimes the most vulnerable, about their security and that of their property,
"guaranteed by the Evian agreements"
. The attacks also ended a week ago with the boarding of the last OAS groups to Spain.
On this day of official independence, a jubilant crowd that has come en masse from the outlying Muslim neighborhoods is heading towards the European neighborhoods. A little before noon, unidentified shots resound which unleash in different places, with the cry of "it is the OAS", the first killings of French by many armed demonstrators, rallied at the last hour, with the complicity active “ATO” (occasional temporary auxiliaries), police officers with little training from the FLN, while shots were fired at the French sentries on duty.
For several hours, the French are chased in the streets, shops, restaurants, churches, hospitals, to their homes to be strafed, lynched, mutilated, burned alive, slaughtered or rounded up as the case may be. The barracks of the French army, in general, do not offer them refuge and the French military forces, that is to say 18,000 men, remain with the weapon at the foot on the order of General Katz. The corpses picked up in the street, often mutilated to the point of not being able to be identified, quickly fill the morgues, while the reports pile up on the desks of the military authorities.
Among those who are kidnapped, of all ages, the luckiest are taken to the central police station [which now came under the Algerian authorities, Editor's note], a place of internment, where they are mistreated.
Others are transported by vehicles to places of execution, where they will be delivered to the atrocities of a blood drunken crowd, before their bodies are discreetly buried - as on the northwest shore of Petit-Lac in a dozen bulldozed pits, as evidenced by military aerial photographs.
During this appalling day, many people will also be saved by Muslims who know them, intervening at their own risk to have them released or hidden.
Beyond the blind and spontaneous dimension of a collective vengeance exercised on scapegoats (...), we cannot rule out the signs of premeditation and of a certain form of organization.
Jean Tenneroni
A few days later, the arrested “mafia gangs” will be presented as the culprits to the press by the Algerian authorities. Beyond the blind and spontaneous dimension of a collective revenge exercised on scapegoats, which can be explained in part by the violence of OAS activism in Oran, we cannot rule out the signs of '' a premeditation and a certain form of organization: warnings, the day before, of Europeans by Muslim friends or employees, armed demonstrators obeying slogans, logistics of collection-execution, attack of scale of the station defended by the 3rd company of the 8th RIMA aiming to seize the refugee travelers.
Certain historians have thus constructed the hypothesis of an implication of the “Oujda group” (Ben Bella, Boumediene) because of its spatio-temporal proximity, of the tensions which opposed it to the GPRA in Algiers. This group, favorable to the complete eviction of the European minority, would have been, according to this hypothesis, the discreet initiator of this demonstration, intended to show the inability of the new authorities to exercise the maintenance of order in Algeria. independent.
While this massacre had been known from the afternoon of July 5 in France since Pierre de Bénouville alluded to it on the benches of the National Assembly ("at the moment wheǹ, again, blood is flowing in Oran ...") , the press spoke little about it and minimized it, with the exception of Paris-Match which published a poignant report. The families, supported by associations, had to wait more than forty years to learn about information on their disappeared contained in particular in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay.
The gray areas of this historical black hole were nevertheless able to be dispelled, by taking account of testimonies (with among others
L'agonie d'Oran
by Geneviève de Ternant) and the work of historical analysis, as shown in professor Guy Pervillé in
History lesson on a massacre
. From the opening of the archives, Jean Monneret (
The hidden tragedy
) or General Faivre (
The unpublished archives of Algerian policy)
were able to reconstruct the course of July 5 and dismantle point by point the many untruths advanced by Joseph Katz (
The honor of a general
) both on his orders and on the reality of his communication and information capacities.
Jean-Jacques Jordi was able to quantify at seven hundred dead and missing the toll of this day in his work with the evocative title, Un silence d'État.
The facts concerning the Oran massacre are therefore sufficiently documented to be recognized by France, without requiring the establishment of a joint Franco-Algerian commission of historians on the subject as proposed in the recent report by Benjamin Stora, except if the Algerian authorities agree to join in this work of memory, in particular to locate the location of the remains.
This carnage continues to challenge the reasons for such a deafening silence, which without minimizing the responsibility of the Algerian killers, first of all obliges to recognize the voluntary and organized inaction of the French armed forces, who remained sealed in their barracks while 'they were able to prevent or significantly reduce the massacre.
Indeed the few officers, such as Captain Croguennec of the 2nd Zouaves and Lieutenant Rabah Khellif of the 403rd unit of the local force, who took the initiative, at the risk of their lives and of disciplinary sanctions, to leave their barracks and rescue the victims, were able, by their sole authority, to liberate and save hundreds of lives.
By following their conscience, these figures of light, in a day of darkness for the French army, disobeyed an order less than they refused to carry out this obviously illegal order of passivity.
The commands given on July 5 fully correspond to the state of mind of the President of the Republic who no longer wanted to intervene to protect the French after independence.
Jean Tenneroni
This order, like the one he gave to send back civilians who had been able to take refuge in military cantonments, goes much further in the wait-and-see attitude than the directives taken by the command during the last months of engagement. At the express request of General de Gaulle (General Faivre,
Les archives unédites de la politique algérienne 1958-1962
) these were already gradually aimed at outlawing the so-called initiative intervention possibilities of third category forces.
The commands given on July 5 fully correspond to the state of mind of the President of the Republic, who no longer wanted to intervene to protect the French after independence, as he said in his memoirs Pierre Pflimlin ("The French will have no only to get by with this government. ") or Alain Peyrefitte in
It was de Gaulle
(" France must have no responsibility for maintaining order ... If people massacre each other, it will be matter of the new authorities. ”).
In fact, we cannot exclude, without being able to prove it, that, given the context, the personalities at stake and the orders given, General Katz directly received the order not to move from the army chief, Charles de Gaulle. .
At the end of the afternoon, while in Paris the meeting of the Algerian affairs committee chaired by the head of state is held, the military command finally asks the mobile gendarmes to patrol the European districts. In the meantime, the international capitals, probably alerted by their navy in the Mediterranean who have received SOS, are insisting on Paris to find out what is happening in Oran.
This unilateral and proximity massacre, according to the typology of the specialist Jacques Sémelin, comparable in cruelties to what other French people suffered during the “Sicilian Vespers” in the Middle Ages (1282), would never have happened, or at least not. in the same proportions if, during this transitional phase of accession to independence, the French military forces in Oran, like any other army, had fulfilled their mission of protection, which is one of their reasons for being, by the ordinance of January 7, 1959: "the purpose of the defense is to ensure at all times, in all circumstances and against all forms of aggression ... the life of the population". It is part of the vital interests to protect its population and its nationals abroad, as the armies have shown thatthey still knew how to do it sixteen years later during Operation Bonite in Kolweizi 1978.
Other legal arguments such as the criminal concept of assistance to a person in danger, the content of the Evian agreements, the case law on crimes against humanity only reinforce this requirement for intervention to protect civilians in distress. .
Obviously, non-intervention is also contrary to military traditions, to the ethical principles linked to the military status and to the honor of armies.
A complaint for complicity in a war crime and obedience to criminal orders was filed in 1999 on behalf of the families of victims against Joseph Katz who had been promoted to the highest rank of the French army (army general) and had become an adviser general UDR.
He died before the appeal proceedings and was buried abroad, in Spain.
the Oran massacre is one of the three acts of a tragedy in which populations loyal to France were sacrificed by a government only anxious to disengage abruptly and completely
Jean Tenneroni
After the killing in the rue d'Isly of March 26, 1962 of dozens of unarmed French demonstrators by a troop of sharpshooters and before the orders not to repatriate thousands of harkis doomed to death, the Oran massacre constitutes the one of the three acts of a tragedy in which populations loyal to France were sacrificed by a government solely anxious to disengage abruptly and completely by making more or less complicit in the army which until now had protected them.
"Silence remains an unforgivable fault ... The" forgotten massacre "can no longer be forgotten," wrote Philippe Labro, at the end of the preface to the remarkable eponymous book that Guillaume Zeller devoted nine years ago to the terrible day of the July 5, 1962 in Oran. It is clear that it still is, despite the broadcast in 2018 on France 3 of an edifying and moving documentary Oran, the forgotten massacre of Georges-Marc Benamou and Jean-Charles Deniau and bills aimed at make it recognized.
In comparison with the “overwhelming responsibility”, which the Head of State felt it necessary to speak of in his speech of May 27, 2021 in Kigali concerning the genocide of the Tutsis, that of the French State concerning this mass crime in Oran no isn't it overwhelming, since a single order to our units would have ended it?
Almost sixty years and seven heads of state later, this public silence, filled only by a commendable memorial initiative of a "wall of the missing" in Perpignan, remains a permanent offense to the memory of these innocent martyrs and an open wound for theirs, leaving a dark stain on our republic and our army.
Hasn't the time finally come to bear witness to the truth?
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/B7F2F3HZ2JCUHDZJKAGKAXXPSU.jpg)