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We Are All Murderers *
In November 1956, Fernand Yveton, a member of the Combattants de la Libération
(Freedom Fighters), planted a bomb at the Hamma power station, an attempted sabotage,
which can in no way equate with a terrorist action. Analysis proved that it was a time
bomb precisely set so that the explosion could not occur before the personnel had left. To
no avail: Yveton was arrested, sentenced to death, a reprieve was refused, he was
executed. Not the slightest hesitation: this man declared and proved that he did not wish
to kill anyone, but we wanted to kill him, and we did so without wavering. We had to
look intimidating, didn’t we? And, as one idiot said the other day, ‘show the terrible face
of an angry France’. How pure and how sure of your purity you need to be to dare to
dispense this archangel’s Justice! And even if we agreed with them for a moment that this
absurd war has some sense, can we not see what the French military and civilian
population would have to demand of themselves if they were to hope to justify the
dreadful severity of this sentence?
A little later came the trial of the ‘accomplices’, Jacqueline and Abdelkader Guerroudj.
He was a political officer who liaised between the Freedom Fighters and the leaders of
the FLN. She was a petty bourgeois from mainland France who wanted to assume her
share
* Les Temps Modernes, No. 145, March 1958.
of the risks because she approved of her husband’s activities. She joined the movement
well after him, and in November 1956, her immediate superiors assigned her the task of
passing on to Yveton the materials for his future sabotage. She obeyed because she was
given the guarantee that the explosion would not cost any human lives.
For those who are familiar with the logic of military courts, there was no doubt about
the sentence: since they had killed Yveton and since the Guerroudj couple were his
accomplices, they would have to kill them as well or go back on their judgement. The
expected outcome has been confirmed since: the government commissioner, almost
nonchalantly, called for the death sentence. He got it. What does it matter if the
complicity of Guerroudj in the Yveton affair has not been established? In Algiers our
justice prefers to astound the world by the harshness of its sentences rather than by the
strength of the evidence on which they are based.
Will logic be taken to the extreme of executing the Guerroudjs, of refusing to grant a
presidential pardon? If it were permitted to address the highest-ranking official of the
Fourth Republic, I would respectfully point out to him that these are no longer the good
times of 1956. Since the trial of the Guerroudjs, an incident has taken place, just a hiccup,
of course, but one which should not be without impact upon our way of administering
justice, especially military justice: Sakhiet. There were bombs at Sakhiet, just as at the
Hamma power station. Only they did not have a timing mechanism. And those