Public (recognition)

Around the corner from my apartment in east Paris 50 years ago, 9 people were killed, scores injured and hundreds traumatized for life. A recent night, organized by the Human Rights League, some 150 protesters, community members, and writers met to mark the anniversary with a showing of the documentary, To Die at Metro Charonne, Why?  The answer is they were protesting the Secret Army Organization (OAS), an extreme right group that supported a continued French presence in Algeria, and that assassinated people that were against them.

To hear the voices of the white-haired tremble as they described how the police beat on their heads and blocked their passage, to the point where children and fathers and sisters were killed, was quite moving and provokes a respect of having lived through struggle.

Witnesses described billowing chaos that makes it difficult to trace the exact way the police contributed to the massacre. They cut off roads, beat those who tried to breach their lines, and forced people down stairwells where they were trampled by other fleeing protesters. 

It is in the hideous melee that the suffocated victims perished.

The police refused to release their confidential documents on the tragedy. The documents that remain will surely not be the most incriminating.  Police who tried to speak about what happened received death threats. In the end, people still don’t know what happened exactly, the accounts can clash, frustrating people’s need for closure.

Why does the Paris police still fail to recognize any wrongdoing?

Maybe the answer has to do with 1) a recognition of their dominance, that it would take an enormous amount of public pressure to force them to come clean, 2) the support of the external war regime within the country would be more controversial today, and 3) it would blemish the prestige of heroic figures like De Gaulle that okayed the reprisal. All of these could potentially reduce the power of the French state.

How can citizens fight against these dominant technologies of the state, of the police, weapons, communications, and outright refusals to provide information?

Who has the right to public recognition has everything to do with how the machinations of power clench on the bodies of its citizens.

Note:  While this event was in my neighborhood, on the other side of Paris, police murdered hundreds of peacefully protesting Algerians, known as the October 17 massacre. Police threw the bodies into the Seine, which were found downriver for weeks. This event barely made the papers.   

An Algerian flag commemorates the bodies of protesters thrown in the Seine river.