The patriarch of the French far right Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose funeral takes place on Saturday, admitted in 2019 to a journalist having practiced torture in Algeria, without using the word, according to statements published by the newspaper The World in its edition dated Sunday-Monday.
“I find it completely normal, natural, that we extort information from organized killers, who struck blindly in restaurants, at dances, with bombs. What was missing was more than that, for them to raise their finger and say: “what about human rights?” Well yes, but you don’t respect human rights, so we’re going to apply your methods to you. The guy has to tell you where the bombs are, he’s the one who will set the duration of his ordeal. We don’t do this for fun. If he speaks, his misfortune stops,” Jean-Marie Le Pen explained to Ivanne Trippenbach on December 4, 2019. “I do this under the orders of my captain. We take the risks that are linked to war,” he added, during an interview recorded at his home in the Paris region.
The former paratrooper of the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment (REP) of the Foreign Legion recognized in November 1962 in the newspaper Combat having “tortured because it had to be done” in Algiers in 1957, before publishing a denial, and contesting over the years that he had engaged in such practices. Accusations of torture supported by various investigations, and “around fifteen” testimonies collected from 1957 to 2002, according to historian Fabrice Riceputi, author in January 2024 of the book “Le Pen and torture”.
Interviewed on January 8 on the radio franceinfohistorian Benjamin Stora reaffirmed that it was possible that Jean-Marie Le Pen was tortured during the battle of Algiers, citing testimonies collected by the journalist from Monde Florence Beaugé in 2002, while emphasizing that Jean-Marie Le Pen “was only an executor of the battle of Algiers”. “He is not a decision-maker, a political decision-maker of the battle of Algiers, it is other decision-makers who are important in my eyes and who remain important. These are those who were in power, it was Robert Lacoste (Editor’s note: then Minister of Algeria) and François Mitterrand in particular, who were from the socialist left (…) François Mitterrand was Keeper of the Seals (… ) at the time of the battle of Algiers (…) when torture and summary executions were very numerous,” he said.
Jean-Marie Le Pen died on Tuesday at the age of 96. He was buried on Saturday in La Trinité-sur-Mer, in western France. A provocative and sulphurous tribune, obsessed with immigration and Jews, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who liked to be nicknamed “the Menhir”, brought the French extreme right, whose leader is his daughter, out of its marginality, Navy.
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