The French authorities denied it happened, but in Paris on 17 October 1961 police attacked many thousands of Algerians who were protesting across the city against the war in Algeria and in particular a curfew that had been imposed on the community, killing an unknown number of them – possibly as many as 300, but at least 50, and wounding many more. Many were beaten to death and their bodies thrown into the Seine. More than 11,000 others were arrested and bussed to three makeshift camps around the city, held for days without food and subjected to beatings. Many Algerians were deported back to Algeria.
The crackdown was ordered by Paris police chief Maurice Papon and later in the year President de Gaulle awarded him the Légion d’Honneur. Officially there were only three deaths and 64 wounded. The events were only accurately reported at the time in a few militant left
publications, though some details emerged in a National Assembly debate
at the end of the month. It was only around 37 years later that the
full truth of the events really emerged.
You can read much more about it in Le Monde, where you can see a set of photographs by Henri Georges, then a photographer for ‘Liberation‘, now published for the first time. There are also a number of other links to features.
We now live in very different times, with so many people photographing events and then – at least in countries like ours – tweeting and posting about what is happening. But we still see the way that the newspapers, radio and TV are too ready to accept the often misleading and sometimes entirely fabricated stories put out by police and other official sources. There was a reminder of this in yesterday’s parliamentary debate on the Hillsborough disaster, as well as a reminder of what happened over the death of Ian Tomlinson. And so many other stories, particularly those involving police violence and deaths in custody.
If you want to know what is happening on our streets, you need to be on them, and not rely on what you read in the papers or see on TV. If you can’t be there, then, unreliable as many tweets and other citizen journalism reports are, taken as a whole and together with the reports in the commercial media they are more likely to give you a true picture. If Twitter had been around in 1961 it would not have been possible to brush several hundred corpses under the carpet.