Word: allegations
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...Assassins!" Into a tiny military courtroom shuffled ten hard-core Communists, held for three years without trial on charges of conspiring with the rebels and secretly reconstituting the banned Communist Party. Prominent among them: Journalist Henri Alleg, 39, author of the international bestseller, The Question (TIME, June 9, 1958), a surreptitiously written and smuggled-out account of the tortures that he suffered at the hands of paratroops of General Jacques Massu's 20th Division. Conspicuously missing was an eleventh defendant: Communist Maurice Audin, a mathematics professor in whose home Alleg was captured in 1957. French authorities say he escaped...
...prosecutor, a major, began the trial by urging that it be held in secret. All ten defendants jumped up chanting "Murderers . . . You are all afraid." The court president, Colonel Rene Catherineau, ordered Alleg removed from the courtroom. At that moment, the fragile voice of a woman barely rose above the din: "I am Madame Audin," she cried. "They don't want me to speak, but I shall speak. My husband has been murdered." Said Court President Catherineau: "But Madame Au din is not accused of anything. You cannot speak." Madame Audin shouted back: "Assassins!" Then Colonel Catherineau announced...
...next two days the trial proceeded in secret; newsmen were denied admission by gendarmes with submachine guns. Then came the verdicts: ten years for Frenchman Alleg, 20 years for the secretary-general of the outlawed Algerian Communist Party and one other Moslem, five to 15 years for five others, acquittals for the last two. Then police picked up the chief defense counsel, handed him an expulsion order and packed him onto a Paris-bound plane...
...Will. As his tortures grew more fierce, his courage and will to stay silent grew fiercer still. He was helped by the growing numbness to pain of a body already half dead. Eventually, the torturers flagged, and Alleg knew that he was winning: "I suddenly felt proud and happy not to have given way. I was convinced that I could still hold out . . . that I would not help them in their job of killing...
...painful identification that the reader feels with Alleg cannot blot out the nagging realization that, as a Communist, Alleg himself has been a consenting party to the same tortures and to a degradation of man that, for its wholesale scale, dwarfs the war-begotten atrocities of El Biar. But nothing can justify the use of torture by any nation passing as civilized. Henri Alleg's ordeal is a parable that mirrors the failure of France's Algerian policy. Just as Whitman found a blade of grass sufficient to stagger an army of atheists...