July 5, 1962 in Oran: the forgotten massacre of hundreds of Europeans from Algeria

A former officer, Jean Tenneroni was technical adviser to the Minister of Defense (2000-2001) and ministerial referent for ethics at the Ministry of the Armed Forces (2016-2021). He is French from Algeria, son, grandson and great-grandson of French from Algeria.

On July 5, 1962, the city of Oran was no longer "the Radiant" that General de Gaulle hailed four years earlier when he returned to power. Almost two-thirds of its 220,000 European inhabitants have already left a stricken city cut in two since the rise to extremes in the struggle between the OAS and the FLN. They also fear the brutality of the methods of the commander of the army corps, General Joseph Katz, who has been in contact with the representatives of the FLN since the Evian agreements, and who subjected the suspected pied-noir population to violent repression. colluding with the OAS. Families pile up at La Sénia airport or in the port area, in a situation of great humanitarian precariousness, without Paris setting up additional means of repatriation.

The French authorities, relayed by the loudspeakers of military vehicles, and the Algerian authorities are trying to reassure the Europeans who remain, sometimes the most vulnerable, about their safety and that of their property, "guaranteed by the Evian agreements". The attacks also ended a week ago with the boarding of the last OAS groups to Spain.

On this day of official independence, a jubilant crowd from outlying Muslim neighborhoods is heading towards European neighborhoods. A little before noon, unidentified gunshots ring out which trigger in different places, with the cry of "it's the OAS", the first killings of French people by many armed demonstrators, rallied at the last hour, with the complicity activates “ATO” (occasional temporary auxiliaries), poorly trained FLN police officers, while shots are fired at the French sentries on duty.

For several hours, the French are chased through the streets, shops, restaurants, churches, hospitals, even to their homes to be machine-gunned, lynched, mutilated, burned alive, their throats slit or rounded up, as the case may be. The barracks of the French army, in general, do not offer them refuge and the French military forces, that is to say 18,000 men, remain the weapon with the foot on order of General Katz. Corpses picked up from the street, often mutilated beyond recognition, quickly fill the morgues, while reports pile up on the desks of military authorities.

Among those who are kidnapped, of all ages, the luckiest are taken to the central police station [which was now under the Algerian authorities, editor's note], a place of internment, where they are mistreated. Others are transported by vehicles to places of execution, where they will be delivered to the atrocities of a blood-drunken mob, before their bodies are discreetly buried - as on the northwest shore of the Petit-Lac in about ten bulldozed pits, as evidenced by military aerial photographs.

During this dreadful day, many people will also be saved by Muslims who know them, intervening at their own risk and peril to free them or hide them.

A few days later, "mafia gangs" arrested will be presented as the culprits to the press by the Algerian authorities. Beyond the blind and spontaneous dimension of a collective revenge exercised on scapegoats, which can be partly explained by the violence of OAS activism in Oran, we cannot rule out the signs of 'a premeditation and a certain form of organization: warnings, the day before, of Europeans by Muslim friends or employees, armed demonstrators obeying orders, logistics of collection-execution, attack of scale of the station defended by the 3rd company of the 8th RIMA aiming to seize refugee travellers.

Some historians have thus constructed the hypothesis of an implication of the “group of Oujda” (Ben Bella, Boumediene) because of its spatio-temporal proximity, of the tensions which opposed it to the GPRA in Algiers. This group, favorable to the complete eviction of the European minority, would have been, according to this hypothesis, the discreet initiator of this demonstration, intended to show the inability of the new authorities to maintain order in Algeria. independent.

While this massacre had been known from the afternoon of July 5 in France since Pierre de Bénouville alluded to it on the benches of the National Assembly (“at the moment when, again, blood is flowing in Oran…”) , the press spoke little about it and minimized it, with the exception of Paris-Match which published a poignant report. The families, supported by associations, had to wait more than forty years to learn of information on their missing persons contained in particular in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay.

SEE ALSO - Algerian War: do we need mutual apologies?

The gray areas of this historical black hole have nevertheless been able to be dissipated, by taking into account testimonies (with, among others, L'agonie d'Oran by Geneviève de Ternant) and the work of historical analysis, as shown in the Professor Guy Pervillé in History lesson on a massacre. From the opening of the archives, Jean Monneret (The Concealed Tragedy) or General Faivre (The Unpublished Archives of Algerian Politics) were able to reconstruct the unfolding of July 5 and dismantle point by point the many untruths put forward by Joseph Katz ( The honor of a general) both on his orders given and on the reality of his communication and information capacities.

Jean-Jacques Jordi was able to quantify the toll of this day at seven hundred dead and missing in his work with the evocative title, Un silence d'Etat.

The facts concerning the Oran massacre are therefore sufficiently documented to be recognized by France, without requiring the establishment of a joint Franco-Algerian commission of historians on the subject as proposed in the recent report by Benjamin Stora, except if the Algerian authorities agree to join in this memory work, in particular to locate the location of the remains.

This carnage continues to challenge the reasons for such a deafening silence, which without minimizing the responsibility of the Algerian killers, first of all obliges us to recognize the voluntary and organized inaction of the French armed forces, which remained caulked in their barracks while 'they were able to prevent or greatly reduce the slaughter.

Indeed the few officers, such as Captain Croguennec of the 2nd Zouaves and Lieutenant Rabah Khelif of the 403rd unit of the local force, who took the initiative, at the risk of their lives and disciplinary sanctions, to leave their barracks and rescue the victims, were able, by their sole authority, to free and save hundreds of lives. By following their conscience, these figures of light, in a day of darkness for the French army, less disobeyed an order than they refused to carry out this manifestly illegal order of passivity.

This order, like the one he gave to send back the civilians who had been able to take refuge in military cantonments, goes much further in the wait-and-see attitude than the directives taken by the command during the last months of the engagement. At the express request of General de Gaulle (General Faivre, Unpublished archives of Algerian politics 1958-1962) these were already aimed gradually at proscribing the possibilities of intervention called the initiative of third-category forces.

The commandments given on July 5 fully correspond to the state of mind of the President of the Republic, who no longer wanted to intervene to protect the French after independence, as Pierre Pflimlin told him in his memoirs ("Les Français n'aura only to manage with this government.”) or Alain Peyrefitte in C'tait de Gaulle (“France should have no responsibility in maintaining order…If people massacre each other, it will be the affair of the new authorities.”).

In fact, we cannot exclude, without being able to prove it, that, given the context, the personalities involved and the orders given, General Katz received the order directly not to move from the Chief of the Armed Forces, Charles de Gaulle .

At the end of the afternoon, while in Paris the meeting of the Algerian Affairs Committee was being held, chaired by the Head of State, the military command finally asked the mobile gendarmes to patrol the European districts. In the meantime, the international capitals, probably alerted by their navy in the Mediterranean who have received SOS, insist with Paris to know what is happening in Oran.

This unilateral and local massacre, according to the typology of the specialist Jacques Sémelin, comparable in cruelty to what other French people suffered during the "Sicilian Vespers" in the Middle Ages (1282), would never have happened, or at least not in the same proportions if, during this transitional phase of accession to independence, the French military forces in Oran, like any other army, had fulfilled their mission of protection, which is one of their raison d'être, provided by the ordinance of January 7, 1959: "the object of defense is to ensure at all times, in all circumstances and against all forms of aggression... the life of the population". It is part of the vital interests to protect its population and its nationals abroad, as the armies demonstrated that they still knew how to do sixteen years later during Operation Bonite in Kolweizi 1978.

Other legal arguments such as the criminal notion of assistance to a person in danger, the content of the Evian agreements, the case law on crimes against humanity only reinforce this requirement for intervention to save civilians in distress. . Obviously, non-intervention is also contrary to military traditions, to the ethical principles linked to the status of soldier and to the honor of armies.

A complaint for complicity in war crimes and obedience to criminal orders was filed in 1999 on behalf of the families of victims against Joseph Katz who had been promoted to the highest rank of the French army (general of the army) and had become adviser UDR general. He died before the appeal proceedings and was buried abroad, in Spain.

After the killing of the rue d'Isly on March 26, 1962 of dozens of unarmed French demonstrators by a troop of skirmishers and before the orders not to repatriate thousands of harkis doomed to death, the massacre of Oran constitutes the one of the three acts of a tragedy in which populations loyal to France were sacrificed by a government only concerned with abruptly and completely disengaging itself by making the army, which until now had been protecting them, more or less complicit.

"Silence remains an unforgivable fault... The "forgotten massacre" can no longer be forgotten" wrote Philippe Labro, at the end of the preface to the remarkable eponymous book that Guillaume Zeller devoted nine years ago to the terrible day of the July 5, 1962 in Oran. It is clear that it still is, despite the broadcast in 2018 on France 3 of an edifying and moving documentary Oran, the forgotten massacre of Georges-Marc Benamou and Jean-Charles Deniau and bills aimed at to recognize it.

In comparison to the "overwhelming responsibility", which the Head of State thought he had to speak about in his speech of May 27, 2021 in Kigali about the genocide of the Tutsis, that of the French State concerning this mass crime in Oran n Isn't it overwhelming, since a single order to our units would have put an end to it?

Almost sixty years and seven Heads of State later, this public silence, filled only by a commendable memorial initiative of a "wall of the disappeared" in Perpignan, remains a permanent offense to the memory of these martyred innocents and an open wound for theirs, leaving a dark stain on our republic and our army.

Hasn't the time finally come to bear witness to the truth?