THE DEATH OF AISSAT IDIR
The cryptofascist dregs of the French army in Algeria have contemptuously challenged the whole world workers' movement by the cowardly and provocative assassination of Aïssat Idir, general secretary of the Union Générale des precisely at the moment world-wide labor protests designed to save him were rising
Aissat Idir was arrested on 23 May 1956, technically on the charge of "endangering the external security of the state," but in simple fact for trade-union militancy. He was transferred from camp to prison to camp to prison, and repeatedly tortured by the over-age juvenile delinquents of the French army who seem bent on outdoing in sadism their Nazi teachers. But he yet lived to be brought to trial, on 12 January 1959, before the Algiers Military Tribunal, where he was defended by, among others, the well-known Belgian senator, Henri Rolin. For lack of any evidence whatsoever on the charge, he was, two and a half years after his arrest, acquitted.
But not released; on the contrary, spirited away, he was kept incomunicado from his family and lawyers and Protests of chul internatiodal Confederation di Pree Trade. parachutists.
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ganization. interested in the case was repeatedly refused entry to Algeria. French authorities, in pure fantasy, alleged that Aissat was contemplating suicide.
After months of refusal, a lawyer was finally admitted to see Aïssat at a prison hospital, where he was confined with horrible burns on his legs. He found Aissat under close and hostile guard, and was not permitted to speak to him alone. But despite the presence of a spying officer Aissat denied any attempt at or desire for suicide. He had been excruciatingly tortured by parachutists with a blowtorch, hence the burns. An appeal to de Gaulle to order the release of this man, acquitted of charges and quite illegally held, went unanswered.
In mid-July a desperate appeal by the UG T A, transmitted and echoed by the World Federation of Free Trade Unions, roused workers' organizations all over the world in tardy protests his seat they seciding a as cyt peach, in early August, his death - - was cynically announced by the French authorities.
Outraged, Maître Rolin, himself a Socialist, denounced the responsibility of French Socialist Robert Lacoste the arrest and the S FIO for its pussyfooting behavior. And the UG TA correctly demands that workers' organizations on a world scale, recognizing that the very principles of trade unionism are attacked, demonstrate by concrete actions their repudiation of these gangster methods of French colonialism. We whole-heartedly associate ourselves with this appeal, as we have with those preceding it, and we salute the memory of this one further union martyr. The attitude of the present French government, like that of its predecessors, in covering up, by an attitude in which hypocrisy and menace are uniquely blended, the creatures as dirty and dishonor it.
BULLETIN
As we go to press, we learn from the UGT A that the life of Ali Yahia Majid, another trade-union leader detained by the French occupation troops, is also in danger from their maltreatment. Many other Algerian unionists held in concentration camps are similarly threatened. The
UG TA appeals to labor organizations everywhere to rush protests to the International Labor Office, urging it to send a neutral international commission to Algeria, while there is still time to save the lives of these tortured union