Torture as State Crime

A Criminological Analysis of the Transnational Institutional Torturer

Melanie Collard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315456119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Can we understand torture by focusing on the torture chamber or even on the states in which it is practiced, or do we have to consider the wider political context in which it is embedded? This is the central question of this book which explores concepts of state crime for understanding and responding to the indirect use of torture by external nation states.

Drawing on the cooperation between France and Argentina in Argentina's Dirty War, this book explores the utility of the concept of state crime for understanding and responding to the indirect use of torture by external nation states with a detailed examination of the exportation of torture techniques and training expertise as complicity in torture. Discussing the institutionalisation of torture in its international structural context, this book focuses on examining three alleged manifestations of the torturer: direct perpetrator, institutional perpetrator, and transnational institutional perpetrator.

Important reading for those in the fields of criminology, sociology, international relations and human rights law, this book will also be of key interest to scholars and students in the areas of state crime, human rights and imperialism.

Chapter 1

From Algeria to Argentina

The transfer of French savoir-faire in the making of official torturers

There is not a single country, not even the most liberal in the world, which is safe from the infection whose symptoms I’m about to describe, or which can be certain of being able to disentangle itself from a chain of events similar to that with which I shall be dealing.

(Vidal-Naquet 1963: 18)

Setting the scene

Many books have been written concerning state terror in Algeria in the 1950s.¹ The renewed winds of democracy which blew in France after its liberation very quickly came into conflict with the colonial inheritance, outdated imperialism, conflict which first broke out in Indochina (1946–1954), and in Algeria (1954–1962) shortly afterwards. It is now common knowledge that, throughout most of the Algerian War, France made general use of the practices of torture, summary execution and large-scale deportation. The current debates focus more on the scale of the methods and on the French senior officials’ degree of involvement. Both alleged extensions – horizontally as well as vertically – reveal the vicious circle that led an increasing number of officers to commit illegal acts, while most of the political leaders, in Algiers as well as in Paris, hypocritically gave the military a free hand while abdicating their own responsibility. Vidal-Naquet summarised the part played by torture throughout the Algerian War in these few words: ‘it started as a police method of interrogation, developed into a military method of operation, and then ultimately turned into a clandestine state institution which struck at the very roots of the life of the nation’ (1963: 15). Torture became institutionalised in Algeria, in the sense that it was exercised by the state through its repressive apparatus. The torturers had good reasons to feel that they were acting within legal bounds (Droz and Lever 1982: 139; Vidal-Naquet 1963: 60–75). By 1962, over 25,000 French soldiers had been killed and 60,000 wounded in Algeria, while on the Algerian side, over a million died,² many of whom were also tortured (Lazreg 2008: 9–10). Despite these enormous numbers, for a long time no one was officially allowed to use the word ‘war’: one spoke only of the ‘events in Algeria’. Only in October 1999 did the French National Assembly (parliament) decide to officially permit the term ‘Algerian War’.³

An increasing amount of academic work has been undertaken concerning Argentina and its Dirty War.⁴ On 24 March 1976, the powerful Argentine armed forces installed their dictatorship, launched the ‘National Reorganisation Process’ – Proceso de Reorganización Nacional – and initiated a phase of anti-insurgent warfare known as the ‘Dirty War’ – Guerra Sucia – that would last until 1983. Although Argentina had long been marked by the presence of armed forces in political life, through coups d’état, dictatorships and exceptional regimes, the military government that settled itself between 1976 and 1983 exhibited new features that were distinct from those of earlier authoritarian regimes. During this period Argentine soldiers kidnapped, tortured and murdered between 15,000 and 30,000 people, according to human rights organisations (Abramovici 2001; Chelala 2001; MacMaster 2004: 8). It is also well known that the Argentine military intentionally employed the same methods of torture as the French army (Aguila 2010; Carlson 2000; Chomsky 1991; Fagen 1992; Gareau 2004; Hey 1995; McClintock 1992; Schirmer 1998). This is consistent with the argument that states learn techniques of repression from their own experience, but also from other states (Gurr 1986: 55).

What is less familiar, however, is the suggestion that France was directly implicated in transforming the Argentinian war and security professionals into official torturers. It was the clash between Argentine willingness to confront its past and French willingness to bury and deny its involvement in the Dirty War immediately following the Algerian conflict that made this particular case study so compelling. This book argues that France continued to be centrally involved in international human rights abuses and actions considered deviant by civil society, shortly after the tragedy of its own Algerian War. This is a bitter irony for a state that considers itself the ‘Pays des Droits de L’Homme’.

Explanation of key concepts

The making of official torturers

Before going any further, it is important to explain the choice of words used in the title of the present chapter. For the purposes of this study, a torturer should be understood as an agent of the state or as an extra-state functionary, acting as a direct perpetrator, rather than as a private individual committing domestic acts of torture or acting as a bystander (Cameron 2009: 107; Cohen 2001: 140). Indeed, this book is not concerned with acts of torture as ‘ordinary’ crimes – that is, acts committed in violation of the expectations and instructions of authority or carried out by individual officials at their own initiative and in disregard of the policies and orders under which they function – but as state crimes. These are acts of torture that are explicitly prescribed, implicitly expected or at least tolerated by the authorities (Kelman 2005: 125–126). This is an important distinction because, as Green and Ward noted, it is the ‘public/state element of torture which allows for its capacity as “world destroying”. If the state perpetrates or tacitly condones the terror there can be no escape, no other world’ (2004: 127). In this context, the world itself is the torturer and ‘extreme forms of abuse follow predictably’ (Huggins et al. 2002: 235). Indeed, once you have what De Swaan (2001) calls the ‘enclaves of barbarism’ – which depend on states for their production – then torture has no limits and will never stop.

Torture refers here to the definition adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, and contained in the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which stipulates that torture consists of:

[…] any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of a public or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.^5,6

Many academics have examined whether torturers, acting as agents of the state, were initially different from the normal population. In their study of the violence workers employed during the repressive military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), Huggins et al. (2002) related that they had neither heard nor seen evidence that any of the torturers had sadistic predispositions prior to their immersion in an atrocity unit. These people ‘were quite ordinary, showing no evidence of premorbid personalities that would have predisposed them to such careers’ (Huggins et al. 2002: 240). On the contrary, where torture was concerned, authorities looked for cool-headed men with no hostile impulses, who could ‘predictably and dispassionately follow orders’ and who presented the ‘detachment necessary for carrying out prolonged torture sessions’ (Huggins et al. 2002: 240). Indeed, Brazilian officials did not want to train people who were initially psychologically ‘uncontrollable’ or could not be shaped into ‘predictable performers of designated atrocity tasks’ (Huggins et al. 2002: 241).

Another example of these findings emerged more recently from Iraq, where members of the U.S. military tortured detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison. Lankford has demonstrated that, even though these acts of torture have been characterised as isolated incidents and blamed on a few rogue soldiers, the evidence indicates that most of these people ‘were relatively normal when they entered the military, and did not have psychological disorders, pathologies, or early life traumas which provide an explanation for their cruel behavior’ (2009: 388). As in the two previous cases, a screening process was specifically designed to keep those with sadistic predispositions from joining the service, since unreliable employees are difficult to control and less likely to conform to institutional norms. Indeed, ‘for the U.S. military, criminal record checks, psychological evaluation, and basic educational requirements help ensure that the new recruits are relatively normal and that they can be successfully trained to serve the system’ (Lankford 2009: 388).

These cases seem to demonstrate that ‘the willingness or, better, the ability to torture and to commit atrocity is not confined to a limited number of sadistic, mentally deranged individuals’ (Green and Ward 2004: 140). There are many other studies to indicate that ‘normality’ in terms of personal and social background characterises the vast majority of those who carry out violence to serve a system. Examples include Arendt’s 1963 study of Nazi slaughterers, Browning’s 1998 research on members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, Lifton (1986) in his study of Nazi doctors, Staub (1989) in his examination of SS paramilitary death squads, and Haritos-Fatouros’s 1988 work on Greek torturers.⁷

Following most evidence it can be inferred, as Gibson did in her study of factors contributing to the creation of torturers, that ‘individual personality and background information about individuals, by themselves, cannot distinguish individuals who will commit torture or other cruel acts from those who will not’ (1990: 79). Since there is no evidence to suggest that men or women, in order to torture, have to be sadistic or mentally unbalanced from the start, it can be inferred that normality and ordinariness characterise perpetrators of torture. Given that it has been established that torturers are not born, it follows that they must be made.

From Algeria …

In Algeria, torture was intimately linked to the nature of the colonial state. Indeed, its use had begun in the aftermath of the French invasion in 1830 (Le Cour Grandmaison 2005: 152–156). However, torture had not initially been institutionalised in the way that it was after 1954 (Le Cour Grandmaison 2005: 154). The war of decolonisation (1954–1962) was the culmination of ‘a long process of economic immiseration, political disenfranchisement, and colonial intolerance of Algerians’ attempts to agitate for change within the system’ (Lazreg 2008: 4). At the time, the population of Algeria was mainly made up of two different cultural groups: on the one hand, there were the Pieds-Noirs – that is, nearly one million French nationals born on Algerian soil – and, on the other hand, the Muslim community. The Algerian War saw the rise of a generation of young nationalists, many of whom joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). These young people rejected their status as ‘protected subjects’ or ‘French-Muslims’, which they were accorded under a special legal system called the Code de l’Indigenat (Vaujour 1985: 48). Algerian nationalism was subjected to fierce repression in which members of the Pieds-Noirs civilian population took part at times, further exacerbating the ethnic nature of the conflict. With international decolonisation processes under way in other latitudes, tensions also took on an ideological perspective. As I shall explain in Chapter 3, the Battle of Algiers was a focal point of the war, in which torture became systematic (Lazreg 2008: 5), and it was conducted in an identical way to what French journalist Pierre Abramovici calls the ‘Battle of Buenos Aires’ (Abramovici, as interviewed by Llumá 2002b: 20).

Torture was everything but an epiphenomenon of the Algerian War: it was central to the army’s defence of a colonial empire in its waning years (Branche 2001; Fanon 1963; Lazreg 2008; MacMaster 2004; Maran 1989; Paret 1964; Vidal-Naquet 1963, 2001). Its systematic use was the direct outcome of the French theory and doctrine of Revolutionary War – Doctrine de Guerre Révolutionnaire – that developed in the 1950s.⁸ Six torture techniques in particular were regularly employed ‘gradually, concomitantly, or alternately’: kickings, hangings, forced submersion of the victim into water, electro-shocks, cigarette burnings and rapes (Branche 2001: 326). As Lazreg explained:

Even though the theory did not initially advocate torture, it informed an anti-subversive war doctrine that could not be implemented successfully without its use. Without the theory, torture could not have been systematized. Similarly, without torture, the anti-subversive war doctrine could not have been implemented.

(2008: 15)

Having set the theoretical and operational context, torture easily became institutionalised. Therefore, its use by the French military was not just an instance of violence committed by a few rogue individuals.

The Revolutionary War theory and doctrine were elaborated by a number of soldiers who were veterans of the Second World War and subsequent colonial wars, especially in Indochina. These men – such as Colonel Charles Lacheroy (2003) and Colonel Roger Trinquier (1964) – saw in the Algerian War an opportunity for overcoming the humiliation of the loss of Indochina in May 1954 (Lazreg 2008: 3, 18). The French experience in Algeria in the 1950s also revealed that even people who had recently experienced torture could in turn become torturers and justify their practices (Clarke 2008: 17). Notwithstanding that it had a legal tradition aligned closely and explicitly with the doctrines of human dignity and civil protection, France turned to torture soon after its own late colonial political agony. It consequently betrayed the very values that had served the French Resistance so well in its combat against Nazi occupation (Le Sueur 2006: xv; Peters 1985: 133–134). As McCoy pointed out:

Despite the Third Reich’s defeat in 1945, its legacy persisted in the former occupied territories, particularly among French officers in colonial Algeria. As partisans who fought the German occupation during the Second World War, some of these officers had suffered Nazi torture and now, ironically, used the experience to inflict this cruelty on others.

(2006: 18–19)

This was ironic, indeed, given that France had so often, verbally at least, championed universal moral values and human rights (Alleg 2006a: 98).

The centrality of torture to the debate on the Algerian War resided not only in the horrors of the practices that took place, ‘but rather in the extent to which it served as a symbol of a deeper corruption, both of the state and of the structures of military, administrative and judicial power that had made it possible’ (MacMaster 2004: 9). Some suggest that torture – and more generally state terror – became established in Algeria at the behest of the government in France, which saw tor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 From Algeria to Argentina: the transfer of French savoir-faire in the making of official torturers
• 2 Torture perpetrators’ levels of complicity: an analytical review of the literature
• 3 France’s military relationship with Argentina: the transfer of an ideology that justifies torture
• 4 Continuing education: the implementation of French savoir-faire during the Argentine Dirty War
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: French diplomatic archives by documents
• Appendix 2: Argentine military archives by articles
• Appendix 3: interview schedule
• Appendix 4: claims for exemption (French diplomatic archives)
• Bibliography
• Index