October 17, 1961: the police and gendarmes “were enraged”, the appalling story of an Algerian survivor – South West

“Police and gendarmes were excruciatingly brutal. They had the rage to hurt, ”says Rabah Sahili, whose voice breaks at the memory of the evening of October 17, 1961 when dozens of Algerians were massacred in the middle of Paris. 60 years ago they were over 30,000 Algerians to demonstrate peacefully at the call of the local branch of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in France, to denounce a curfew decreed exclusively against French Muslims in Algeria (FMA) by the prefect of police, Maurice Papon.

Ten thousand police and gendarmes were deployed. The repression was bloody with several demonstrators shot dead, some of whose bodies were thrown into the Seine. The number of deaths is estimated by historians at at least several dozen, even 200, the official toll counting only three and 11,000 injured.

“It was wild, no more no less”

On Saturday, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced the establishment of a minute of silence every October 17 at 11 am in memory of the “chouhada”, the martyrs. Rabah Salihi, who arrived four years earlier from Hautmont (north) where his parents had settled in 1950 when they arrived from Algeria, was arrested when he left the metro at Place de l’Étoile in Paris. He had just turned 19. “We had to meet at Place de l’Etoile to start our peaceful demonstration with a single instruction: no blunt object should be worn by the militants,” he recalls.

This huge square was chosen by the FLN as a rallying point for immigrants from the working-class suburbs of western Paris (Gennevilliers, Asnières, Nanterre, etc.). Other demonstrations were planned elsewhere in the French capital. “I was with a cousin when the police came upon us. Stronger than me, he tried to protect me but he received an avalanche of blows from the butts of revolvers and batons, which left him with a broken leg, ”says Rabah Sahili.

“All Algerians leaving the metro were arrested. They were facies arrests. There were even Italians, Spaniards and South Americans ”who were arrested, says Rabah Sahili, about the instructions given to the gendarmes and police officers to attack the FMA. They were all driven “with batons” to a parking lot near Place de l’Etoile. “You should not fall under the blows of the butts which were going to fall on the skull. They were so ferocious… It was savage, no more and no less, ”says Rabah Sahili.

Thrown alive in the Seine

“The parking lot was crowded. From midnight, we were transferred by bus to the Palais des sports, where we stayed for three days, watched by the police and harkis ”(auxiliaries of the French army), he adds. During these days of anguish, the “9000” people parked in the Palais des sports were only entitled to “a snack and a bottle of water” before the police took them to the “center of sorting of Vincennes ”, according to Rabah Sahili. “This camp was devoid of all amenities: no beds, no toilets. We slept on the floor in freezing cold, ”he says. “I stayed there for a fortnight before being allowed to go home.”

“During the arrests, I saw around 20 bleeding people lying on the ground near Place de l’Etoile. The police were very numerous and behaved like ferocious beasts, ”he said. “Algerians were also thrown, some alive, in the Seine by the police but we will never know the exact number of corpses engulfed by this river”, regrets this former member of the FLN networks responsible for collecting money with immigrants. According to him, even before October 17, a good number of Algerian activists “ended up in the waters of the Seine” during police raids.

“I took part in the rescue at the last minute of a young activist, thrown into the Seine, near the power station at the port of Gennevilliers, by the police,” he recalls, adding that, given for dead, he ” was badly messed up when we got him out ”but he survived because he was young and tough. After independence in 1962, Rabah Sahili remained in France for two years before returning to his country where he made a career with the airline company Air Algeria.