France finally jails Nazi collaborator
By G.
Dunkel
Former French official Maurice Papon is facing 10 years in
jail for crimes against humanity. He rounded up Jews for
deportation under the pro-Nazi Vichy government in World War
II.
Papon was a wily opportunist. He collaborated with the Nazis
while working in France's Vichy government. Then later he
worked for the anti-Nazi but pro-imperialist Resistance
Movement led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle. Still later, under
imperialist governments headed by the Socialist Party in the
1950s, he was assigned to viciously repress the liberation
movement in Algeria, then a French colony.
The truth is Maurice Papon was an energetic and ruthless
agent of the French bourgeoisie.
Papon recently fled France to Switzerland trying to avoid
incarceration. When arrested there, he was holding three
passports, one not his, indicating he had not lost all his old
government connections.
When de Gaulle became France's president in 1958, he made
Papon police commissioner of Paris. On Oct. 17, 1961, Paris
police acting under Papon's orders attacked a peaceful
demonstration of Algerians, beat at least 300 people to death
and threw them into the Seine. These deaths have never been
investigated.
Police arrested 15,000 people--half the demonstration, many
of them children.
A year later, Paris police attacked a left-wing
demonstration against a secret fascist army--the OAS, which was
organizing an attempted coup against de Gaulle--and killed nine
people.
It wasn't until 1967, after a leading opposition figure in
Morocco, Ben Barka, was kidnapped in the middle of Paris and
killed, that Papon was fired as police commissioner.
After a brief stint in France's defense industry, he ran for
parliament as a candidate of a right-wing party, was elected
and worked his way up to minister of budget and finance in
1978, a cabinet post.
Revelations of his Vichy past forced him to resign in 1981.
He was indicted for crimes against humanity in 1983 but managed
to stave off a trial until 1997. It was the longest criminal
trial in French history; his appeals were not finished until he
fled France this October.
Even after Papon's past crimes in helping the Nazis
exterminate Jews were exposed, his role in attacking members of
the French Communist Party and other leftists, Algerians and
other North Africans passed without much comment. Papon shares
this kind of background with many other French capitalist
politicians and officials.
He would not have gone to jail without the efforts of
relatives of the people he helped to deport and of
Communist-led veterans of the French resistance to fascism in
World War II.
His crimes are far greater than those for which he was
convicted.
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