One of the greatest political leaders of the 20th century spent a total of 27 years in prison before leading South Africa into a new era
Nelson Mandela called himself a “troublemaker” and a humble servant to his people. He was in fact the preeminent political leader of his age, tearing down the evil of apartheid and almost single-handedly laying the foundations of a free South Africa.
As a prisoner for nearly three decades he showed the strength that earned him the leadership of black Africa’s liberation struggle. As President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 he brought reconciliation where many had feared civil war. As a global statesman in his later years he became the focus of hopes for a new era of justice and better governance across subSaharan Africa and beyond.
The sheer force of his personality and the scale of his suffering would anyway have given him a formidable authority. But that alone would not have accounted for his unmatched moral stature, had it not been combined with a deep reverence for truth and forgiveness in everything he said. It was his unshakeable conviction that peace and reconciliation must be at the heart of the new order in South Africa. The idea of revenge on the old order for the iniquities of the past, was no part of his makeup. Once he had exchanged the plight of the political prisoner for the offices of head of state and government he looked always forwards into his country’s future, never back.
Mandela was a fighter and a strategist who took critical decisions on when to confront apartheid with violence; and when at last to negotiate with his oppressors. He was also a patriot and an optimist who saw more clearly than any of his peers in the African National Congress how to turn the minority rule of white supremacists into a functioning multiracial democracy.
He emerged from a remote tribal upbringing to lead the struggle against apartheid from one of the world’s harshest prisons — Robben Island, off Cape Town. When he was at last released, by a government which had slowly realised that he was its only hope for the peaceful future of their country, his success in building a new nation despite the toxic legacy of pass laws and “whites only” privilege was frequently described as miraculous.
It may be doubted whether anyone else could have achieved this. Although Mandela came from a royal Xhosa family, his background was modest. He had acquired a certain reputation as a Johannesburg lawyer while his younger years were devoted to politics and the African National Congress. After reluctantly taking the dangerous decision to embrace violence in the battle against apartheid, Mandela was arrested and imprisoned for life. His spirit undimmed, he survived many years on Robben Island and, when popular unrest was reaching a peak — and without the full agreement of his ANC colleagues, either in jail or in exile — he judged that it was time to talk.
The process was long and difficult but, with the advent of President F. W. de Klerk, Mandela set course for the majority-rule Government of National Unity that was achieved in April 1994. He then became President of South Africa, recruiting de Klerk, the former president and National Party leader, as his joint deputy. Throughout this process Mandela presented himself as a symbol of non-racial South Africa, a country in which the discrimination and suffering of apartheid could be set aside. He led by example, with forgiveness, patriotism, humour, wisdom, compassion, loving kindness and a vision of a united nation.
This was a messianic role which — for he was by then an old man — he played with extraordinary stamina around the world. “Madiba”, as he was known at home, was greatly loved, sometimes by those who might have been expected to abhor him. All South Africans knew that Madiba was the last, best hope for their divided land.
Rolihlahla Mandela — the given name means “to pull a branch of a tree”, or more colloquially, “troublemaker” in Xhosa — was born in a remote village in the Umtata district of the Transkei in 1918. His father was a member of the Thembu royal house who died young. The boy, brought up in a peasant society, herding cattle and goats at 5 and initiated by tribal ceremony at 16, was in effect adopted by the Regent of the Thembus, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, and was educated with a view to his becoming a councillor or adviser to the Xhosa king: he was sent to the Clarkebury Institute in Engcobo, a boarding school for black Africans; to Healdtown Wesleyan College, and then to the University College of Fort Hare. He was given the name “Nelson” at his first school by his teacher, Miss Mdingane, though he never knew why it was chosen.
When the Regent arranged a marriage for his young protégé which did not appeal, Mandela fled to Johannesburg where his first job was as a night watchman at Crown Mines. He soon met Walter Sisulu, a young estate agent living in Orlando, who would become one of his dearest friends and closest colleagues; Sisulu arranged an apprenticeship for Mandela with a liberal law firm. In those days Mandela lived in Alexandra, a black township adjoining some of Johannesburg’s most affluent white suburbs, and he used to say that he would always think of “Alex” as his home even after he moved to Soweto.
Articled in 1943, he graduated in the same year and enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg as the only African student in the law faculty. There he met many future political colleagues, though he did not pass his degree exams. He used to say that there was no single moment when he became “politicised”. He disagreed with what he considered the quietism of older ANC leaders, represented by Dr A. B. Xuma, president-general of the party, and by 1944 he had associated himself with the new ANC Youth League. But in those early years Mandela was wary, even critical, of the Communist Party. In 1944 he married Evelyn Mase, by whom he would have four children, one of whom died in childhood.
The tensions between the younger and older generations in the ANC intensified — these were the years when the National Party came to power and institutionalised apartheid — and in 1950 Mandela took Dr Xuma’s place on the party’s national executive committee. The year was important because it featured the “Day of Protest”, now remembered as South Africa’s Freedom Day though at the time it was only a modest success. In the same year there was, for Mandela, a reconciliation between what passed as Marxism in South African circles and his own priority of African nationalism.
He thereafter accepted the Communist Party as an ally of the ANC, and was persuaded to agree to a civil disobedience movement which was to be known as the Defiance Campaign. It was an historic moment in the struggle.
In July 1952 the young lawyer was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended sentence. In those days Mandela, and the ANC, influenced partly by the anti-colonial struggle in India, were committed to non-violence. Mandela in fact believed that the South African Government could not be overthrown by protest, let alone by violence. “We were still amateurs,” he would say afterwards.
With Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC president from 1952, Mandela became the party’s first deputy president. He was “banned” (restricted to Johannesburg and forbidden to publish or to have contact with other people). In 1952 he had opened the first firm of African lawyers in Johannesburg with his close friend and colleague Oliver Tambo. They were successful and busy.
In 1953, although his banning had been renewed, Mandela wrote the first of his famous speeches, which had to be read for him, in his absence, at the ANC Transvaal conference. It was titled “No Easy Walk to Freedom” (the phrase was borrowed from Nehru). In 1956, after an unsuccessful schools boycott, the Congress of the People delivered the “Freedom Charter” which was to be a core document of the next generation. Mandela provided a commentary on the “Freedom Charter” to the magazine Liberation, in which he revealed his dream of the growing black middle class that is one of his crowning legacies: “The breaking up and democratising of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”
In 1956 Mandela was banned yet again, this time for five years. He was arrested in December of that year, imprisoned in the fort in Johannesburg, and charged with treason. At this point his wife left him, unable to endure the ordeals which came with his political life. (She had become a Jehovah’s Witness; his children, he later admitted with great sadness, had been near-traumatised by his political career.)
The famous Treason Trial in Pretoria, with 30 accused, lasted from August 1959 to March 1961. The eventual verdict was Not Guilty. But a state of emergency had been declared in March 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre, and after the trial Mandela decided to go underground. Posing usually as a chauffeur or a servant, he became a “Black Pimpernel” of popular legend as he defied the police for more than a year, travelling throughout the country as well as abroad, before being arrested at a road block in Natal.
He had come to the conviction that non-violence, which he had previously espoused, had to be abandoned since it seemed manifest that it did not work against a ruthless apartheid state. In his autobiography he would later write: “We had no option but to turn to violence. I used an old African expression: ‘Sebatanaha se bokwe da diatla’ (The attacks of the wild beasts cannot be averted with only bare hands).” He therefore agreed to the setting up of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military arm of the ANC, and to be its commander-in-chief. In October 1962, after a trial at which he wore the Xhosa leopard-skin kaross to illustrate that he was a black man in a white man’s court, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
That trial, and sentence, were overtaken by the discovery and capture by the police of almost all the members of the Umkhonto we Sizwe high command, in Rivonia, an outlying northern suburb of Johannesburg, in July 1961.
The Rivonia trial which lasted from October 1963 to June 1964 attracted global attention. Facing life imprisonment at 46, Mandela used his opening statement to make perhaps the most dramatic speech of his life. It lasted more than four hours and ended with this warning: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
He had taken his law exams, and passed, as he was waiting for the judge’s verdict.
Mandela would spend a total of 27 years in prison, most of them on Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz. The early years were particularly bleak for him and his companions. They were required to break stones and then to labour in the limestone quarry (which permanently damaged his eyes), enduring the racist abuse of the Afrikaner warders while looking out on the idyllic landscape of Table Mountain. From the beginning, Mandela was able to establish himself as the leader, commanding the respect of both warders and fellow prisoners.
As the years passed, conditions slowly improved. Hard labour was phased out for the political prisoners by 1977, and Mandela later recorded that he could take up gardening and even tennis. Secretly, he began to write his memoirs, which were buried and then smuggled to the mainland. He played Creon in a prison production of Sophocles’s Antigone. He was occasionally visited, when the authorities permitted, by his second wife, Winnie Madikizela, whom he had married before the Treason Trial in 1958 and with whom he had two daughters. She was herself to be persecuted for many years by the South African officials: her sufferings on his behalf would for the rest of his life be one of Mandela’s greatest regrets. In 1969 his eldest son, Thembi, was killed in an accident, and the Government refused his request to attend the funeral.
As it filled with a new generation of political prisoners, Robben Island was becoming a “university” of black protest, led by Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Mac Maharaj and the rest of his senior colleagues. The authorities could hardly have been unaware of this, and in 1974 the government, through the Justice Minister, Jimmy Kruger, offered the first hint of negotiation. Kruger said that he might reduce Mandela’s sentence dramatically if he would agree to move to Transkei and accept the legitimacy of its government. Mandela refused. As he said later: “Only free men can negotiate.”
The Justice Department commissioned a psychological profile of Mandela in 1980. It revealed that “Mandela commands all the qualities to be the number one black leader in South Africa. His period in prison has caused his psycho-political posture to increase rather than decrease, and with this he now has acquired the characteristic prison-charisma of the contemporary liberation leader.”
In 1982, perhaps because the situation on the island was becoming too difficult for the authorities to handle, Mandela and some of his senior colleagues were transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in a beautiful part of the Cape peninsula. Conditions were relaxed, including the rules for personal visits. It was 21 years, he later recalled, since he had been allowed to hold Winnie’s hand.
The South African Government, under pressure, was also increasingly isolated by sanctions and embarrassed abroad by a “Free Mandela” campaign gaining the status of a cause célèbre for students and progressives on every continent. In January 1985 President P. W. Botha offered, again, a conditional freedom, which Mandela rejected.
The first real breakthrough came in late 1985 when, after prostate surgery, Mandela was visited in hospital by the comparatively open-minded Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee. He was then separated from his colleagues and moved into a much more comfortable cell.
Mandela decided, as he put it later, that “it was time to talk.” It was his own decision, and it was to create problems with the ANC leadership in exile. He explained that he never had illusions of a military victory over the white South Africans. During this period he was moving alone, and he understood that any negotiations would be slow. The Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth came to see him in his prison in February 1986. He talked again with Coetsee in 1987 and 1988. A secret working group was set up with the Government in May 1988. By this time Mandela, though still in jail, was being treated by the government almost as an honoured guest (witness his speedy nursing home treatment for TB in that year). His relationship with his warders had also changed, as though they had now discovered in themselves a respect, even affection, for their country’s future leader.
Mandela’s life at this stage had its farcical elements. He was having secret conversations with a special government committee (he recorded 47 meetings with them), without authority from his party-in-exile. Despite being South Africa’s most famous convict, he was frequently escorted out of prison and taken for recreational drives throughout the Cape. This may have offered opportunities for escape, but if so he eschewed them.
He was moved, in December 1988, to a comfortable cottage in the gardens of the Victor Verster Prison outside Paarl, where he had white warders to wait on him. (They would become admirers, even devotees.) But he rejected all suggestions of release. In July 1989 he had a secret and apparently relaxed meeting with President P. W. Botha, who would shortly be succeeded by F. W. de Klerk. In February 1990, de Klerk started to lift bans and release some of the ANC’s political prisoners. Mandela chose to delay his own release, refusing to leave prison before his colleagues, until February 11, 1990. Then, in scenes of triumph televised worldwide, he and Winnie emerged hand-in-hand. He raised both fists in exultation and was driven in a makeshift motorcade to Cape Town to greet rapt crowds “in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all”. He had been in prison for 27 years.
There followed a difficult and confusing transition. Between 1987 and 1990, members of the Afrikaner establishment and the leadership-in-exile of the ANC had been holding secret meetings in Europe. After the release of Walter Sisulu in October 1989 it took more than two years for constitutional talks to get under way at the Codesa negotiations which were held at a venue between Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Mandela, from February 1990, was technically only deputy president of the ANC (the long-exiled, ailing Oliver Tambo being president). No one doubted that he was in fact the leader, but there were growing and visible tensions with F. W. de Klerk. The “Armed Struggle” was suspended by the ANC. Mandela toured Africa, and the world, to universal acclamation.
Early in 1992 he announced that he and Winnie were to separate, in circumstances which would have attracted scandal-mongering but which he diverted by the evident pain and honesty of his public explanation. As he wrote in his autobiography: “My own return was also more difficult for her than it was for me. She married a man who soon left her; that man became a myth, and then that myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all.”
After that Mandela, it seemed, could do no wrong. In late l992 he agreed to the concept of a government of national unity, which would include the Nationalists who had imprisoned him for so many years. When the radical and popular Chris Hani was assassinated by white right-wingers, Mandela appeared on television and succeeded in defusing dangerous racial tensions. In June 1993 it was agreed that there would be a majority-rule election in April 1994 — and when the ANC won a 62 per cent victory, amid extraordinary scenes of racial reconciliation and hope for the future, Mandela volunteered that he was relieved that the party had not achieved a full two-thirds majority, because he wanted not an ANC government but a government of the whole country.
When the new South African government was installed on May 10, 1994, Defence Force jets displayed the colours of the new national flag over Mandela’s head as he was sworn in as president in Pretoria. Beside him stood the former president, F. W. de Klerk, now willing to serve as one of his two deputies. The two men shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 when, in his speech in Oslo, Mandela saluted de Klerk: “He had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people through the imposition of the system of apartheid.”
As president, Nelson Mandela continued to emphasise reconciliation above all. Sometimes he took this to the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of apartheid, and visited Orania, the remote settlement where a handful of Afrikaners continued to pursue the dream of a whites-only state. In 1995 he met the former president P. W. Botha and Percy Yutar, his old prosecutor in the trials, both of whom spoke kindly of their visitor. He had a remarkable gift for the appropriate, emollient gesture, never more rapturously received than at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup — traditionally the game of South African whites — which he attended wearing a Springbok jersey. Afterwards when he embraced Francois Pienaar, the victorious white South African captain, Pienaar was too moved to speak.
From his Johannesburg house, in affluent Houghton, he would take a daily morning stroll, chatting with the neighbours. To the delight of Johannesburg’s influential Jewish community he even turned up at a bar mitzvah. He could charm any audience, whether in a township rally, a television studio or a business banquet. He was always, simply, himself.
Mandela understood that these first five years were crucial to South Africa’s prospects of peaceful emergence from the legacy of apartheid: the foundations of a multiracial constitution had been laid, and the seeds of inter-racial harmony had been planted, but he well knew how easily things could go wrong.
Later he admitted that the transition had succeeded better than in his wildest dreams: he suggested that the white right-wing had been on the point of starting a civil war in April 1994 and a bloodbath had been averted only narrowly.
From his inauguration he made it clear that he would step down at the next election, in 1999, when he would be in his eighties. This brought a contest for the succession, which was quickly resolved when Cyril Ramaphosa retreated to a career in business and Thabo Mbeki, son of Govan, one of Mandela’s oldest friends and colleagues, emerged as heir-apparent. Mbeki had been brought up in exile in Britain and had been groomed for this role by Oliver Tambo.
Mandela’s only real embarrassment was the activity of his wife Winnie. She was always a flamboyant personality, and her indiscretions were increasingly distressing for him. When she was Deputy Minister for Arts, he accepted her apology for publicly criticising the Government, but in March 1995 he dismissed her. Their daughters demonstrated their support for her, but beyond the townships Winnie attracted little sympathy. In March 1996 Mandela endured a public divorce but in 1998, on his 80th birthday, Mandela married Graça Machel, the widow of President Samora Machel of Mozambique, who had been killed in an air crash in 1986. With Graça, Mandela finally found marital happiness, surrounded by a huge family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
For all the esteem and affection in which he was held, Mandela chose not to be a “strong” president. He saw himself, he once said, as the chairman of the board. He may equally have envisaged himself as the traditional tribal elder, deliberately distancing himself from the day-to-day decisions and conflicts of government. He rarely chaired Cabinet meetings. He was famous for his habit of rising long before dawn and taking a street walk — to the horror of his bodyguards — and then working a long day, often not finishing before midnight. He liked to be called “Madiba” — a Xhosa term of respect — and as the years went by more and more South Africans of all races came to refer to him by this name. He published his memoirs, Long Walk to Freedom, which, though the later chapters were ghosted by a skilful US journalist, is a moving and eloquent autobiography, and a worldwide bestseller. The royalties were given to charity (as was one third of his presidential salary).
He did not claim that everything was perfect: on the contrary. In January 1997 for example, he spoke of “fundamental and serious mistakes” in the government’s first two and a half years and referred to factionalism, problems in provincial leadership, disastrous errors by the health department and, more generally, to the fact that his government was “not moving as fast as we would like”. He agreed that crime was a major problem, though he also insisted that the crime wave was in part a legacy of apartheid.
In December 1997 he alarmed many of his white admirers when, in a marathon speech marking his retirement as president of the African National Congress (he would continue as South Africa’s president until 1999), he harshly criticised continuing white racism and resistance to social and economic change. It was generally assumed that this intemperate speech had been written by his successor, Thabo Mbeki.
Perhaps his greatest error as President was his failure to recognise and publicise the scourge of Aids. In retirement he admitted that he had been advised not to raise the subject before the 1994 election because it would not prove to be a popular issue. It was believed that black South Africans who had endured the policing of many aspects of their lives under apartheid would not take kindly to the close scrutiny of their sexual habits.
None of this detracted from his popularity both inside South Africa and around the world. His smile became one of the world’s most familiar images. His innate courtesy and natural charm were remarked upon by everyone who met him. He could bring informality to the most difficult or official occasion, whether by wearing one of his large collection of elegant but casual shirts or breaking into the stiff-jointed dance that became known as the “Madiba shuffle”.
Mandela’s willingness to stand down as president in 1999 will stand as among his most important political legacies. But while he liked to portray himself as just a “pensioner”, his fame and status grew in the years following his retirement. Without the burden of presidential politics, he could adopt the role of informal leader of the developing world that he retained until his death. In old age his life was busier than most people’s in the peak of life. He travelled the world, communicated with international leaders and spoke out on issues of the day. He established the Mandela Foundation which raised and distributed money to worthy causes in South Africa, and he started (without a ghost writer) to work on a second volume of memoirs which he told friends would cover the presidential period.
He eventually abandoned this volume in its intended form, but passages from the material he had written for it appeared in Conversations with Myself, published in 2010 and incorporating diaries, calendars, letters and transcripts from recordings, as well as narrative.
Celebrities and world leaders visited Mandela, apparently eager simply to touch the hem of his shirt. Some critics wondered whether there were any celebrities he had not met. He tried to avoid upstaging President Mbeki in public, but it was widely reported that Mbeki had not been his choice as successor. On the subject of Aids Mandela campaigned with an intensity that suggested he knew that this had been the central failing of his administration. In August 2002 he visited and publicly embraced Zackie Achmat, South Africa’s leading Aids campaigner. But his foundation concentrated primarily on the plight of children both in South Africa and around the world. He loved to tell the story of a young girl who had told him that he was a silly old man who had broken the law and been sent to prison.
Mandela played an important role in attempting to transmit the lessons of the South African peace-making process to other conflicts around the world. He persuaded President Gaddafi to release the suspects in the Lockerbie airline bombing to be tried in the Netherlands. He attempted to play a behind-the-scenes role in the Middle East peace process and he provided a voice to the poor and hungry of the developing world who felt vulnerable in the face of interventionist western powers. In 2003 one wing of the Mandela Foundation merged with the Rhodes Foundation to create a new philanthropic organisation.
At the age of 85, in June 2004, Mandela announced that he was retiring from “retirement”. The award to South Africa that year of the hosting of the 2010 football World Cup symbolised the complete rehabilitation of the country on the world’s sporting stage, something that could never have happened without him.
Six years later, on a cold night at the final in July 2010, he and his wife Graça waved to nearly 85,000 spectators before they together witnessed Spain gain its first World Cup with victory over the Netherlands.The fans at Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg rose to their feet to give a thunderous welcome to their living legend, His relative silence during the last years of his life only intensified the South African hunger for the Mandela “brand”. There was a minor scandal and a court case over paintings which dealers claimed were Mandela’s work. Numerous books were published, although few improved on Anthony Sampson’s authorised biography (1999). Meanwhile the Mandela Foundation reinvented itself as an impressive research archive.
In 2008 while visiting London, Mandela broke his silence on Zimbabwe to condemn President Robert Mugabe, and in 2009 Mandela twice appeared on public platforms in support of Jacob Zuma, who was elected President of South Africa in April 2009. In the same election, Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, was elected as an ANC MP.
By the end of his life, Mandela’s iconic status had long transcended orthodox political meaning. His long walk had taken on mythical qualities. His fame had propelled him even beyond the status of “father of the nation”. In addition to his Nobel laureateship he was the recipient of countless awards. Notable among them were the US’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and honorary membership of the Order of Merit from Britain. He was also an honorary Queen’s Counsel and an honorary citizen of Canada. India awarded him its highest civilian award the Bharat Ratna and he had been the last recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His wife Graça was appointed an honorary DBE in 2007.
He is survived by her, and by the daughters of his marriage to Winnie Mandela. There were two sons and two daughters of his first marriage to Evelyn Mase who died in 2004; both sons and one daughter predeceased him.
Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa, 1994-99, was born on July 18, 1918. He died on December 5, 2013, aged 95
>General Paul Aussaresses
>Àãåíò SOE â îêêóïèðîâàííîé Ôðàíöèè, ó÷ëàñòíèê âîéí â Èíäîêèòàå è Àëæèðå
SOE officer embroiled in controversy over the torture of prisoners during the Algerian War
Paul Aussaresses served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in south-west France two months after D-Day, later with the French Army in Indo-China (modern Vietnam) during the campaign against the communist Viet Minh and then in Algeria during the war against the the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). As the officer responsible for the interrogation of prisoners, accusations of torture were raised against him — charges that he chose not to refute.
He parachuted into France in August 1944 as a member of a three-man Special Operations Executive (SOE) team, with instructions to encourage attacks by the French maquis on German lines of communication through the Carcassonne Gap. The operation began inauspiciously. The pilot dropped the three men without reducing speed, so they somersaulted as they fell, and so high that they landed far apart, separated from their equipment and radio.
The team, led by Captain Sell, Royal Artillery, subsequently reassembled, gathered items of their equipment that had not been found and appropriated by the locals and set off to locate a group of maquis active around Ste-Colombe-sur-Guette. After meeting there another SOE team with a radio, a parachute drop of arms and explosives was arranged. The Toulouse-Narbonne railway link was cut, putting it out of action until after the Liberation.
Aussaresses took advantage of the sparse enemy presence in Carcassonne to depose the Vichy-appointed Prefect and set the maquis to work building defensive positions round the town. Sell and Aussaresses took control of the region as far as the Spanish frontier.
Aussaresses was recalled to England and transferred to the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force. This was formed by the SOE to drop teams into Germany close to Allied prisoner-of-war camps to advise the inmates to wait in their camps for liberation and, should the threat arise, take what action they could to prevent any reprisal massacres of the prisoners by their captors.
On return to England, he discovered that he had been posted missing and his bank account closed, obliging him to make his way to France penniless. From October 1948 until the summer of 1951 he served with 2nd Battalion of the French 1st Parachute Regiment in what is now Vietnam where he was almost continuously in action.
The communist-led war of independence in Indo-China had begun in 1945 with the emergence of Ho Chi Minh as political leader of the Viet Minh movement and General Vo Nguyen Giap (obituary, October 5, 2013) as its military strategist. Ironically in view of subsequent events, the US Office of Strategic Services, which had worked closely with SOE in the war, had supplied the Viet Minh with arms and training for operations against the Japanese. It was not long before both weapons and expertise were turned against the French as they returned to try to restore colonial rule. The campaign ended disastrously for France in 1954 after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
Opposition to French rule in Algeria erupted into full-scale guerrilla war as Dien Bien Phu fell. Around 450,000 troops were required to contain the insurrection led by the FLN. The war became increasingly brutal, with murder after sexual mutilation of prisoners by the FLN being matched with pitiless interrogation by the French to extract intelligence on FLN organization and tactical intentions.
Aussaresses, with his reputation for ruthlessness, was chosen to run a detention centre at Tourelles, where the use of electric shock and water immersion during interrogation was tacitly understood. A number of years later, after retirement as a brigadier-general and a Commander of the Legion of Honour, Aussaresses published two memoirs entitled Services Spaux, Alge 1955-1957 and Pour La France. In the later of these, he admitted, “Prisoners brought to Tourelles were sufficiently implicated in terrorist activity that there was no way we were going to release them alive. Torture was used if a prisoner refused to talk and when they seemed to have nothing more to say my men would take them out into the bush, shoot and bury them.” This led to an outcry in France. President Jacques Chirac, who had served with the Army in Algeria, called for suspension of Aussaresses from the Legion d’Honneur.
His first wife, Odile, predeceased him. His second, Elvira, survives him with three daughters of his first marriage.
Brigadier-General Paul Aussaresses was born on November 7, 1918. He died on December 4, 2013, aged 95
