WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Ideas and struggles: Dante had seen nothing: Biribi (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 "Biribi must disappear" ---- Albert Londres, a famous investigative

journalist from the beginning of the 20th century, gave his name to a
prize that has been rewarding the work of journalists since 1933, one
year after his death in a fire on a ship in the Gulf of Aden. These
articles, often grouped together in books, challenge the public, the
Government, and institutions. Let us recall Au bagne en Guyane, Terre
d'ébène contre la traite des Noirs, Dans la Russie des soviets... His
fame is such that he can go to hidden or at least discreet places, the
doors are opened to him more or less willingly. ---- This is the case in
1924 of Dante n'avais rien vu: Biribi reissued by Arléa in 2024. Biribi
is a well-known term. Aristide Bruant made a song about it: In Biribi,
Georges Darien reports an account of it in a novel of the same name
published in 1890. The historian Dominique Kalifa devoted a book of the
same name to it in 2016.

"There is hate in the penitentiaries"

The term Biribi covers half a dozen military penitentiaries located in
Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. "That's where those convicted of court
martials go to pay. The African battalions provide the majority of this
clientele." 3,500 convicts, called "pègres" or "pégriots", on the
grounds of desertion, refusal to obey, breaking weapons. "There is hate
in the penitentiaries as it is hot in a greenhouse."

The prisoners are afraid to speak in front of officers and, worse,
non-commissioned officers, sergeants who reign terror on a daily basis
through their sadism in arbitrary punishments. Violence is daily. "The
main fault of military delinquents is not understanding that, in life,
one must often give up one's right." (sic!!)

The pages describing the Sidi Moussa camp, for example, are sordid. The
sergeants and chaouchs believe they are playing their part. "The cruel
acts that mark the careers of many sergeant supervisors are less the
result of a decision of the mind than the natural consequence of a
brutality that believes it has rights and gives itself duties."

Misery and dull anger

The detainees, helpless in the face of this situation, end up mutilating
themselves by removing one, two, or even three fingers. Sick, their
pathology is not recognized and death is often at the end of the road,
not to mention the attitude of the thugs. Unequivocal remarks highlight
the sexual violence. The Senegalese riflemen in charge of surveillance
are ordered to shoot the detainees at the slightest twitch. Yes, hatred
flows from every page. "Hatred is the face of penitentiaries. In the
penal colony, the mask is one of misery, here of dull anger."

In conclusion of a list of observed savageries, Albert Londres states:
"Where on earth do such tyrants still reign? They are not tyrants, they
are sergeants!" And in an interpellation written especially "for the
Minister of War", he insists in 1924: "It is a great shame for
France.[...]The time has come to see more clearly in our reason. Biribi
must disappear", we will have to wait until 1938.

* Albert Londres
Dante had seen nothing: Biribi
Ed. Arléa, coll. Arléa-Poche n°154, 2024

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8167
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca