Last spring, on a predawn prowl of Algiers' casbah, a French military patrol opened fire on some shadowy figures moving in the half-light. When they reached the spot, the soldiers found a 22-year-old girl named Djamila Bouhired sprawled in the narrow street, with a bullet wound in the shoulder. In her possession were various F.L.N. documents linking her to Yacef Saadi, the rebel "Captain of Algiers," who had been terrorizing the city with a rash of bombs planted in cafes, milk bars, and litter baskets.
Stripped Naked. Pretty, doe-eyed Djamila was so important a find that French officers did not even wait until her wound was bandaged; they began their questioning as she lay on the operating table in a military hospital. She admitted being a rebel courier, denied she had any part in the bombings, refused to give the hiding place of Yacef Saadi. For the next 17 days she was in the hands of the French paratroops. In her testimony later, Djamila said she was beaten repeatedly. Djamila testified: "They stripped me naked and tied me on a bench, taking care to put damp cloths under the cords that bound me. They then fixed electric contacts to my sexual organs, my ears, my mouth, the palms of my hands, my nipples, and my forehead. At 3 in the morning I fainted. Later, I became delirious. Every time, while one of the paratroopers worked the machine, the others took notes." A month after the alleged tortures, a French doctor examined her and professed to find nothing wrong; in fact, he identified the bullet wounds in her shoulder as only "open fistulae due to tuberculosis."
At her court-martial the prosecution, assembled three witnesses to link her to the crimes. One of them promptly denied that Djamila Bouhired had any part in the bombings; the second never appeared —she was also a paratrooper prisoner, and the newspapers announced that she had died in custody. The third was a 19-year-old girl named Djamila Bouazza who had spent three years in a mental hospital, answered most questions by machine-gunning the court with her finger and crying: "Tac-tac-tac." She tried to undress on the witness stand and, frantically spinning a bracelet on her wrist, alternately withdrew her charge against the defendant and renewed it. A French doctor assured the court that Witness Bouazza was sane; two other doctors said they would prefer to express no opinion.
Dirty Chinaman. The defendant's lawyer, Jacques Verges, the son of a French father and a Vietnamese mother, had his own problems. He was greeted with angry shouts of "Kill the dirty Chinaman!" When he protested an arbitrary ruling, the examining judge observed: "Doctors who care for rebels are arrested. It might be better to arrest lawyers who defend them." Verges was not allowed to make a final plea for his client. Djamila Bouhired, permitted a few words before sentence was passed, said: "The truth is that I love my country; I want to see it free. And it is for this, and this alone, that you have tortured me and are going to condemn me to death. But when you kill us. do not forget that you are killing your own country's tradition of liberty, staining its honor, and endangering its future." The court sentenced her to death.