Statements by Sarkozy are unbearable, unforgivable, inhuman statements

"We regret that France’s presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy misuses the Holocaust to exonerate his own country from other crimes and at the same time he constantly uses the language of the right-wing extremists to proceed against people who are weaker”, said the General Secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV), Tilman Zülch. "His recent statement is unbearable: ‘Suicidal persons have a genetic weakness’. Unforgivable and right-wing extremist is likewise the exclusion of the ‘coloured’ and North African young immigrants. Sarkozy said in November 2005: ‘I will clean the suburbs of the scum, of the rabble, of the layabouts and the cancerous ulcer.’”

The European challenges of the present time cannot be overcome without recognition of the crimes of the past. It is for this reason that France’s present President, Jacques Chirac, begged for forgiveness in the name of France for the collaboration of the French authorities in deporting the French Jews. It is strictly forbidden for a German to deny the responsibility of Germany for the Holocaust or the crimes against the Sinti, the handicapped, homosexuals or East Europeans, and no one can resist criticism of this part of German history.

In the light of Sarkozy’s statement that France had committed no massacres we should like draw attention to a number of crimes committed both during and after the war which should encourage France, like every other European country, to human politics in the future:

On 8th May 1945, when Europe celebrated the end of the war, Algerian soldiers in the French arms also waved Algerian flags. Calls for independence from the colonial power were voiced. The command was given to stop this and then colonial officers fired shots into the crowd. In Sétif and Guelma there were massacres and estimates of the number of Algerians killed range from 15,000 to 45,000.

- The attempt to prevent Algerian independence cost between 1954 and 1962 the lives of between 700,000 and one million Algerians and about 24,000 Frenchmen.

- Already before the invasion of the Nazis in the Second World War France had internment camps within the country. The most notorious camps were set up for the refugees from the Spanish civil war. Among the prisoners were 4,000 Germans, Jewish refugees and left-wing French politicians. The prisoners were handed over to the German Nazis in 1940, from whom they were deported to German concentration camps. Only a few of them survived.

- The collaboration of the French "Vichy” regime with the Nazis is well known. Between 1941 and 1944 with the assistance of the French administration in France about 75,000 Jews, among them about 12,000 children, were deported to extermination camps, such as Auschwitz, Birkenau, Maidanek and Sobibor. About 65,000 mostly French Jews were deported from the Drancy camp near Paris to German concentration camps, 63,000 of whom – among them being about 6,000 children – were either murdered or died as a result of the catastrophic transport and living conditions.

- At the end of the war, when France was liberated, more than 10,000 people were murdered for proved or suspected collaboration in "cleansing operations” (Epuration).

- As a "victorious power” of the Second World War France directed its attention in 1945 against the independence movement of Vietnam, a country had been first under Japanese and later British influence. The first Indo-China war began in 1946 with a French attack on the port of Haiphong, in which about 6,000 civilians were killed. However France was defeated in 1954 by the Viet Minh. The war cost the lives of some 95,000 on the French side and more than 300,000 on the Vietnamese side.

- In Madagascar, a French colony from 1898 until 1960, French forces beat down in 1947 a bloody rebellion with great inhumanity. People were shot or thrown into the sea out of military aircraft. It is estimated that some 100,000 people lost their lives during the rebellion.”