The Paris administrative court ruled last Friday that French authorities had not only provided the soldier’s family with false information in the years following his death, but had subsequently failed to use all available means to establish the precise circumstances of his death or the location of his burial.<\/p>\n
While the court acknowledged it could not rule on the death itself due to the statute of limitations, it found that the state’s failure to investigate amounted to a fault giving rise to liability.<\/p>\n
The tribunal awarded \u20ac10,000 in damages to the soldier’s son, who brought the case to court<\/a>\u00a0last June,\u00a0accusing the French state of concealing mass graves and blocking justice.<\/p>\n The massacre took place on 1 December 1944 at Thiaroye, near Dakar<\/a>, when French forces fired on West African riflemen \u2013 known as tirailleurs senegalais \u2013 who had served in the French army and who mutinied over unpaid pages.<\/p>\n The precise death toll, the full circumstances of the killings and the location of the victims’ graves remain unresolved.<\/p>\n Visual retelling of Thiaroye massacre sheds new light on French colonial atrocity<\/a><\/p>\n ‘Ungrateful’ France<\/p>\n The son, Biram Senghor, who was not named in the ruling, welcomed the verdict but said it was inadequate.<\/p>\n “I am truly glad that French justice has condemned the French state, because the French state has been unjust \u2013 an ungrateful state,” he told RFI. “France had great need of the Africans who were mobilised. So when it refuses to pay them at the end of that work, it is because France<\/a> is ungrateful.”<\/p>\n Senghor argued that France owed the families of the tirailleurs far more than a symbolic sum.<\/p>\n “France must also pay damages and interest,” he said. “It has been 82 years now that France has been prevaricating and refusing to pay. The amount it has been ordered to pay does not even cover four years of work, let alone my father’s life, which France took from him.”<\/p>\n