The Woman's Word — Will the Algerian Heroine Djamila Boukhodr Be Executed?

The civilized world today watches, with much eagerness and anxiety, the fate of the death sentence issued months ago against the valiant Algerian fighter Djamila Boukhodr (or Bouhired); every day dozens of telegrams take wing, and demonstrations are organized in condemnation of the affair and in vindication of humanity and conscience.

Djamila's story is the story of the "legendary" heroine who consecrated herself, and walked to death with head held high, for the sake of a cause — the liberation of her country.

What noble honor crowns the brow of this girl, a daughter of twenty, as she lies now in a fetid corner of the Algiers prison, her body disfigured, her nerves shattered, after torture and abuse that seized and raged and dragged on... directed at every member of her body, even the most sacrosanct — all so that she might say something, might utter a word about the hiding place of the leaders of the National Liberation Front... Yet not a single letter left her lips; she stood fast before the barbarians of the twentieth century, defying their savagery, scorning to bow to a cowardice and a villainy such as no human mind could conceive in this century.

This is what appeared to us from reading the book by the two French lawyers Georges Arnaud and Jacques Vergès, recently rendered into Arabic. No one can leaf through this book without being shaken by a shudder of indignation, anger, and contempt... What is strange and shocking in the case is not the arrest of one of the dangerous women fighters and her being sentenced — by a military court — to death without a legitimate legal trial. Ancient and modern history is not free of similar scandals, wherever judges commit crimes in their rulings and are blind to the truth. The strangeness and the outrage lie rather in the fact that the source of this very crime should be France — France, symbol of liberty and civilization — France, which to this day has not forgiven the English their burning of the martyr Joan of Arc. What folly is this that so blinds France herself as to commit the same crime, and one far uglier, against a girl whose whole offense is that she is a brave fighter who faced death without an eyelid's flutter or a failing of strength — a fighter still steadfast, iron in morale, content to shed what blood remains in her frail veins, for she knows with certainty that the legend of her death will work the miracle and thrust her country onto the road of freedom and glory.

It would be well for France, in the face of the condemnation and wrath of the world's human conscience, to reconsider her hideous crime before it is too late. Nor is it unlikely that the carrying out of the death sentence against Djamila Boukhodr — should it happen — would be an omen of the setting of France's star once and for all; and on that day all the blood of her youth would not wash away the shame that has stained her face and blackened her conscience. It would be well for France to go back on her foolish sentence, for arbitrary, senseless measures and unjust, crooked judgments are no longer accepted by the people of this age, who are all setting out toward freedom and light.