A Senegalese man has lodged a complaint against the French state, accusing it of concealing the corpse of his colonial soldier father after killing him during World War II, his lawyer said Wednesday, June 25.
Lawyer Mbaye Dieng said he filed the legal complaint with a Paris court on Tuesday on behalf of Biram Senghor, who is at least 86 years old.
French authorities have admitted to killing his father M’Bap Senghor, a colonial soldier for France, in December 1, 1944 in Thiaroye, in what is now Senegal. He was among at least dozens killed when the French military cracked down on African soldiers demanding their pay after returning from war-torn Europe. While French authorities at the time said 35 had been killed in the Thiaroye incident, historians say the real death toll could be as high as 400.
The Thiaroye episode marks one of the worst massacres during French colonial rule, and questions remain concerning the number of soldiers killed, their identities and the location of their burial.
Historian Armelle Mabon, who has written a book about the 1944 killings, said French authorities at first said Senghor had “not returned” from the front, then that he was a deserter. They only officially recognised his death almost a decade later in 1953, she said.
Last year France recognised Senghor and five others among those executed in Thiaroye as having given their life to France.
“For a while, they lied to his family. They pretended Senghor was a deserter, that he did not die in Thiaroye, and then they admitted that he had,” said Dieng, the lawyer. “They need to tell us where his remains are.”
France ‘needs to pay’
Dieng accused France of having left the country after independence with “all the archives of the period during which it managed the country, because there were things to hide.” A French government source, however, told AFP in December that France had “done everything it had to” regarding the incident, and that all related archives had been made available for consultation.
Excavations have been under way since early May in Thiaroye, with experts uncovering human skeletons with bullets in their bodies, some in the chest, according to a source following the project.
“I don’t know where my father was buried – in a cemetery or in Thiaroye,” said Senghor, the only known surviving descendant of the slain soldiers. He said that he had been due reparations from France for more than 80 years. “It needs to pay,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of African soldiers fought for their colonial master France in the two world wars and against independence movements in Indochina and Algeria. They are commonly known in France as the “tirailleurs sénégalais,” or “Senegalese infantrymen.”
Around 1,600 soldiers from West Africa arrived at the Thiaroye camp in November 1944, having been captured by Germany while fighting for France. Discontent soon mounted over unpaid wages and demands to be treated on a par with white soldiers. Some protesters refused to return to their home countries without their due.
