First ColumnAuthor(s): NTUSource: Africa Today, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Feb., 1966), p. 2Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184687 .

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first column...

WE RECENTLY RECEIVED an appeal for signatures from a Paris committee for the release of Ben Bella and other political prisoners in Algeria. The appeal had little emotional impact on us until we spoke with a young American who spent four and a half months in an Algerian prison last year. He is Ron Ramsey, a 27-year-old psychologist from California, better known as Granny Goose, the broadcaster whose tapes are played from Hanoi to GIs in South Viet Nam. But our concern with him is not with his present activities, but rather with the conditions of political prisoners in Algeria today.

After a series of extraordinary adventures in East Africa, Ramsey had landed in Algiers in late 1964, working for Radio Algiers. Several months before the Boumedienne coup, he was arrested by the security police, apparently the victim of an anti-Ben Bella faction within the police. He was charged with being a member of that ubiquitous brotherhood, the CIA, denied a trial, the right to see a lawyer or American authorities. His jail experience we quote from a story which appeared in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner last May 7:

"Conditions were unspeakable. For 10 days we slept on the floor [covered with dried urine and left-over food], weren't allowed to wash and ate only bread and water. I decided to show my protest somehow, so I fasted for the next 12 days. On the 22nd day, four plainclothesmen came to my cell and took me to another. They tied a rope under my armpits and strung me up about three feet from the floor by a pipe in the ceiling. Then they filled rubber bags with water and began to swing them, damaging me internally and my spinal cord. This lasted four hours.

"After that, they strung me up about 10 feet from the floor and suddenly cut the rope. I landed on my face and back, causing severe fracture and com- plete immobility. I was screaming. They looked at me, decided they were hLungry and walked out. I lay on the floor six hours.

"I was put in isolation in a prison ward hospital. I'd lost control of both legs, one arm, and 80 percent of my vision. I thought I was going to die, so I fasted again for eight days, demanding proper medical treatment."

He was not to receive the treatment, but did manage to smuggle out some letters, including one.to the US Embassy. The latter inquired after him with the Algerian Government, which denied he existed. For the next 2?2 months he was held incommunicado. Then....

"I was taken back to the prison and held for three days. On the third day, three plainclothesmen tortured me with electricity applied to my spinal cord. I was knocked unconscious and awoke six hours later on the same bed from which they'd taken me. At that time I contracted a severe contagious parasite and was isolated for 10 days." He was never at any time asked for information or a confession. He was tortured for the sheer joy of it. He was finally released after the US Consul General ascertained in person that he really did exist. In early May, he flew to Los Angeles.

Ramsey's experience appears typical of many in Algerian jails, judging by information released by the French-based Committee for the Defense of Ahmed Ben Bella and Other Victims of Repression. If anything, Ramsey might have had it easier, for he was pummeled with water bags (to leave no external trace) rather than the more normal hammers and bayonets. We note that the elec- tricity torture (in which the electrodes are branched directly into a wall socket) is frequently mentioned in the French Committee's pamphlet.

Those who may want to protest the continuation of this cruel insanity are urged to write to Colonel Boumedienne, or to H. E. M. Sherif Quellac, Embassy of Algeria, 2200 R St., NW, Washington 8, DC.

NTU

February 1966-Vol. XMii, No. 2

Editor: Collin Gonze

Assistant Editor: Catharine Raymond

Con tributing Editors: Robert Browne, Mary Benson, Mark Cohen, Stanley Diamond, Elizabeth Landis, Sheldon Weeks, Peter Weiss.

The End of the First Republic 5 Stanley Diamond

Who Got There First? . 10 Robert Weisbord

Token Education in Ethiopia 12 Hagos G. Yesus

BOOKS Levine's Ethiopia . . 14

A. Agomafer

NEWS NOTES ... .. 15

LETTERS . . .. 15 Russell Warren Howe .Jidith Dollenmayer

INDEX for 1965 . . . 16

Published monthly except July and August by the American Committee on Africa, Inc.

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Second class postage paid at New York, N.Y. Copyright e 1966 by American Comniittee on Africa, Inc., 211 East 43rd Street, New York 11, N.Y. TN7-8733

2 AFRICA TODAY

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