Gérard Chaliand

in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi

It is with all my heart that I join in the tribute paid to the memory of Léo Matarasso. If I were not currently in South America, I would of course be with you.
I knew Léo in the 1960s, shortly after the Algerian war. He was an anti-colonialist who, at the same time, had an idea of socialism, the realization of which implied responding to the aspirations of justice and dignity for all those who were deprived of them.
We, along with others, some of whom are no doubt present today, campaigned for an end to the American intervention, both in South and North Vietnam. An intervention that was, among other things, determined by the illusion that China was the instigator of the Vietnamese conflict and that of the domino theory. The latter assumed that once South Vietnam fell to the Communists, the whole of Southeast Asia was lost. We thought it was primarily a Vietnamese affair, where Vietnamese nationalism, for the most part, perceived the American intervention as foreign interference and the bombing of North Vietnam’s infrastructure as a reversal of ten years of work to bring the country out of underdevelopment.
The role of Léo Matarasso in the organisation of the Russell Tribunal, both in Stockholm and in Roskilde where I had the honour to testify, is well known.
Subsequently, together with Lelio Basso, and at the latter’s instigation, he participated in Algiers in the creation of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, which examined and judged a series of regimes and events. This Tribunal filled a gap that no international tribunal has since really filled. The international significance of this initiative will be noted by others. It was thanks to Léo Matarasso, and at my request, that a session of the Tribunal was held in Paris in 1983 on the Armenian genocide, which had long since been forgotten, even though it was an imprescriptible crime. This session, in which three Nobel Prize winners were present on the jury, including Sean Mc Bride, founder of Amnesty International, delivered its judgment in the National Assembly after several days of hearings at the Sorbonne. The three Nobel Prize winners were received by the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand. It was this seminal event that led to the subsequent recognition of the genocide by the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights in 1985 and by the Council of Europe in 1987. Since then, this cause which, in the past, did not even occupy a footnote in history textbooks, has become widely known, since it has found an echo even among Turkish elites who want to know their own history better.
Léo is the one who initiated this Tribunal, which broke with decades of oblivion and state lies. I would like to thank him once again.

Chaliand, Gérard

in:

<strong>Léo Matarasso,
Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Milano, maggio 2009</strong>