Since Monday, the Assize Court in Paris has tried three pilots and co-pilots accused of murder and attempted murder in the case of the bombing of Bouaké in Côte d’Ivoire in 2004. On Wednesday morning, “one of the 38 French soldiers injured in the bombing, one of the most seriously affected , who gave a moving testimony.
With our special correspondent at the courthouse in Paris, Pierre Firtion
That day, Djamel Smaïdi received a bullet and rocket fragments all over his left side, from face to foot. So badly wounded that the military authorities give him time to die. Taken care of at the Bégin Hospital in Paris, this soldier, then a driver of military vehicles, passed very close to the amputation. A doctor manages to save the foot, but the trial has only just begun.
60 different surgeries and post-traumatic stress
For seven months he underwent about sixty operations. At the same time, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I could not sleep,” he says. I saw lightning from my comrades ”. Even today he does not manage to do whole nights. His trial is the first time he gets to know. “I could not talk to my wife about it,” he explains. That was my job, there is nothing to say. I created a shell for myself and for my family ”.
Djamel Smaïdi was reformed from the army in 2010 after his injuries and has a deep grudge against the army and the political class. He can not digest after receiving the war-damaged medal by simple mail and said that he was very surprised that no officer present in Bouaké that day had become a civilian party, officers who – he emphasizes – have all received the Legion of Honor.
The soldier expects a response from this trial. “I need this truth – he launches in the bar – to move on”, this truth that Michele Alliot-Marie had promised him in 2004, during a visit to his bed, in the hospital.
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