http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.307665468&par=0

FRANCE: CABINET AND STATE RAILWAY FINED FOR WWII DEPORTATION OF JEWS

Paris, 7 June (AKI) - In a landmark ruling, a French court has found the French state and state railway company SNCF guility of collusion in the deportation of Jews during the World War II Holocaust. A tribunal in the southwestern French town of Toulouse ordered the state and the SNCF to pay a total 62,000 euros compensation to the family of Green Party MEP Alain Lipietz, who brought the case on behalf of their father, who was transported from Toulouse to a wartime transit camp outside Paris.

The judgement is being interpreted as another embarrassment for France, which for decades refused to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation- still a taboo in much of the country.

In the ruling, the judges recognised the prejudice suffered by the victims in their transportation to and confinement in the Drancy wartime transit camp after being rounded up in wartime Toulouse in mid-1944. The victims were transported in a cattle truck which held 52 people, with no sanitation and only one air vent. In a journey that lasted over 30 hours, they were only once given water by the Red Cross during a stop.

The victims were held in the camp for three months but survived.

The ruling stated the victims' transportation amounted to "an act of negligence of the state's responsibilities," on the grounds that the state could not have been unaware that transportation to Drancy would normally mean subsequent removal to a Nazi death camp.

The SNCF never voiced "any objection" to transporting such prisoners, the judges said. Shockingly, the company classified the journeys are "third class tariffs" - despite prisoners being transported in cattle trucks - and continued to ask for payment of the bills after France was liberated from the Nazis.

The judges did not however uphold the plaintiffs' charge that the actions of the French state and SNCF amounted to crimes against humanity.

Lipietz and campaigners described the ruling as "historic" and said it was recognition that the French wartime state and its railways had gone beyond what was asked of them by the German occupiers.

The SNCF says it plans to appeal: its lawyer said the firm could not be held responsible for the transportation because it had been forced to cooperated with German occupying forces.

(Ajd/Aki)

Jun-07-06 12:58

What kind of world do we live in, where you aren't allowed to deport a group of people from your own country, or you will be fined decades later? No one has to answer that, it is a rhetorical question.