F: Georges Abdallah, the end of more than forty years between the walls

A large red flag struck by a portrait of che, posters and stickers signs of the fight in favor of the Palestinian cause: Georges Ibrahim Abdallah must leave, Friday, the decor of this 11 m² cell where he spent the last of his forty years of detention in France. In accordance with the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal of July 17, the 74-year-old Lebanese, which has become one of the oldest detainees in France, will leave the central prison in Lannemezan (Hautes-Pyrénées), before flying off for his native country.

A few kilometers from the Pyrenean peaks that Georges Abdallah could not see from his cell, the establishment reserved for long sentences welcomes around 140 prisoners. Incarcerated since 1984 and convicted in 1987 for complicity of assassinations, the prisoner had already passed there several times, alternating with the power plants of Saint-Maur (Indre), Moulins (Allier) or Clairvaux (Aube), before setting up in his 221 jail marked with a handwritten label bearing the mention “Abdallah”.

It is in this cell opening on an orange flashy corridor of the building A that the deputy LFI Andrée Taurinya was able to visit her on the day of the announcement of her release, accompanied by an AFP team.

The communist and anti-imperialist activist, red tank top and white shorts, welcomed it that day with a long hug, sharing smiles, selfie and impressions with the parliamentarian. In this cell with apricot walls, postcards sent by friends and supports, various papers and newspapers fill almost all the space between the bed, a cluttered desk and a small kitchen area.

“Forty years old is a lot, but you don’t feel them when there is a dynamic of struggle,” says the detainee, beard and white hair. Even if it is difficult because of “comrades who are underground”, dead over the years as so many milestones in his detention. “On my computer, I have a calendar, where I see day by day what is happening: the comrades who died, it is in brown color, the orange is for visits, the green birthdays,” he says. However, “the brown color, it becomes very consistent”.

Despite everything, the liberable detainee on Friday believes that he was “pampered” in French prisons, with regard “of what is happening in Gaza or in the West Bank, especially for the comrades who are in prison”.

Condemned for complicity in assassinations of American and Israeli diplomats, the Propalestinian activist denied during his trial, saying that he was “nothing than a Arab fighter”. Since then, he has never expressed the slightest regret on his past. Behind bars, he describes himself as “an activist who fights (…) in special conditions”. Outside, he claims to want to remain an activist “in different conditions”, not seeing in his release a “radical change in the perspectives of struggle”.

On the Palestinian cause, the Marxist activist believes that demonstrations in the West are an important element in an attempt to develop the situation in the region, considering that “Palestine remains the historical lever of the revolution in all the Arab world”.

In any case, the word “struggle” remains its engine: “If I am standing today in front of you, it is because I fight, otherwise forty years it is ahead of it, it should not be forgotten that prison is prison,” he said, just after learning his upcoming release and his imminent return to Lebanon.