A French appeal court ruled yesterday that a man who was conceived when French soldiers raped his mother during Algeria's struggle for independence was a victim of war, and awarded him damages.

Finally addressing a painful period in France's colonial history, the pensions court in Paris recognised Mohamed Garne as a victim of Algeria's 1954-1962 war against French rule and awarded him disability benefits and a partial military pension for three years.

"For 13 years I have been saying that my mother was raped, that I am a child of rape. Everybody hid, everybody pretended not to hear. I fought and I am very pleased to have waged this battle," Mr Garne after the hearing.

"I am the first to have dared to defy the state," he said. "I am not totally satisfied, because I have not been awarded a life pension - but it is important to have reopened the file on the Algerian war."

Mr Garne, who suffers from both physical and psychological infirmities, was born in April 1960 in the internment camp of Theniet el-Had.

He was the son of a 16-year-old local girl identified only as Kheira and an unknown French officer, one of 30 or 40 who raped her repeatedly and brutally during a period of several months.

The court accepted his argument that the foetus had suffered from continued violence inflicted on his mother by the French soldiers while she was pregnant and ruled that, under the military pension system, he was entitled to partial benefits.

Kheira previously testified that in an attempt to provoke a miscarriage the soldiers had hit her stomach with metal cables after discovering that she was pregnant.

She gave Mohamed up after his birth and he was raised in various orphanages, only succeeding in tracing his mother in 1988.

He later took her to court to force her to reveal the circumstances of his birth, and while she initially insisted he was the son of an Algerian killed during the war, she finally broke down during a hearing in 1994 and said he was conceived during a gang rape by French soldiers.

In 1999 and 2000 two lower courts denied Mr Garne any reparation, saying he could only be considered an "indirect" victim of the war.

Yesterday's ruling, made after a psychiatrist testified that his troubles could be linked to the traumatic pregnancy and later shock of discovering his origins, overturned those decisions.

Mr Garne, a caretaker in a Parisian department store, said he did not now want to find his father, nor see him punished.

"Recognition is all I seek," he said. "There are many of us in Algeria, children born of French army rapes. It is necessary that this is said and recognised in France. Otherwise it will be forever a stain on its history."

Whether France should officially recognise the barbarism of its troops in Algeria has become the subject of a heated and at times venomous debate during the past 18 months.

"That terrible war ended without anybody being found guilty or held responsible," Mr Garne's lawyer, Jean-Yves Halimi, said yesterday.

"Now we know that it left behind at least one victim."