An abandoned cemetery highlights a painful colonial episode for France
Nestled among vineyards in a picturesque region of southwestern France known for its sweet wines and goat cheeses, lies a fenced plot of thorny, empty land, mostly avoided by nearby villagers except for the few who walk their dogs there.
The inconspicuous patch has become part of a national effort to address a painful episode in French colonial history: the treatment of the predominantly Muslim Algerians, known as Harkis, who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence.
After the war ended in 1962, some Harkis and their families were placed in various internment and transit camps throughout France. They stayed in those camps for years, where in France they were treated more like unwanted refugees than former soldiers, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, while the French government organized their relocations throughout the country.
In the early years, many of the children in these families, historians say, died in the camps, including a camp known as Rivesaltes, through which some 21,000 Harkis passed through. Historians say they believe the bodies of at least fifty of these children are buried beneath the dry soil of Rivesaltes, which is close to the Mediterranean Sea and about a half-hour drive from Avignon.
A much smaller number of adults also died in the camps; It is believed that a few are also buried near Rivesaltes.
A stone memorial opposite the field at Rivesaltes lists the names of the children who died there, without saying where they were buried. A nearby museum honors the memories of various groups of people interned at Rivesaltes at different periods – including Spanish Republicans and Jews during World War II, and then the Harkis – but no mention is made of the nearby cemetery.
“It’s absolutely despicable,” said Hacène Arfi, 68, who lived in the camp as a child and led an organization to help Harkis. As he walked through the field where he believes the remains of his stillborn brother lie, he said: “They haven’t done any serious work here. They just threw away a stone slab somewhere and decided enough was enough.”
After pressure from families of people interned at Rivesaltes, the French government promised in October to excavate the land where the children’s bodies are believed to be buried. That pledge is part of a broader government effort to address how the Harkis were treated after the war, a conflict that remains a raw wound in France.
More than 200,000 Harkis were left to fend for themselves in Algeria after the war, and many were tortured and murdered by Algerian authorities who viewed them as traitors. About 84,000 Harkis fled to France – as did about 800,000 French Algerians of European descent – and were met with hostility.
French Algerians of European descent could rent subsidized housing in modern buildings. Only the Harkis ended up in the camps.
President Charles de Gaulle promised the Harkis during the war that they would be incorporated into the French army, but he later broke that promise by saying that he did not want his beloved city of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (literally Colombey-de- Two -Churches) into “Colombey-the-two-mosques.”
Amid growing awareness in France in recent years about the plight of the Harkis, President Emmanuel Macron has made efforts to address their treatment, ask for their forgiveness and pass a law providing reparations for the time they spent spent in the camps.
But the issue of unmarked cemeteries near camps where Harkis lived has never been fully addressed.
Historians estimate that between 300 and 400 Harki children died in the camps in the three years after the war. Most died as babies, says Fatima Besnaci-Lancou, a historian who has written several books about the Harki experience in France and who is a daughter of Harkis who spent years in the camps.
“What killed the most was the cold,” Ms. Besnaci-Lancou said. “And the mothers were weak, they were in need, because they had been through the war and then ended up in a camp.”
The last camp was closed in 1975 and all cemeteries were abandoned.
After years of requests from Harki families, Veterans Affairs Minister Patricia Mirallès announced in October that the cemetery at Rivesaltes would be excavated.
“There is hope that families will finally be able to recover the bodies of their loved ones,” she said in a statement.
Another cemetery in the area is on the outskirts of St.-Maurice-l’Ardoise, another camp where Harkis and their families were interned. That cemetery was excavated in March. Archaeologists found the outline of 27 makeshift graves there and opened two graves; There were child remains in it.
“We would now like to carry out DNA tests to be able to name each grave,” Ms Mirallès said, a process that would require further excavations.
“They were buried like dogs,” said Nadia Ghouafria, 52, a descendant of Harkis, as she placed teddy bears and flowers on graves at the cemetery, a two-hour drive east of Rivesaltes. “Now they are treated like people again.”
There has not yet been an excavation in Rivesaltes.
The long wait for an excavation at Rivesaltes has been painful for people like Mr. Arfi, who also grew up in St.-Maurice-l’Ardoise.
When he was six, Mr. Arfi said, he watched his father bury his stillborn brother on the edge of the Rivesaltes camp after his mother gave birth in their unheated tent.
“We had nothing, just a bath towel to wrap him in,” Mr. Arfi said during an interview in a cafe in St.-Laurent-des-Arbres, the town where he now lives, a short drive from the two camps.
Mr. Arfi and others who grew up in St.-Maurice-l’Ardoise said the camp had no running water. The local prefect threatened to send misbehaving students back to Algeria, despite their French citizenship.
During school holidays, they said, the children sometimes harvested string beans, cherries, tomatoes or grapes for local farmers to earn money for their families. They spoke Arabic in the camp and lived isolated from the rest of France.
The closure of the camps was another traumatic moment for the Harkis and their families, thrusting them into a French society of which they had little knowledge, still deeply traumatized by the war and the isolation of the camp, without psychological support .
In Rivesaltes, in the early 2000s, the gravestone of Abdelkader Attout, a 21-year-old Harki who died in 1963 after being hit by a bus, was moved without warning to the town’s official cemetery, his family said. The family also said local authorities would not confirm whether his remains had been moved.
Local officials did not respond to an email seeking comment, but in a recent statement, Ms. Mirallès, the minister of veterans affairs, said the government’s own archival investigation had not determined the whereabouts of Mr. Attout’s body, and that officials would “seek to accompany the family” in its “legitimate search for the truth.”
No date has yet been set for the excavation in Rivesaltes, and the Harki families are eagerly waiting. However, they say that even this will not be enough to completely heal their scars.
“We Harkis, we are mentally unwell to this day,” said Rachid Guemrirene, who grew up in the same camps as Mr Arfi. “It is impossible to cure.”