2023-04-22 12:25:18
Symbols to repair memory. A cemetery and a memorial will be erected on the Gard military field where dozens of children who died in harki camps were buried without a dignified burial 60 years ago, the French government promised on Friday.
“We must repair and recognize the harm done to them,” said Patricia Miralles, Secretary of State for Veterans and Memory, during a visit to the site of the former Saint-Maurice camp. l’Ardoise, north of Nîmes. The graves of 27 people, almost all children or even infants, have been unearthed.
“The families will be able to recover the bodies to bury them in another place or choose to keep them on the spot” in this future cemetery, specified the Secretary of State, in the presence of families, local authorities and representatives of associations of harkis.
“We will have a beautiful cemetery, commensurate with their suffering, with a memorial, as the families wish,” insisted the Secretary of State. “The symbol is perhaps to write the name of little Raoul, the first child who was discovered” here and whose mother, present on Friday, “herself concealed the fact that her newborn had been buried there,” she continued.
Dozens of babies buried without a decent burial
French Muslims mainly recruited as auxiliaries of the French army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), the harkis had been abandoned by France at the end of the conflict. After fleeing reprisals in Algeria, tens of thousands of them and their families had been parked in France, in “transit and reclassification camps” run by the army, with deplorable living conditions.
In Saint-Maurice l’Ardoise, one of these main camps, dozens of babies had been buried without a decent burial by their relatives or by soldiers. In the Gard, this wild cemetery came out of oblivion on March 20, finally located by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap). These unprecedented excavations had been decided by the State after the revelation of the existence of this cemetery in an investigation by AFP and the tireless work of local associations.
This investigation into the fate of children and babies who died in the Saint-Maurice l’Ardoise camp, between the end of 1962 and 1964, had notably revealed a police report attesting that the authorities of the time knew of the existence of this graveyard. These authorities had deliberately decided not to inform associations and families.
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