“The bones of the twenty-seven children from the Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise camp alone personify the abandonment and tragedy of the harkis”

2023-04-21 05:30:06

Ne are more than a hundred women, wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, all linked to the history of the harkis. We live in various regions of France, including French Polynesia, but also in Europe or the United States.

We are shocked by the discovery of the bones of twenty-seven children of harkis that archaeologists from the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) unearthed on March 20, near the Saint-Maurice-l camp. ‘Slate (Gard). Excavations continue.

Indeed, after months of fruitless research, archaeological digs have finally found the bones of children in a vacant lot, not far from the former harkis camps of Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise and Lascours. In this improvised cemetery, dozens of infants who died of cold and illness were buried from the fall of 1962, without a proper burial, and sometimes without the families being informed of the burial conditions.

seventy names

Thus began the burial of the history of these children. Should we see a resonance with the blunder of François Missoffe (1919-2003), former minister for repatriates, who, in 1964, described the harkis as ” waste “ to be transferred to the Bias (Lot-et-Garonne) and Saint-Maurice-l’Ardoise camps, reserved for “unclassifiable” and to “unrecoverable” ?

Subsequently, associations of harkis and the families concerned tirelessly asked the authorities for help in finding the graves of the children. In vain. It was not until 2019, when a descendant of Harki discovered a police report dated October 23, 1979 on the “creation of a cemetery on a military camp”so that the subject is finally considered.

This report is based on a “provisional burial register at the Ardoise military camp”, opened on February 19, 1963. The indications recorded mention seventy names and dates of birth (ten adults and sixty children), all from families of harkis. For thirty-one people, there were also burial dates and causes of death.

Read also: The harkis and their descendants still consider themselves “undesirables” in Franco-Algerian memories

The investigation carried out by the gendarmes reveals that they had been able to gather precise information on the location and organization of what they called “temporary cemetery”. In addition, there would have been a question of enlarging the cemeteries of Laudun and Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres (Gard), but, with the departure of the families after 1975, this project fell into oblivion, and the graves disappeared under the brambles.

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