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Asking the harkis for forgiveness: "Emmanuel Macron's words are restorative because, for 60 years, we have been crying in silence"

2021-09-22T18:00:43.414Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - The request for forgiveness made on Monday by Emmanuel Macron to the harkis and their families is historic, according to journalist Dalila Kerchouche. For this daughter of harkis, he is the first President of the Republic to become aware of the singularity of this drama.


Dalila Kerchouche is a reporter, writer and screenwriter, author of the book

Mon père, ce harki

(ed. Seuil).

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Unexpected. Historical. Restorative. The request for forgiveness made by Emmanuel Macron to the harkis and their families on Monday, September 20, marks a rupture. Break with his predecessors: he is the first President of the Republic to realize the singularity of this drama, which represents the greatest state scandal in postcolonial France.

When one replaces the word “harkis” with the word “French”, which they are and always have been, one realizes the gravity and the extent of this tragedy and the moral fault of the authorities of the time. Nearly 70,000 French soldiers abandoned, disarmed, deprived of their French nationality and massacred after the Evian agreements on March 19, 1962. More than 45,000 surviving French families, parked in camps behind barbed wire on French soil, in the Massif Central , the Larzac or the Pyrénées-Orientales. Some families locked up in old prisons, such as the camps of Bias (Lot-et-Garonne) and Saint-Maurice-L'Ardoise (Gard). Some stayed there for more than 25 years.This is the fate that France reserved for these Muslim soldiers who shed their blood for the French flag and who remained faithful to it. "

Faced with those who had loyally served it, our country has not been faithful to either its history or its values,

”admitted the Head of State.

Emmanuel Macron's words are restorative because for 60 years, we have been screaming in silence.

Above all, we shout our French identity.

Dalila Kerchouche

Author, daughter and granddaughter of harkis, I was present at the Élysée Palace when he said these words, the accuracy of which was unanimously hailed by the entire French political class. Emmanuel Macron is the first head of state to understand the suffering of the harkis without victimizing them. To pay homage to their “

loyalty repeatedly flouted

”, but never broken. “

To the abandoned combatants, to their families who have endured the camps, the prison, the denial, I ask forgiveness. We will not forget

, ”he assured.

It is also a break with 60 years of denial of our history. I admit it without difficulty: I dared not hope so. For 20 years, through books and films, I have been fighting against silence and oblivion. Last January, after the presentation to the President of the Republic of Benjamin Stora's report, which obscured the tragedy of the harkis in the history of the Algerian war, I even felt despair and anger. Sixty years later, we were still there. To deny this drama, to refuse to face our past.

Emmanuel Macron's words are restorative because for 60 years, we have been screaming in silence.

Above all, we shout our French identity.

No, the harkis are not "

Algerians who chose France

", as the media often assert.

There again, there is a break.

A break in representations.

And this is the major key to understanding this drama.

The harkis are French.

French people, born in a French department which was called Algeria, and who have decided to remain so: "

The harkis were, always have been and are French, by the bloodshed, the chosen fights and their birth

" , said the President of the Republic.

To read also "We, girls and women of harkis, reject the Stora report on the war in Algeria"

I am the great-granddaughter of poilus, granddaughter of an indigenous soldier who fought to liberate France from Nazism, and daughter of harkis. In my family, seven of my ancestors died for France. Like many families of harkis, the fate of mine, which I recount in my book

My father, this harki

(Ed.

Du

Seuil), illustrates the heartbreaks of this drama.

After the Evian agreements, my father and my grandfather were demobilized. Very quickly, rumors of harkis massacres reached them. We must go. Save. My father witnesses terrible scenes. When harkis cling to the trucks of the French army on departure, they are hit with the butt on the fingers. The howls of the harkis tortured, tortured and massacred by the FLN, reach the barracks where the French army is quartered. But the order is given not to intervene. Many French soldiers will also be durably traumatized by this abandonment.

In June 1962, my family finally found a military convoy that accepted them. This officer then takes the risk, unheard of for a soldier, of disobeying the Minister of the Armed Forces in order to save these families condemned to certain death. As soon as they arrive in Marseille, the harkis are invisible by the authorities. My family is transported by night trains to the Bourg-Lastic camp, in the Massif Central, then to the Rivesaltes camp, in the Pyrénées-Orientales. This camp acts as a “marshalling yard”. Harkis able to work are sent to camps or logging hamlets. The others, widows, wounded or disabled in the war, were sent to two specific camps: those of Bias (Lot-et-Garonne) and Saint-Maurice l'Ardoise (Gard).

After a long wandering from camp to camp on the roads of France, in Lozère, in the Morvan, the Alpes-Maritimes, my family fails in Bias.

It is the end of the end, the "dying of the harkis".

Nearly 1,300 harkis and their families, including mine, live in this camp, cut off from the world, deprived of their resources, deprived of their liberty, access to education and their fundamental rights, in a totalitarian system.

Dalila Kerchouche

I was born in 1973 in this place of banishment, at the bottom of the Lot valley. Bias camp is a former prison, a 16 hectare fenced enclosure, which looks like an ocean of mud. At the entrance, stands a high blind gate, padlocked with a heavy chain, closed every night and watched by a guard. The architecture of the camp is designed to exercise total control of the harkis, thanks to a square plan, a network of alleys and calculated rows of barracks. The perimeter, surrounded by fencing and barbed wire, can be monitored at all points.

The camp is organized so that the harkis go out as little as possible: there is a grocery store, a butcher, a coal room, and a primary school. Among the inhabitants of the camp, there are a majority of children. Two-thirds of the camp's inhabitants are under 16, or around 800 children. Nearly 1,300 harkis and their families, including mine, live there, cut off from the world, deprived of their resources, deprived of their freedom, access to education and their fundamental rights, in a totalitarian system.

Hired by the Ministry of Returnees, sixteen officials control our lives down to the smallest detail, right down to the names given to newborns.

A camp leader, a former soldier from Algeria, maintains these French families under administrative supervision, in close contact with the prefect of Agen and the various supervising ministers (Interior, Social Affairs, Repatriates).

The head of the camp exercises a right of cuissage on certain women of harkis, manages the savings accounts of the families and distributes the social benefits as he wishes.

Apart from any legal framework, part of the aid for the resettlement of the harkis is allocated by the public authorities to the operation of the camp.

The harkis pay for their own prison.

Read alsoHarkis of the Algerian war: the story of a still open wound

Life in the camp is punctuated by the distribution of mail at the auction, opened and read in advance by the administration, thus violating the privacy of families.

Curfew, electricity cut every evening at 8 p.m. in the barracks, overcrowding, paid showers ...

Every day, in the central square of the camp, our fathers must come to attention to watch the colors rise.

They must salute the flag of a country which humiliates them and violates their rights.

Beyond destitution, what is striking is the totalitarian atmosphere and the climate of fear in which these French families live. The camp leader's mission is to bring order. When a harki rebels or dares to claim his rights, the head of the camp, with the approval of the prefect, has him automatically committed to the psychiatric hospital, with a chemical straitjacket. Dr Bouhlol, 72, a psychiatrist seconded to the Bias camp, testifies to this method of maintaining order: “

Bias was an underground psychiatric hospital. Psychiatry played the role of auxiliary to justice and the police. The head of the camp had the power to intern unruly harkis

”.

Assigned to the camp dispensary of Bias, Dr Jammes, who spent 30 years of his life treating harkis, also confirms these abusive internments: “

When I arrived, I had the impression of entering a citadel,

he testified in my book

. The camp leader gave me the keys to the large gate. But I was confused, I didn't understand why we were locking up this population. And I discovered Bias: the straw mattresses full of critters, the filthy barracks, the promiscuity of families, prostitution, conflicts with the administration and these distraught people who did not speak French ... barely 2 degrees. The men were physically and psychologically dilapidated. They told me about the war, the torture they suffered, their loyalty to France, their attachment to General de Gaulle, and that made me want to cry. I was brought up in the sense of justice and the Republic: in the camp, all these values ​​were flouted by officials responsible for ensuring that they were respected. VS'was a state within a state. We funded a system that destroyed the harkis

".

To the camp chief who tried to dissuade my mother from leaving, she replied: "

I would rather go and throw myself into the Lot with my children rather than stay a minute longer in your camp

 ".

Dalila Kerchouche

Another mode of repression terrorizes families: the kidnapping of children. Regularly, a courier from the “Center” enters the camp. Educators forcibly snatch children from their parents, some very young, and send them

manu militari

to socio-educational centers, some for recovery. Terrified, my mother hides my brothers and sisters under the beds. Our mother saw her neighbor escaping with her son to the plum tree fields. The gendarmes ran after her and tore her child from her arms, leaving her in tears, on the ground.

When I was writing

My Father, This Harki

, Doctor Jammes sent me a copy of the internal regulations of the Bias camp, signed by the Minister of Social Affairs. The text is chilling: women and children are described as "

generators of disorder

". The Director (or head of the camp) has the power to exclude families, or to transfer them to another camp: the Director's decisions are "

enforceable with the help of the public force if the transferred or excluded persons do not obey them. not of their will

”. There is also sanctioned "

failure to comply with the instructions prescribed by the director in matters of placement of children and adolescents

".

My family left the camp in 1974. Bruised, traumatized, marginalized.

We were among the first to leave.

To the camp chief who tried to dissuade her, my mother replied: "

I prefer to go and throw myself into the Lot with my children rather than stay a minute longer in your camp

".

We settled in a small village nearby.

When my siblings enrolled in school, the teacher was shocked.

They were 4 years behind in school.

In a year, thanks to evening classes, he made them catch up.

It is thanks to him, and to the stainless faith of my parents in the Republican school, that we owe our resilience.

In the summer of 1975, the children of the Bias camp, who had become adolescents and young adults, revolted. They bring down the barbed wire, confront CRS called in for reinforcements. Stunned, the media discovered "

these camps of shame

". The government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing finally decides to close them. It will take another 10 years for the last camps to dissipate, at the end of the 1980s.

Daughter of illiterate and illiterate parents, at the age of 6, I decided to become a writer to break the silence which surrounded the history of the harkis and which destroyed us from within.

My brother Mohamed, who spent his childhood in these camps, committed suicide at the age of 35.

A few days before killing himself in our house in Arles, he said to me:

"Look what they did to us ..."

This story shows how quickly state officials, through blind administrative machinery, can flout republican values ​​and deprive innocent French citizens of their fundamental rights.

Dalila Kerchouche

For 20 years, I have not stopped "watching", with my eyes wide open as a journalist, writer and screenwriter. Many questions remain unanswered. After the time of forgiveness will come, I hope, that of truth and justice. Why has the French state favored a policy of massive internment, rather than individual reclassification? How did the primary concern for the protection of the harkis (against the FLN and the OAS) become total control? Who decided on this policy of official segregation of the harkis? Why did the provisional last? How was it possible to intern thousands of French families for so long, outside any legal framework? And this, in times of peace, in the prosperous France of the Trente Glorieuses?

Under the bill announced by the Head of State, a commission will be responsible for collecting testimonies and shedding light on this tragedy. Basically, this French tragedy reveals the fragility of our democracy. It shows the speed with which representatives of the State, through blind administrative machinery, can flout republican values ​​and deprive innocent French citizens of their fundamental rights. Today, I have one certainty: the drama of the harkis has not finished revealing all its secrets. After the time of forgiveness, the time of truth and justice begins.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-09-22

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