Report
Harki, pied-noir, Franco-Algerian, heartbreaking memories of the Évian Accords
Parade of FLN troops in Algiers in July 1962 Getty Images
Text by: Anne Bernas Follow
12 mins
On March 18, 1962, the Évian Accords put an end to seven years of war in Algeria.
But this does not mean that the conflict stops.
The population is divided, sometimes in a murderous way, between the harkis, the pied-noirs, but also the Algerians.
Testimonials from three of them who experienced this historic event.
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“
On March 18, I felt happy.
Hamid Khemache was born on December 19, 1950 in Oulad Oumarou, Algeria.
He arrived in France at the age of eleven, on May 6, 1962. The Algeria of his childhood, he has good and bad memories.
“
When we were kids, there were no differences, we all played together regardless of our origins.
When we skipped school, we did it together
!
»
On March 18, 1962, he was in Azazga, a small town in Grande Kabylie.
"
I was going home, and all of a sudden, a plane passed over me dropping leaflets on which were written 'ceasefire' (...) This image remains in my mind today. the head.
»
The end of a bloody conflict that directly affected his family.
His father was not harki, his uncle and his older brother were, but he was still murdered.
Hamid was then 5 years old.
This rural policeman was killed "
from the start of the events, in 1955. And my grandfather, also a rural policeman, was assassinated a year later, by the FLN, well, at the beginning it was not yet the FLN.
It's a story of revenge, of settling scores.
Because at the beginning, I saw members of the FLN come and eat at my house... Besides, my father had a great friend from the FLN...
" Hamid Khemache remembers the day of his father's funeral, the huge crowd present around the body surrounded by a blue-white-red flag.
As for his grandfather, it will take a year to find his body, "
thanks to an army helicopter
”.
Hamid Khemache is then adopted as a pupil of the Nation.
“
In May 1962, we left for Tizi Ouzou then we were embarked to return to France, some of my half-sisters remained.
We were a little scared, because we heard that people were being kidnapped everywhere.
When we boarded the boats, the military trucks were all covered... There were a lot of people leaving the country for the metropolis.
»
►
To read also:
Algerian War: the tumultuous history of the Évian agreements
“If I had been old enough to fight, I would have been with the FLN”
Then came the time of the camps, the horror of the camps.
“
First, I was put in the camp of Rivesaltes, then in the Larzac then in the camp of Bias, in the Lot-et-Garonne.
In Rivesaltes, where he remained until October 1962, the memories of Hamid Khemache are painful;
he remembers the barbed wire, the ban on singing, all the unspeakable mistreatment.
“
It was atrocious, we had to run when the army told us to fetch water, we lived in army tents.
We slept in sleeping bags with straw in them.
And Hamid Khemache to moderate: “
I was very lucky, thanks to my uncle and my brother, I only stayed two years in the camps.
»
Sixty years later, the wound is still open.
Hamid Khemache regrets that the harkis who served France were so badly treated.
"
The
pardon
granted by Macron, I wonder if it's not because the presidential election is there...
" "
If I had been of fighting age in March 1962, I would have stood alongside those who demanded the independence of Algeria, and on the side of the FLN.
Because, when you see the reward the harkis got, it's disgusting.
The harkis served as cannon fodder, today they serve as ballot papers.
I think so and I always will.
»
Resentment or resentment towards all those who shared his Algerian childhood, he does not know.
“
I had a lot of pied-noir friends in Algeria
!
Today, Hamid Khemache, a former Opex fighter in Chad and former prison supervisor, is part of an association of harkis but also of pied-noirs in the Dordogne.
Harkis in the Bias camp, in Lot-et-Garonne, in 1975. AFP
“A feeling of abandonment took hold of us”
“
We were banished
”, confides Marie-Luce Mignon, daughter of French people present in Algeria for several generations.
This woman born on November 10, 1941 in Algiers, in the popular district of Bab el-Oued, wants above all to tell: “
We were all mixed, in joy, all nationalities, all religions.
My whole childhood was spent in happiness.
We shared everything, we respected each other, we loved each other.
In Bab el-Oued, we were a very big family.
»
But on March 18, 1962, everything collapsed for the young girl who had become a nurse.
“
It was a Sunday, a beautiful spring day, I remember, I see myself on the balcony in the sun.
We were all sad.
We did not accept the thought of having to leave our land, our country.
A feeling of abandonment took hold of us.
We had been lied to.
“And Marie-Luce to explain that the events caused many tears in her neighborhood, “
we lived permanently under curfew, but despite everything we thought that we could still change things
”.
“
In my building
, she remembers,
there was an Arab family present since the war of 14-18, we were very good friends.
One day, people from the OAS came to her house.
They told Baya: "You are known in the neighborhood, you can stay, no one will hurt you".
She answered them: "I know you won't hurt me, but my Arab brothers maybe; I am therefore obliged to leave."
That was the prevailing climate.
And Marie-Luce to moderate, admitting that, of course, everything was neither black nor white.
Then the time of terror came.
Hundreds of bombs falling every night on Bab el-Oued.
It was popping all over the place.
“
We had to open the windows quickly so that they wouldn't smash.
»
Two suitcases to put your life in
Marie-Luce's mother then began to have a depression.
At the end of May 1962, the time had come to leave their home.
“
We were allowed two suitcases per person, to put our whole lives in.
“And to say, sobs in her voice, that her mother wanted to put the coffee grinder in it that she had had for Mother’s Day but that it was taking up too much space … That the housewife on which she sat was folded down was far too heavy.
“
So, we took some pictures, and warm clothes because we knew it was cold in the metropolis.
»
After several days of waiting at the port, Marie-Luce manages to obtain boat places for herself and her family.
“
On the day of departure, there was fire from all sides, we had to leave on the sly.
Those who had accompanied us hung on the railings at the entrance to the port to say goodbye.
Destination Port-Vendres, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, after hours full of tears at sea, doubts and questions in your head "
to break your heart
".
There, unlike those who disembarked in Marseilles, Marie-Luce and her family were welcomed with great comfort and love.
Sixty years later, Marie-Luce confides that the wound is still raw.
“
We have the feeling that people died for nothing.
"Every March 26, she remembers the massacre in the rue d'Isly, "
of all those people who demonstrated because we were locked up in Bab el-Oued, that we were tortured, and that we killed for us, killed by the French army
”.
And, at 80 today, she insists on the fact of not having been accepted in France, of being treated as a
pied-noir,
a colonialist... "
We were the little people, however.
We lived like the others.
And me, I am doubly French, because I left my native land to stay French.
The president talked about us, but let's not kid ourselves, it's because there are elections!
But we are a people of pioneers, and we know what it's like to raise our heads.
»
Since this disastrous departure, Marie-Luce Mignon and her husband, also pied-noir and in close ties with the harkis, returned to Algeria in 2016. “
In the street, people welcomed us wonderfully.
They said to us: 'But you are at home! Stay! Why don't you come back?'
”
On July 7, 1962, Pied-noir Europeans took refuge in the port of Oran waiting to embark for France.
UPI/AFP
“On March 18, we knew nothing”
“
I learned of the ceasefire on March 19, 1962. We were in the camp.
We didn't have a transistor.
Around 10am, a small plane passes very low and drops leaflets.
In the block of shacks, I was the only one who could read.
It was written: "Cease-fire";
I misread, because I thought you had to pronounce all the letters, but everyone understood and it was an absolutely incredible clamor.
For the first and last time in my life, I saw my father, a very modest man, dancing like crazy.
Slimane Zeghidour was then 9 years old.
In 1957, three years after the start of the war, he and all the inhabitants of his hamlet were sent to the Erraguene regrouping camp, in Petite Kabylie, the Kabylia of the Babors.
The French army had implemented a tactic brought back from Indochina: to starve the maquisards, it was necessary to evacuate the peasants of the villages which fed them.
Thus, two and a half million peasants are forced to leave their villages and are gathered in a thousand regrouping camps.
“
In one morning, we had to leave everything and leave our village.
We had no choice, it was a military order.
We found ourselves in a camp, surrounded by electrified barbed wire, in straw huts.
There were also harkis (not rural guards but those who were in combat units) with whom we had terrible relations… We were watched by Senegalese skirmishers.
» And Slimane to remember that it was then the first time that he heard a call to prayer, shouted by these same Senegalese skirmishers… As for the French soldiers, they also played the role of teachers and nurses.
“
We lived like this until the day the leaflet fell.
And to celebrate the event, we were asked to march through the camp.
As there was no flag available, we tied pieces of fabric to sticks and we walked through the camp
,” he jokes.
Then Slimane Zeghidour and his family returned to their village.
“
It was a spring day, there were flowers everywhere.
Snow on the peaks.
When we arrived, the village was invaded by brushwood, the windows and doors of the houses had been blown off -
the army had removed them to prevent the guerrillas from hiding there.
But after a few days, he and his family realize that it will now be impossible to stay in their village.
"
In the camp, we had known the school, and the doctors.
Coming back home, we found ourselves in the fog, abandoned by the French.
But we were all the same for independence, spontaneously, without really knowing what that meant.
So we all left for the cities.
Thus, Algeria has become the only country in the world where there is no peasantry.
Novi regrouping camp in Algeria, in December 1959. © KEYSTONE-FRANCE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
“My two nationalities collide.
It's a whole, a coherent block "
Arrived in Algiers during the summer of 1962, Slimane discovered the sea, electricity.
Fear of reprisals from the FLN?
“
No!
the FLN had completely forgotten about us.
Because the day after independence, another war began, that between the factions of the FLN, for power.
The FLN never thought of the people again!
»
Today Slimane is French, but also Algerian.
In 1953, he was officially "French Muslim of non-African stock not naturalized".
In 1958, under the Fifth Republic, he became a full-fledged Frenchman.
On July 3, 1962, Independence Day, he became an Algerian but did not lose French nationality, which was "frozen".
He then began the process of “reintegration” to obtain it in the 1980s. “
My two nationalities collide.
One was born from the other and against the other.
I feel Algerian by origin, but French by affiliation.
It is a whole, a coherent block.
»
In 2022, Slimane Zeghidour refuses to talk about a wound that would not have closed.
“
There are still stigmas: Algeria no longer has a peasantry, imports 80% of its food, and finally, 86% of the population lives on the coast, or 14% of the territory.
My country was abandoned inside, everyone went to live where the French lived…
”
Who are the harkis and the pied-noirs
?
The harkis constitute part of the auxiliaries engaged in the French army during the war of Algeria, without having the statute of soldiers.
They obtained the status of veterans in France by a law of December 9, 1974 if they live in France and from July 23, 2010 if they live in Algeria.
After the Algerian war, Paris undertakes to welcome them with their families.
But the day after the Evian agreements, France reconsidered this commitment and only a handful of them, around 40,000, reached the metropolis in terrible conditions, the others were abandoned and had to stay in Algeria at the risk of being to kill.
The Pieds-noirs are the French people who came from Algeria until July 1962 and beyond for those who stayed there.
The Pieds-noirs possessed, like those of metropolitan France, the rights associated with the status of citizens.
After the signing of the Evian Accords, the massacres and abuses against this community increased.
In 1962, some 800,000 of them joined the metropolis.
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