The Rivesaltes camp, near Perpignan in the Pyrénées-Orientales, has undoubtedly not yet revealed all its dark secrets. Built initially to accommodate the Spanish Republicans in 1939, it then welcomed Jews and Gypsies in appalling conditions during the Second World War. Then, after the war, Axis prisoners or people suspected of collaboration. And finally 21,000 Harkis, after the Evian agreements and their hasty departure from Algeria in 1962.
It is this latter population which is at the origin of the geolocation and search operations launched this Monday by the State. They aim to identify the location of an old cemetery in which the bodies of numerous harkis were buried between 1962 and 1964. The undignified internment conditions there had led to very high mortality, particularly among infants.
An operation similar to that carried out on the former camp of Saint-Maurice l’Ardoise
“Thanks to the research of Inrap archaeologists, a serious lead concerning the potential location of the cemetery has been presented and can thus be verified,” says the Ministry of the Armed Forces. In 2022, the State launched a similar operation on the site of the former Saint-Maurice l’Ardoise camp. [dans le Gard] which made it possible to identify, on March 20, 2023, the location of the camp’s Harki children’s cemetery and to confirm the presence of remains. In 2015, a memorial was built on the Rivesaltes camp.
Patricia Mirallès, Secretary of State to the Minister of the Armed Forces, in charge of Veterans and Memory, asked the independent national commission Harkis to produce a report on the conditions of creation and forgetting of the camp cemetery. The Rivesaltes camp “is one of the sites giving right to compensation within the framework of the law of February 23, 2022 recognizing the Nation towards the Harkis, desired by the President of the Republic,” specifies the ministry.