Headline : Buried past comes back to haunt France

Read more from the original article on here at correspondent.afp.com.

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No. of Paragraph 48

A series of investigations by AFP journalist Lucie Peytermann has forced the French government to face up to a shameful betrayal of those who fought for France during the war in Algeria

The text message landed like a meteorite. “Hi Lucie. We have found it!”  I was in the newsroom and my heart jumped. The graves of babies and children who died in appalling conditions in a camp run by the French military in the early 1960s had been found on waste ground on army land in the south of France. 

Their fathers were Harkis – Algerian Muslims who fought for France during the long and bitter war there – and who faced terrible reprisals and massacres at independence in 1962.  Some 90,000 men, women and children fled for their lives across the Mediterranean to France only to find themselves corralled into grim camps, where child mortality was shockingly high.

The cemetery was by one such Harki camp north of Avignon, its existence hidden from the families of the dead children for decades. My feelings swung between joy and relief and the pain I knew the news would bring to the families who have been trying all these years to find the graves. Their story is another twist in one of the most shameful episodes in modern French history.

Read more from the original article on here at correspondent.afp.com.

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