A Study On The “Last Taboo” Of Brutal French Colonialism In Algeria

Among the files that have not been adequately investigated regarding the heinous crimes of French colonialism during the Liberation Revolution, is the issue of the camps that the occupying army set up as the war intensified, with the aim of isolating the men of the Liberation Front from the population and thus depriving them of many benefits, such as food and access to the necessary information at the right time to confront the enemy’s plans.
This sensitive file was the subject of a study reported by the magazine Jeune Afrique, which described it as “the last taboo” in the “Algerian war”, as indicated by French historical literature and the liberation revolution with regard to Algeria. While many historical references state that the camps began in 1958, after General Charles de Gaulle had come to power in France on the ruins of the Fourth Republic, this study is completely different.
According to “Jeune Afrique” magazine, the creation of the camps dates back to 1955 in the Aures region, and the first to order them was General Barlani, the officer in charge of popular affairs. The purpose of these camps was military, since the occupying army had difficulty reaching isolated villages, which were ideal hiding places for the Algerian mujahideen or freedom-fighters, who benefited from a better knowledge of the terrain.
According to the same study, the French occupying army also destroyed villages whose owners were expelled and established areas forbidden to Algerians, and the French army was given the right to open fire without warning. In 1956 and 1957, the camps began to be organized and, in 1957, propaganda messages were sometimes broadcast through loudspeakers. On January 1, 1959, the number of camps reached 936, and in June 1959, the threshold of one million people in camps was exceeded.
It did not stop there. From 1958, the occupying power launched the Constantine Plan, a project for the economic and social development of Algeria. It aimed to allocate 250,000 hectares of agricultural land to Muslim peasants, implementing the policy of the thousand villages led by De Louvrier, in what appeared to be an attempt to absorb the anger of the Algerians, embodied in their stand by the liberation revolution.
The study was based on a memorandum on the camps written by six senior French officials, which revealed its broad outlines in 1959. It was submitted to Paul Delouver on February 17 so that the government delegate in Algeria could submit it to General de Gaulle. The memorandum of Michel Rocard, who became Prime Minister in the 1980s, spoke of the crimes caused by the decision to create the camps.
The forced deportation of Algerians from their lands, preventing them from cultivating their crops and gathering them in camps, as well as depriving them of raising animals (goats, sheep, cows and poultry), worsened their nutritional situation, which led to the spread of diseases and consequently to a staggering increase in the number of deaths among them, especially among children, according to the study. In terms of numbers, 3.5 million people were forcibly displaced, or about 40 percent of the Algerian population at the time.
In fact, what happened in 1959 was nothing more than a second wave of regrouping operations and barbed wire sieges, a common practice to prevent peasants from returning to their lands. The study also rejected Michel Rocard’s memorandum, which referred to the camp as a “center” because it was considered an “administrative euphemism” to avoid evoking the trauma of the Second World War, and stressed the need to replace the center with a “camp”.
However, the National Liberation Front (FLN) knew how to take advantage of the new situation and to spur its activity inside the camps so that the resistance would continue, working to collect donations and publishing and promoting slogans calling for support for the lofty revolution against the brutal occupying army, as psychology professor Michel Cornaton said.