Memory: Emmanuelle Eriale, director of the Musée du Bagne (prison museum) on Nou Island, Nouméa, New Caledonia, 20 May 2021
Theo Rouby · AFP · Getty
Seen from the air, the rows of white stones are striking. Stepping through the green gate topped with a crescent moon and a red star, it becomes clear that they bear neither names nor dates. This is the ‘Arab cemetery’ at Nessadiou, the resting place of Algerians who were among some 30,000 convicts sent to the Pacific archipelago by France between 1864 and 1897. New Caledonia had been turned into a penal colony, the heart of which was the island of Nou, now a district of the capital Nouméa. Journalist Jacques Dhur describes how the ‘long buildings of the central camp were lined up like coffins’. This was a place of humiliation, violence and contempt.
All ethnic groups were held there: Kabyles, Chaouis, Arabs or desert nomads. In total, 2,106 ‘Arabs’ as they were officially designated were sent to New Caledonia: 121 political prisoners, 1,822 ‘common-law’ detainees and 163 repeat offenders. Historian Benjamin Stora explains that the colonial administration in French Algeria was quick to classify people as common-law offenders, whether they were ‘hardened criminals’ or had simply stood up against the established order.
Beyond the hell of Nou, the archipelago was dotted with penitentiaries, farms and temporary camps where convicts were forced to work on the roads, down nickel mines or draining the marshes. ‘Arabs’ sentenced to more than eight years could not return to Algeria after serving their time. Condemned to live out their lives on ‘Caledoun’ (as they called New Caledonia), many would never see their families again.
There is a guillotine out in the bush at Bourail, 150km northwest of Nouméa. It’s now an exhibit in a museum housed in the agricultural penitentiary’s former commissary. The regime was a little less harsh at Bourail. Driven by a reformist philosophy, the utopian socialist governor Charles Guillain offered recently released convicts – and even those still serving their sentences – the opportunity to acquire concessions (…)
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* Wendy Kristianasen is a journalist.
(1) The National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK) has equal numbers of military and ministers and is presided over by the president of the republic. It is the body through which the army exercises power, seeing itself as the guarantor of the secular republic founded by Ataturk. See “Secular Turks search for reform”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, February 1999.
(2) International Herald Tribune, 6 March 2003.
(3) The RP (May 1983-January 1998) was replaced by the Fazilet party (November 1997-January 2002). Fazilet was then replaced by the Saadet party (Islamist, and very marginal), formed on 20 July 2001, and AKP, formed on 14 August 2001. See “New faces of Islam”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 1997.
