Le passé est mort

The SAS (Special Administrative Section) units were created by the French Army during the Algerian War to “pacify” the indigenous population. In the daytime, the SAS quarters were used as medical centres and at night-fall as torture chambers in the effort to break the Algerian resistance. When independence came, the centres were recycled as housing for villagers. Forty-six years later, at Laperrine, the families of resistance fighters, the sons of native French-army conscripts, the sons of harkis and refugees who fled terrorism live side by side, in the same poverty, along with their memories, and a similar rejection of a present that bears little resemblance to the dream of Independence.