FRANCAISComité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués - History
1950-1959
-1953, France: the CIMADE starts visiting ordinary prisoners, not only political ones.
-September 1955, France: the CIMADE starts an aid programme for Indochina refugees in camps in Noyant (Allier), Vigeant (Vienne) and Sainte-Livrade (Lot et Garonne).
-November 1956-September 1957, Hungary: the CIMADE facilitates the resettlement of 10,000 Hungarian refugees previously put in military barracks and camps in France. At the request of the French minister of Foreign Affairs, the Committee briefly sends a team in Budapest to give food during the Soviet repression.
-1956-62, France: the CIMADE helps the resettlement of 510 Albanian refugees, and runs two shelter centres for Eastern Europe refugees in the suburbs of Paris. Among those refugees, there are old ‘white Russians’ who fled the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and who are eventually channelled to Cannes, Saint-Raphaël or Le Perreux with the support of the Tolstoy Foundation. As the independence war in Algeria gains importance, the CIMADE also starts helping the North-African communities in Marseille (districts of Porte d’Aix and Arenas), then in Paris, Lyon and Strasbourg. The Committee denounces military torture in Algeria, and takes care of the immigrants condemned for political offences, identified in Vincennes and kept under custody in four centres (Vadeney in the Marne department, Thol in the Ain, Saint-Maurice in the Gard, Le Larzac in the Aveyron) which contain up to 17,000 North Africans in 1962.
-1957-1962, Algeria: after sending, in June 1957, a first team in Alger, and after denouncing, in May 1959, the squalid conditions in the “peace camps” imposed by the French army, the CIMADE works in the hinterland. There, it first rescues the Arab people of Medea, south of Alger, then of the villages run by the SAS (Special Administrative Sections) in Sidi Naamane and Belkitane. As the distinction between civilians and guerrillas is very difficult to make, the CIMADE sometimes assists FLN agents in being taken care of in French military hospitals. Some members of the CIMADE are probably in favour of the Algerian independence, so they are suspected of carrying goods for the rebels. According to Roland Gaucher, a right-wing journalist, the CIMADE’s secretary general between 1956 and 1968, Jacques Beaumont, is close to the Henri Curiel’s network, which supports liberation movements in Arabic countries. However, the political closeness between the CIMADE and the Algerian FLN is aimed at practically facilitating the access to the victims of the conflict. In an internal document, the organisation states that: “if the CIMADE hadn’t helped the FLN in France, it would never have been trusted by Algerians in Algeria”. The CIMADE is first and foremost dealing with humanitarian issues, as shows its non-discriminating range of action. For instance, the Committee helps Algerian-born Frenchmen and Arab Harkis to settle in France after the independence of Algeria in 1962, the former because they are seen as colonists, the latter because they served as auxiliaries in the French army.
