From 1955 the French army in Algeria adopted forced resettlement as a counterinsurgency method: it declared rural areas forbidden zones, removed the people living there, and concentrated them in 'centres de regroupement' under military supervision, so as to deny the FLN food, shelter and recruits. As many as two million people, about a quarter of Algeria's Muslim population, were moved into such centres before independence in 1962. Conditions were poor: an ICRC delegate reporting on a 1962 mission found that only a small minority of centres had permanent structures, most consisting of huts of clay and straw brick roofed with thatch or branches and without floors, and recorded high infant mortality attributable to poor hygiene and nutritional deficiency, together with widespread tuberculosis, rickets and conjunctivitis, concluding that residents lacked the basic necessities. The ICRC provided mobile medical teams from 1959, after French press coverage — including Michel Rocard's official report — brought the camps to public attention. The policy destroyed the settlement pattern and agricultural economy of large parts of rural Algeria; many of those uprooted never returned to their land and moved instead to the shantytowns of the coastal cities. This is distinct from, and much larger than, the 1962 departure of the pieds-noirs and harkis.
The French army cleared rural Algerians out of zones declared forbidden and held them in army-supervised 'centres de regroupement' to separate the population from the FLN
The 1954 census counted about 8.45 million Muslim Algerians alongside roughly 1 million Europeans. The regroupement camps drew almost exclusively from the rural Muslim population, then about 6.5 million; Michel Cornaton's study counted some 2.35 million people in the camps by 1961, with a further million or more displaced outside them.
No death toll has been established for the camps. The ICRC's 1962 mission reported high infant mortality, widespread tuberculosis, rickets and nutritional deficiency in the centres, and French official inspections described child mortality as very high, but these deaths were never systematically counted and are not separable from the war's overall toll — itself contested between French estimates of roughly 250,000–400,000 Algerian dead and the Algerian state's figure of a million or more.
The ICRC treated the regroupment centres as places of detention and inspected them as such, documenting confinement and conditions; the clearing and destruction of villages in the forbidden zones is documented by the historians of the camps.
Algeria