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We had visited the site and noted several possible targets. We had been told to place two bombs, but we were three, and at the last moment, since it was possible, we decided to plant three bombs. Samia and I carried three bombs from the Casbah to Bab el Oued, where they were primed .... Each of us placed a bomb, and at the appointed time there were two explosions; one of the bombs was defective and didn't go off.
Djamila B., Zohra D., and Samia, Algiers, September 1956 (quoted in Amrane Minne, 1993: 97)
In the terrorists' camp, I lived in hell. I awoke at dawn to start cleaning, washing, cooking, fetching firewood and water. I nursed the sick and served the wives of the terrorists, the legal ones they called "free women." Every night the terrorists visited me, taking their turns. They forced me to have sex several times a night. During my [six months'] captivity I was raped by about 50 dirty, stinking, brutal, violent men. ... The rest of the night, to keep me from running away, they bound my wrists and ankles with wire and took away my clothes.
Chrea Meriem, March 1998 (as told to Belloula, 2000: 115)
FORTY-TWO years separate these quotations, yet the experiences described seem to be centuries apart-and in reverse order.* During the Algerian war for independence from France (1954-1962), thousands of women were active participants, taking initiative even on deadly missions. During the civil war of the 1990s, tens of thousands of women and girls were the victims of terrorists who denied not just their womanhood but their humanity. I went to Algeria in April 2001 to ask how this apparent shift from active participant to passive victim could have happened. How is it that Algerian women-whose struggles became, through the pen of Frantz Fanon (1924-1961), the hallmark of a national revolution's potential to liberate women-found themselves the target of a civil war in the 1990s? How did Algerian women, whose analysis and praxis of women's liberation were so advanced, respond to increasing restrictions on their lives and the lives of their daughters in the aftermath of war? What options do Algerian women think they have now, and which are they pursuing...