"(Cherifa Khedda), .... on the ground during the darkest years of the dark decade. “The day after the massacres, we went to the places where they happened and people not only described the terrorists, but they knew who was a member of the Islamic Salvation Front. They recognized the terrorist of the neighborhood who was there killing.” Without hesitation, she calls out those who do not have her firsthand experience. “Now if people who were not there want to testify in our place, that is something else. If they meet the affected families, the one whose son was killed by the Islamists will tell you he was taken by the Islamists.” In the small villages where abuses often happened, everyone knows everyone else’s business. She recounts what local people would tell her on the ground in the Triangle of Death after any given atrocity in the 1990s. “When we go to a village and talk to a woman, and ask, ‘How do you know it was the Islamists?’ she will say, ‘The cousin of my husband was with them and the cousin of my husband was a terrorist.’ When, for example, I had friends whose children were taken by the security services, they say, ‘I knew my son was taken by the security forces.’ There is no confusion in the minds of these citizens (Like in western minds). Why is there so much denial elsewhere that fundamentalists killed here?
Cherifa Kheddar in
- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here.
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