Slow descent into a life of terror

As Nacera poured the mint tea, I asked my hosts who was this pale beauty with thick black hair, a manic grin and frightened eyes. A distant cousin by marriage, they told me, one of hundreds of thousands of Algerians displaced by the war. They felt sorry for her and took her in. She repaid their kindness by becoming their housekeeper.

Nacera hesitated when they asked her to sit down. Her employers had never heard her full story, and she told it self-consciously, laughing when she spoke of violence.

Nacera's simple tale is that of thousands of Algerian villages. It is the story of the last four years, of how an Islamist insurrection with lofty rhetoric degenerated into banditry, rape and murder.

For two years, from 1993 to 1995, Nacera's family lived with the Islamist rebels. Her widowed mother owned a former French colonial plantation near Chebli village, 70 km south of Algiers. Their grand house was furnished with antiques, and surrounded by seven hectares of fruit orchards.

When the guerrillas took over the region, they wanted Nacera's two brothers to join them, so the brothers fled to Algiers, leaving their mother, seven sisters and two orphaned girl neighbours to fend for themselves.

"I was 16 when they first came," Nacera recalls. Like most Algerians, she refers to the guerrillas as "terrorists" or by the somewhat mocking nickname "les terros". "In 1993, the first year, the Islamic Salvation Front ran Chebli. They weren't killing people. They solved disputes over land and made an Islamic government.

"By the second year, they had turned into the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and they were much harder.

"At first they were very polite, never aggressive, kind," Nacera says of the guerrillas. "They would not talk to us girls unless our mother was present. We would have stayed in our home if they had continued to be well-behaved.

"But little by little, they became more demanding. They slept in our beds, in our sheets, and took showers. Sometimes there were 10 in the house at a time. We cooked for them. They made us wash their clothing.

"Once they brought a wounded man named Farouk, and I had to wash his blood-soaked clothes. There was one soldier who worked with the military and with the GIA. He told us that Farouk had killed a journalist.

"My sister was in love with the soldier - she was going to marry him. Now he's in prison."

The 10 women in Nacera's house sheltered the wounded rebel for a week. "He listened to tapes of the Koran on a walkman all day. They brought a doctor, who pulled a bullet out of his ribs.

"In the beginning, they only slashed the throats of drug addicts and homosexuals," Nacera continued. "They warned them first. The townspeople thought it was a good thing.

"The village of Chebli was theirs; they were the masters. They were friends of [GIA leader Antar] Zouabri. I used to see Zouabri in the village. He always rides a motorcycle.

"He's a big throat-slasher; he loves killing. Zouabri asked my mother for money and she gave him 5,000 dinars. They made all the girls wear hidjab [Islamic covering]. One refused and they put tar on her head.

"Zouabri had a villa near our farm where he kept 50 hostages, people who refused to give him money, and he planned to cut all their throats.

"One of the good GIA guys went to the army and told them. The soldiers raided the house and saved the hostages. Then they sent them to live in the south - because otherwise the GIA would pursue them."

The emir (leader) began taking an interest in Nacera and her pretty sisters. "One day you will give me your daughters," he joked with Nacera's mother. Another guerrilla began staring at them. "We were afraid to tell the army, because there were GIA people in the military. The nearest barracks was 24 km away at Blida. "Some people betrayed us - people we had a dispute with over a plot of land. The military accused us of helping terrorists."

One afternoon a guerrilla wearing a ski mask grabbed Nacera in the garden. She called the family's Alsatian dog, which attacked him. In his anger, he slashed her arm with a knife, splitting it open from the shoulder to the elbow. She wears long sleeves to hide the scar, a thick, pink, slug-like welt.

She stayed with relatives for a month. "The day I returned home, we learned that our neighbours Saida and Zouleikha and their mother had their throats slashed. All three refused to marry terrorists. That day, we locked up the house and left forever."

Without money to rent an apartment in the capital, Nacera's family split up, each woman lodging in a different place. After her arrival in Algiers, Nacera escaped a second kidnapping attempt, when a man jumped out of a car and grabbed her by the hair.

Today, she is afraid to go outside. She is terrified by the bomb explosions in the city, terrified of her own future.

"There are many people like me who have lost everything," she says sadly. Former neighbours tell her the army has recently chased the GIA out of Chebli, but it would take much more to give her the confidence to go home.