ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the experience of Algerian adolescents as victims and perpetrators in the violent years of the last decade of the twentieth century. Gender shaped and sharpened the experiences of that era. That adolescents are fighters, that they participate in warfare in other ways (as spies, lookouts, couriers, and plants, for example), that they transport weapons and materiel even when they are not trained to use them, are all well-established facts. In Algeria, older teenage boys and young men did all of these things and more. Teenage girls appear uniformly as victims: there are no documented cases of teenage girls participating in any armed groups. 1 The sole exception is the girls living in the forest camps of the armed bands with guerrillas who kidnapped and enslaved them, required them to cook and clean, and forced them to provide sexual services. 2 Girls never carried arms and never went on raids, as girls in similar circumstances did in conflicts in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and elsewhere. Some women did support the FIS (Front islamique du salut [“Islamic Salvation Front”], the main Islamist political party); called “fisistes,” they marched in support of the FIS agenda, and some wives of combatants did live in the forest camps. But no reporter (male or female) ever identified a girl or woman in any attack. The absence of women in the conflict of the 1990s contrasts strikingly to the enlistment of young women, some still in their teens, in the bloody struggle for independence from 1954 to 1962. 3
