The men thus rehabilitated included not only leaders who had been liquidated during the war, but also fallen angels who had revolted against either Ben Bella or Boumedienne during the post-war years. Among the wartime leaders forgiven were Si Salah, and the two tracked down and murdered abroad: Krim and Khider. Explicitly absent were the harkis who had served France. So, too, was Ramdane Abane; for obvious reasons, so long as any of those implicated in his death remained alive, the legend of the hero "killed in action" had to be allowed to persist. But, in Chadli Bendjedid's Algeria of 1984, veterans were much less inhibited in discussing what really happened to men like Abane and Si Salah, in a manner that would have been inconceivable under the shadow of Boumedienne ten years previously.

DEFINE: Harkis were Algerians who served in the French army during the war of independence; the term may need clarification for readers unfamiliar with the Algerian War.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1682