Amira Merabet, a 34-year-old woman, was burned alive in the Eastern Algerian town of El Khroub in August. Her crime: refusing a man’s advances. The murder shocked Algeria, and protests were held across the country – in Constantine, Oran, Algiers and Béjaïa – to pay tribute to female victims of violence. This was not a crime without precedent. In Béjaïa, Merabet’s photo was placed among that of women assassinated by Islamists during the 1990s. They included 17-year-old Katia Bengana, who was killed for refusing to wear the hijab.

The linking of these two murders shows that memories of the civil war that raged from 1992 to 2002 remain vivid in Algeria. And Merabet’s death shows that Algerian women’s struggle for rights is neither over nor forgotten, as shown in this article.