Mokrane is suffering another loss now. She feels the killers are escaping justice because of the government's efforts to turn the page on a brutal conflict in which 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed.
Authorities are offering amnesty for many of the remaining Islamic militants as part of the peace initiative. So far, 2,200 prisoners have been released, while 250 to 300 militants have turned in their weapons ahead of the Thursday deadline, the government says.
Families of those killed, as well as human rights groups, say the peace charter is a crude attempt to get Algerians to forget about the conflict while denying justice to its victims.
They would have preferred something like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which allowed victims and perpetrators of violence during the apartheid era to testify about killings and other abuses.
Some Algerians say they could even have accepted pardons for killers, but only after the violence was accounted for in the courts.
``We want peace, but not like this," said Mokrane, visiting the cramped offices of Djezair Iruna (Our Algeria), an association of victims' families based in Blida.
The group has more than 5,000 members, mostly women. The region around Blida, about 25 miles south of the capital, Algiers, saw some of the worst reprisals by Islamic militants.
``We want peace, but not with the terrorists being freed, avoiding arrest and trial, and with us denied the right to lodge complaints against them," said Mokrane, 56.
Her son, Berouichi Billel, was targeted with other family members because his father, a mechanic, was accused of cooperating with police. Along with his photograph, Mokrane carries an X-ray showing the bullet wounds of another son, Mohamed Farid, wounded in 1994 when he was 19.
After the army prevented an election victory by the now banned fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front, religious extremists terrorized the country for years.
``You had to be on their side," said Ahmed El-Fertas, who was shot in the hand and chest when his food shop near Blida was attacked in 1994. ``Everyone who was not with them was a target."
