At a glance there is nothing in the central square at Blida to betray the extreme violence Algeria suffered until recently.

To the sound of a splashing fountain, old men chat on the benches. Around them, teenage boys kick a football. Even the French woman whose family ran the old printing shop on one corner of the square has come back to a town that in the 1990s was at the centre of a region where some of the worst massacres of Algeria's civil war took place.