My compliments to Hannah Uebele for her excellent report of Zohra Drif's talk at the Fares Center on Wednesday (Tufts Daily, Oct. 5). However, she raises the question of the FLN's resort to bomb attacks and Mme. Drif's own role in this and the fact that this was not discussed. I wish to make clear that there was no intention on our part to avoid consideration of this issue, which is in fact very fully discussed in Mme. Drif's book "Inside the Battle of Algiers" (2017). The organizers of the event were concerned that, in her initial presentation, Mme. Drif should be free to say what she wanted to say about the war of independence as a whole and the Battle of Algiers in particular, and members of the audience were entirely free to raise the specific issue of the bomb attacks. None did so, which is a pity, since Mme. Drif would have been perfectly willing to discuss that aspect.
Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History
