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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Morocco makes amends
By Dalal Abu GhazalehBits and pieces of intriguing information are slowly emerging about the mysterious death of Moroccan opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka. The disclosures came after France partially lifted a decades-old official silence and as the North African country tries to reconcile with its past under its new King Mohamed VI. But so far, these small pieces are insufficient to complete the jigsaw puzzle.
Antoine Lopez, a former French Secret Service agent, on Sunday broke 35 years of silence, telling a Paris newspaper how Ben Barka was strangled and his neck broken in October 1965 by a huge underground gangster called Boucheseiche. He said this happened in the presence of Moroccan ex-Interior Minister General Mohamed Oufkir.
"Boucheseiche delivered a first blow to Ben Barka, he then grabbed him by the throat and snapped his neck," Lopez said.
But Lopez's account of the death in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper appears to absolve late King Hassan II of responsibility, saying that Ben Barka was kidnapped and taken into a secret hideout to await an envoy of the late monarch to discuss his return to Morocco.
The full blame seems to have fallen clearly on Oufkir, who is officially said to have committed "suicide" after he was accused of plotting to overthrow the late king a few years later. His accomplice, Moroccan Police Chief Ahmed Dlimi was later killed in a mysterious car accident.
The information given by Lopez, in which he denied an earlier report that Ben Barka's body was buried under a mosque near Paris, only came after France agreed to lift a ban on some of the documents kept secret since 1965. The lifting followed the sudden death of King Hassan in July of last year. Lopez said that Ben Barka's body was dumped under a viaduct near Courcouronnes, south of Paris.
Lopez said he was now telling the story because he wanted to come clean after so many years of silence -- years in which many of the others involved had died or disappeared.
Ben Barka had been a mathematics tutor to King Hassan. As a major opposition leader after independence, he became increasingly leftist in his views. He was twice sentenced to death in absentia during 1964 following allegations of his involvement in an attempt on the king's life and for backing Algeria in border disputes.
Lured to Paris to discuss an anti-colonial film in 1965, he was kidnapped by detectives who handed him to French gangsters working for Oufkir. They strangled him in the basement of a house in the Paris suburb and his body was never found.
The case angered the late French leader Charles de Gaulle, straining his country's diplomatic relations with Morocco until after his death in 1970.
Following a failed coup against King Hassan in 1972, Oufkir was found guilty of Ben Barka's death and sentenced to life in prison in absentia by a French court. His wife and children were incarcerated on the order of the king. The entire family, the youngest of whom was a baby, were held incommunicado for 14 years until one of them escaped in 1987 and alerted the world to their fate.
George Figeon, a journalist who admitted then his involvement and who said that Ben Barka was strangled, was found dead in suspicious circumstances shortly afterwards. Although it was said that he had committed suicide, an independent investigation said his body was found shot several times.
In a recent interview, Ben Barka's eldest son, Bashir, said most of the legal documents concerning Ben Barka's murder, which came before a French court, have been classified as state secrets "because of the direct involvement of King Hassan".
"The French state did not want to harm its good international relations [with Morocco]. Now that Hassan II is dead, we wonder whether the documents will be declassified," he added.
Truth, and perhaps reconciliation at some future date, are the watchwords dominating the resolution of human rights issues which are the most emotive aspect of Morocco's emerging political order.
As many of the abuses were closely linked to his repression of those who disapproved of him personally and the monarchy politically, King Hassan's task of making amends with the victims was extremely difficult while he was still alive.
Since his accession to the throne following the death of his father, King Mohammed VI has ridden the wave of popular enthusiasm for extensive change and moved swiftly to try to resolve the most glaring cases of human right abuses inherited from his father's long reign.
He allowed Ben Barka's widow to return home along with nine members of his family after 36 years in European exile. He also helped trace four French underworld figures who have been sentenced in absentia by a French court for involvement in Ben Barka's kidnapping. The family was warmly received by high-ranking officials last December at the Casablanca airport. The young king received Ben Barka's son in his palace in Rabat.
The Ben Barka family is now determined to establish the truth about what happened to him, as part of a growing campaign to ensure that the families concerned in an estimated 1,500 cases of arbitrary arrests and disappearances between the 1960s and 1980s are made fully aware of what happened to their relatives.
