Morocco’s
Justice and Reconciliation Commission
Susan Slyomovics
April 4,
2005
(Susan Slyomovics
is a professor of anthropology at MIT and author of The Performance
of Human Rights in Morocco [University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005].)
From independence
in 1956 through the 1990s, the Moroccan state sent thousands of
dissidents and political opponents to prison. During these decades,
known to Moroccans as the “black years,” the act of expressing
an “unauthorized opinion” could earn years of arbitrary detention.
Political opponents of King Hassan II’s regime, many of them leftists
or Islamists, were often “disappeared” in the manner of dictatorships
in Chile and Argentina and tortured or killed while in state custody.
In 1990, Hassan II established an Advisory Council on Human Rights
to begin the rehabilitation of his regime’s reputation for repression.
These official efforts intensified after the king’s death in 1999.
Anxious to burnish Morocco’s new image as a developing democracy,
and pushed at every stage by vocal and organized survivors of
the prisons, as well as Morocco’s vibrant community of human rights
activists, King Mohammed VI has endeavored to fulfill his father’s
1994 promise to “turn the page definitively” on the rampant abuses
of the past.
On January
7, 2004, the king appointed Driss Benzekri to head the newly formed
Justice and Reconciliation Commission. Benzekri, himself a former
political prisoner (1974-91) from the outlawed Marxist-Leninist
group Ila al-Amam, presides over 16 commissioners, eight drawn
from the Advisory Council on Human Rights (in Arabic, al-Majlis
al-Istishari li-Huquq al-Insan or in French, Conseil Consultative
des Droits de l’Homme) plus eight nationally recognized experts
in law, medicine and women’s rights. Among them are other former
political prisoners and victims of torture and “disappearance.”
According
to the commission’s multilingual website,
its mandate to investigate human rights violations begins with
independence and ends with the establishment of the 1999 Indemnity
Commission, an earlier attempt to redress 43 years of the regime’s
war against its own citizens. Both the Indemnity Commission and
the Justice and Reconciliation Commission accord blanket immunity
from criminal prosecution to perpetrators and victims alike. The
competence of the commission is non-judicial (dhat ikhtisasat
ghayr qada’iyya). Like Chile and Argentina before it, Morocco
chooses to circumscribe justice, eschewing punishment to concentrate
on identifying, verifying and reporting the process of uncovering
the truth about arbitrary detention and secret torture sites.
The story
of forcible disappearance, torture and deaths during police custody
or in secret prisons is therefore told about the past from the
perspective of the present and entirely in the victims’ voices.
By the filing deadline of February 13, 2004, over 22,000 requests
for reparation had arrived at the commission’s headquarters in
the Moroccan capital of Rabat. Despite the limited purview of
the commission, it is collecting an enormous volume of testimonies
and depositions that constitute an important resource for counteracting
the repression of Morocco’s “black years” with transparency and
accountability.
CRITICISMS
Reactions
to the state-mandated Justice and Reconciliation Commission (in
Arabic, Hay’at al-Insaf wa al-Musalaha or in French, Instance
Equité et Reconciliation) are mixed. Government brutality to suppress
rural armed uprisings and urban riots was directed against a panoply
of actors, from political parties to trade unions, each of which
has complex reservations about the state’s attempt to “turn the
page” on the past without penalizing perpetrators of abuses. Mustapha
Laamrani, a veteran of Morocco’s national liberation army, gave
testimony about his torture as part of the liquidation of nationalist
fighters by Moroccan leaders of the Istiqlal Party eager to consolidate
power in the immediate post-independence years. Although many
such political figures grew to know well police station and prison
interiors, as yet no member of the Istiqlal leadership has stepped
forward to confront muddy histories as victims and perpetrators,
not even those minimally complicit with the regime’s violations.
Other
critics note the content of Morocco’s anti-terrorism law, Number
03-03, swiftly enacted by Parliament in reaction to multiple bomb
attacks in Casablanca on May 16, 2003 that targeted foreign and
Moroccan Jewish sites and killed 46 people. Like the United States,
Morocco makes claims in regard to a global war on terrorism that
place their respective nations’ safety above various legal rights.
The Moroccan version, now integrated into the country’s penal
code as Article 218, defines terrorism as any premeditated act,
individual or collective, whose purpose is “attacks against public
order through terror or violence.” This phrasing is reminiscent
of French colonial-era statutes that enabled the capricious incarceration
of generations of Moroccans.[1] Based on profiles of the perpetrators,
in the wake of the 2003 bombings waves of arrests have targeted
specific groups, primarily those belonging to organizations labeled
Islamist. There is a distinct echo of the past when the Moroccan
government acknowledges that more than 1,000 people are detained
incommunicado under anti-terrorism laws. Human rights groups double
and treble the government numbers.
Moreover,
newspapers link US and Moroccan anti-terrorist efforts in a macabre
fashion. According to Amnesty International and press reports,
detainees held by the US as unlawful combatants at Guantánamo
Bay were transported to a Moroccan secret detention center for
questioning under torture.[2] Many Moroccans deplore their country’s contribution to the war
on terrorism, one in which the international community recognizes
Moroccan expertise in torture. Those who point to continuities
between the “black years” of 1956-1999 and contemporary government
abuses assert strong opposition to the efficacy of any truth commission.
Security forces operate secretly and with government protection,
and retrograde laws prohibiting “attacks against the monarchy”
have led to prison terms for prominent journalists whose newspaper
articles investigate royal family matters.The most famous case
concerns Ali Lmrabet, editor of the magazines Demain and
Doumane, who was sentenced to three years in June 2003
for “insulting the king’s person” and “undermining the monarchy.”
Lmrabet had reported that one of the king’s palaces was to be
sold to tourist developers.
Even
as the new commission meets and passes judgment upon the truths
of pre-1999 brutalities, new victims are being created daily by
the unchanged, untouchable legal, police and prison apparatus.
These new victims fall outside the commission’s mandate and compromise
its mission.
PUBLIC HEARINGS
Beginning
in Rabat on December 21-22, 2004, followed by Figuig, Rachidia
and Khenifra, with upcoming sessions planned for El Hoceima in
the north and Laayoun in the south, the Justice and Reconciliation
Commission is holding a series of public hearings featuring victims’
oral testimonies broadcast on Moroccan television and posted on
the commission website. Although no polls on the numbers of viewers
or the effects of the hearings are available, Moroccan newspapers
report the profound emotional impact on the viewing public. Women’s
accounts are deemed especially moving, perhaps because many are
pronounced not in literary Arabic but in darija (Moroccan
Arabic dialect) or Amazigh/Berber, the two languages spoken and
understood by Moroccans. During the televised hearings, speakers
could not name their torturers. Given the extensive literature
by political prisoners and numerous articles listing torturers
that are published regularly in the Moroccan press, this prohibition
reflects less the commission’s desire to protect the rights of
due process, even for high officials known to have been torturers,
than the immense power and reach of television.
Impunity,
or the Moroccan state’s disinclination to prosecute or even name
the perpetrators, has lead to a parallel series of public hearings
by various non-governmental organizations in Morocco and Europe.
In Rabat on February 12, 2005, the Moroccan Association of Human
Rights, despite little publicity, heard
testimony from nine people challenging the mandate of the
commission to remain silent about perpetrators’ names and to avoid
human rights abuses committed since Mohammed VI ascended the throne
in 1999. Speakers such as El Ghalia Idjini from Laayoun described
her own rape as part of systematic sexual attacks against thousands
of Sahrawi women, while the Italian wife of Aboulkacem Britel,
an Islamist detained following the Casablanca bomb attacks, spoke
as well. So did Maria Charaf, wife of Amine Tahani, a Marxist
political prisoner who died in 1985 as a result of torture in
Derb Moulay Cherif, Casablanca’s secret detention center. Charaf
had filed for indemnities during the 1999 commission. Currently,
she is pursuing a civil action through the Moroccan courts.
Reconciliation
occupies a special place in the title, competence and powers of
the commission, whose mandate is “to develop and promote a culture
of dialogue and to establish foundations for reconciliation directed
toward consolidating the democratic transition in our country,
reinforce building the rule of law and implanting values of the
culture of citizenship and human rights.” Unlike the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Moroccan one so far has
not talked much about reconciliation. Moroccan perpetrators are
under no compulsion to step forward because reconciliation possesses
no legal standing to request amnesty or avert prosecution; it
is a moral principle incumbent on the victim, not the torturer,
as part of a political compromise. The “culture of human rights”
and “rule of law,” phrases expressing praiseworthy international
norms, do not respond to one witness’s cry from the heart: “With
whom do you want me to reconcile?”
ARCHIVES
While
debates rage about the role of the commission in deflecting responsibility
away from the government, or worse, its capacity to undermine
the rule of law by legitimating the powerlessness of the Moroccan
criminal justice system to pursue prosecutions, it is noteworthy
that the important daily work of the commission continues with
little fanfare. Each request for reparation, mailed or presented
in person to the commission, produces a file. Each file adds to
the overview of Moroccan history by contributing to the computerized
database about violations and torture now accessible according
to date, region and even torturers’ names. Ordered chronologically,
the archive begins with section “A” to designate immediate post-independence
political events from 1956 to 1960, moves to section “B” chronicling
the 1958-1959 uprisings in the northern Rif region, and proceeds
down the decades until the death of King Hassan II, the endpoint
of the commission’s mandate. Exceptions to the decade-by-decade
record are “AH” for the region of the Sahara, where violations
among the Sahrawis know no specific date constraints, and “AJ,”
a catchall category of individual cases not linked to specific
years in which uprisings, mass political trials or groups deemed
dangerous by the regime are categorized.
While
the main working archive of 22,000 files owes its existence and
formation to applicants and deponents who met the 2004 commission
deadline, more data derive from two additional research archives
that consist of more than 8,000 files from the 1999 commission
plus those who missed February 13, 2004 deadline (with some overlapping
cases) but still filed. At the Rabat headquarters, follow-up procedures
by commission statement-takers include additional oral interviews,
many audiotaped and videotaped single or group testimony sessions
immediately transcribed, and internal videotaped commission sessions
organized thematically in the form of day-long witness testimony
on such topics as prisons, secret detention centers and deaths
of famous political martyrs.
In
addition, commission note-takers travel to the applicant’s home,
and teams of field workers are sent for several weeks to regions
notoriously hard hit by human rights abuses. During January 2005,
20 commission researchers resided in villages throughout Azilal
province, the Berber/Tamazight-speaking Middle Atlas tribal region,
where anti-government uprisings resulted in devastating army reprisals.
The 1999 Indemnity Commission had introduced Berber speakers to
the vocabulary of “dahaya,” or victims. The 2004-2005 team
of commission investigators report that inhabitants dubbed them
“Ait Ta’assufat,” the tribe of arbitrary violations, suggesting
sardonically that interviewers were there either to uncover or
perpetrate the rule of the arbitrary.
Government
interviewers faced multiple problems in assessing the stories
of individual victims when they were detached from the layered
history of revolts that characterized a state of war between the
monarchy and this Berber region. Moreover, depositions and forms
mailed to the commission had been mass-produced by official village
scribes (katib umumi) who wrote in literary Arabic on behalf
of an illiterate or non-Arabic-speaking population. Both scribe
and victim documented abuses in the most general way without dates
of imprisonment or names of prisons or torturers, and the depositions
were especially silent concerning the subject of rape. The commission’s
extended sojourn in Azilal resulted in several thousand more applications
filed past the deadline, but with more precise claims describing
torture, arbitrary detention, state expropriation of goods, collective
punishment and sexual assault, thereby raising the possibility
of rape as a military tactic against the population.
REMEDIES
For
the moment, although Morocco’s Justice and Reconciliation Commission
is expected to request an extension to present their findings
and recommendations, two crucial remedies are offered. The first
is financial reparation in keeping with the majority of victims’
preference, checked off in the commission forms, for indemnification
over court cases, tribunals or memorializations. One-time, lump
sum payments to victims are envisioned, because all concerned
lack confidence in the Moroccan bureaucracy’s ability to disburse
efficiently and without corruption the monthly payments that would
otherwise be preferred. Instead of collective indemnification,
the commission could recommend rehabilitating targeted regions
with roads and other infrastructure and transforming detention
centers into community centers.
Second,
what appears to be a minimal commission accomplishment -- collecting
and tabulating witness testimonies by the enormous number of Moroccans
eligible for reparations -- will prove to be its most powerful
legacy. Such descriptively ahistorical, yet powerful accumulations
of testimony are advocated by José Zalaquett, a lawyer and member
of the Chilean Truth Commission: “I would like to draw the distinction
between revealing the truth about secret crimes and interpreting
the political processes that led to such situations. The distinction
between fact and interpretation has become very important in the
working of truth commissions. They should largely concentrate
on facts, which may be proved, whereas differences about historical
interpretations will always exist. The report can make recommendations
by pointing to the immediate context of the atrocities, but not
to the remote context. This is not the place for an historical
analysis of class struggles.”[3]
Zalaquett
argues for a legal, positivist approach anchored by the research
imperative of hearing testimony combined with additional empirical
evidence in government archives, when made available. Truth comes
about through small, detailed steps, Zalaquett and the Moroccan
commission imply, that reconstruct the world of perpetrators as
well as reconstruct victims’ lives through investigation, acknowledgment
and indemnification. In this way, a truth commission need not
preempt punishment, but may precede civil suits or even criminal
prosecutions. To the criticism that Morocco has experienced no
regime change or transition to democracy that heralded the creation
of other internationally acclaimed truth commissions, the Moroccan
archive claims to be laying a foundation for a society that is
attempting to correct itself based on the fact of victim testimonies.
Most evident is the remarkably high quality of researchers, interviewers,
investigators, note-takers, archivists, psychiatrists and medical
staff (many themselves eligible to claim reparation) that attests
to and underpins a necessary, future renewal of social science
research in Morocco.
Testimony
and archiving are the main processes of the commission to narrate
human rights violations and to offer narratives of change and
justice. Morocco’s commission controls the circumstances of public
testimony vigilantly and coercively but less so the relationship
between the archive and acts of torture and disappearance. The
hope is that the final commission reports, due by the end of 2005
if not before, will answer questions of what happened, speculate
on why it happened and usher in a culture of transparency by pointing
to those responsible. Their identities are housed, but not hidden,
in the archive, open to victims but also to future historians
and researchers.
Skeptics
who point to the anti-terrorism legislation or the circumscribed
mandate of the Justice and Reconciliation Commission raise important
questions about the sincerity of the Moroccan state’s commitment
to human rights. Nonetheless, victims who testify to atrocities,
NGO activists who name perpetrators and the archiving function
of the commission itself all evince a belief in human rights work
as a rational and practical endeavor -- not simply a means of
beautifying the regime in the eyes of the international community.
When ordinary Moroccans share this belief, then the act of documenting
abuses will diminish the effects of a century in which rights
have been systematically trampled on by colonial domination and
indigenous repression.
