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. 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. 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."
>
>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.
>
>-----
>
>For background on Moroccan efforts to redress wrongs of the past, see Susan
>Slyomovics, "A Truth Commission for Morocco," in Middle East Report 218
>(Spring 2001). The article is accessible online at
>http://www.merip.org/mer/mer218/218_slymovics.html<http://www.merip.org/mer/mer218/218_slymovics.html>.
>
>See also Susan Slyomovics, "No Buying Off the Past: Moroccan Indemnities and
>the Opposition," in Middle East Report 229 (Winter 2003). The article is
>accessible online at http://www.merip.org/mer/mer229/229_slyomovics.html<http://www.merip.org/mer/mer229/229_slyomovics.html>.
>
>Order back issues of Middle East Report, or subscribe, via a secure server
>at MERIP's home page: http://www.merip.org<http://www.merip.org/>
>
>
>
>
>Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
>and Information Project (MERIP).