http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=56833&contrassID=2&subContrassID=15&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Thursday, August 02, 2001
`The flower must be cut down before it gives its scent'
By Joseph Algazy
A French investigating judge in Paris waited in vain last week for
former Moroccan security service agent Ahmed Boukhari, who was to have
testified on his revelations concerning Moroccan opposition leader
Mehdi Ben Barka. In a recently published interview in the French
newspaper Le Monde and in the Moroccan newspaper Le Journal, Boukhari
talked about Ben Barka's murder and the disappearance of his body 36
years ago. The body, he said, was flown from Paris - where he had been
abducted and murdered by agents of King Hassan II of Morocco - to
Rabat. There, in the cellars of the interrogation and torture
headquarters at Dar-El-Mokri, it was dissolved in an acid bath.
Heading the operation in Paris and Rabat were the interior minister,
General Mohammed Oufkir, and the head of the security service and his
deputy, Major Ahmed Dalimi. Endless articles and books have been
written over the years about "the Ben Barka affair," but there is no
certainty that everything related in them is correct and that, at
least in some of them, an effort has not been made to obfuscate
information that might lead to those who were partners to the
despicable crime. Boukhari held an official position at Dar-El-Mokri
at the time, and he was the one who wrote the report on the transfer
of the body and its final disposal. His statements shed light on the
mystery of the disappearance of Ben Barka's corpse. Boukhari's
revelations expose, for example, the fact that CIA agents in Morocco -
"Colonel Martin," "Scott" and "Steve" - who were aiding the Moroccan
security service, knew first-hand details about the way the Moroccan
leader was eliminated. "Colonel Martin," related Boukhari, was
authorized to take a daily interest in the activities at Dar-El-Mokri
and also used to help him keep the archive up to date, sort and
catalogue documents and organize the office files. According to
Boukhari, beginning in 1961, an apparatus for dissolving bodies was in
operation; it had been constructed according to the instructions of
"Colonel Martin." The colonel, added Boukhari, spoke both French and
Arabic and knew how the apparatus worked from his days in Iran, where
he had been stationed during the 1950s. The apparatus was ordered from
a factory that produced boilers in Casablanca, and the order was
signed by a hotel-bar called Le Sphinx, located in the Muhammadiya
quarter of northern Casablanca. Le Sphinx had a reputation as the best
brothel in Morocco, and until 1964 it was run by a man called Zurita,
who was defined in Le Monde and Le Journal as a franco-israelien.
According to Boukhari, from 1961 to 1967, "Dozens of bodies of
oppositionists were dissolved in the acid apparatus at Dar-El-Mokri."
Boukhari was not a witness to the abduction of Ben Barka in Paris or
to his murder. Insofar as is known, Ben Barka, who lived part of the
time in Geneva as an exile, fell into a trap that had been laid for
him. On October 29, 1965, he was invited to a meeting, supposedly
concerning the production of a film, at the Brasserie Lipp in the St.
Germain quarter in Paris. There he was abducted and taken to a villa
in the southern part of the city, where he was murdered. The only copy
of a film documenting the dissolving of bodies at Dar-El-Mokri was
personally handed over by Dalimi to King Hassan. Many of those who
took part in the abduction, murder and dissolving of the body -
Moroccans and Frenchmen - were eliminated, among them General Oufkir
and a number of denizens of the French underworld. "Boukhari's
revelations are important, but partial, as many questions about the
Ben Barka affair have remained unresolved," said Simone Bitton this
week. Bitton's documentary film, "Ben Barka: The Moroccan Equation,"
was screened last month in Europe.
State secrets
"Many agents of the French security services, whom Boukhari mentioned,
are living in Morocco and have not told their version of events. The
time has come for us to know, for example, to what extent foreign
security services were involved - French, the American CIA, the
Israeli Mossad and others." Indeed, the governments of France and the
United States have acknowledged that they have in their possession
thousands of reports and documents dealing with the Ben Barka affair,
but they have been declared state secrets for many years to come. A
partial admission by Meir Amit, who headed the Mossad during the
1960s, revealed a tiny bit about the Israeli involvement in the
matter. The Mossad, acknowledged Amit at the time, had connections
with the Moroccan security services and their head, General Oufkir.
Mossad operatives helped them find Ben Barka and lure him to the
meeting in Paris. The matter was first made public in December 1966 in
the now defunct Israeli weekly Bul, for which its editors were
arrested. "Thirty-six years later," says Bitton, "many people remember
the Ben Barka affair, but only a few really know who he was and what
he did. In my film I tried, with help of testimony by members of his
family and his ideological colleagues, to describe the man, his
struggle and his dream." Into the personal history of the Moroccan
leader, an admired and charismatic political and social figure who was
nicknamed "Dynamo," is interwoven, like a scarlet thread, the history
of contemporary Morocco. Bitton, 46, defines herself as "Moroccan,
Israeli, French," in that order. For many years she felt that she did
not know the history of her native country, "which up until a short
time ago, was shrouded in fog. Ben Barka's name," she says, "was
always mentioned only in the shocking context of `the Ben Barka
affair,' since his murderers wanted not only to eliminate the man
himself, but also his history. I tried to rediscover his living
character, which is tragic and illuminating. This is my contribution
to the activity of a new generation of Moroccans who want to
reconstruct the hidden history of their country." Mehdi Ben Barka, who
was murdered when he was 45, was born in the madina, the old city of
Rabat, to a poor family. He excelled in his studies at the French
school and later at college. There he also learned the values of the
French Revolution - freedom and equality - which were not applied by
the French occupier in Morocco. As an adult he became interested in
mathematics and politics. When his sister Zahour expressed jealousy of
other girls who had completed their studies and accused him: "You
encourage other people to study, but you let your sister just stay
home" - Ben Barka went out and enrolled her in school and eventually
told her to teach the other women in the family. At that time, 90
percent of the 11 million inhabitants of Morocco were illiterate.
Years later, when asked to name one of the positive aspects of French
rule, Ben Barka said that the French had helped the Moroccans
understand how much they had contributed to the backwardness of their
country. As an adult, he was brought by the Istiqlal (Freedom) Party
into the taifa - "community" - the code name for the underground that
operated alongside the open party framework and published a newspaper
called Al-Alam (The Banner). His parents' house on Sidi Fatah Street
in Rabat became the home of the illegal party. When the Moroccans
embarked on an open struggle against the French colonial regime after
World War II, Ben Barka was exiled and put under house arrest in the
southern part of the country. He was not with his children as they
grew up, and his family was allowed to visit him only once a year. The
struggle for freedom became more intense. The resistance movements no
longer limited themselves to demonstrations and political struggles,
and employed violence and terror attacks. Sultan Mohammed V, who had
ceased to sign orders dictated to him by the French, was exiled to
Madagascar and a puppet sultan was appointed in his place. After its
burning defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina (May, 1954) and the
uprising in Algeria (November, 1954), France released the political
prisoners in Morocco and invited them for talks. Only after the French
government had brought Mohammed V back to Morocco and the throne did
they accept the invitation. Morocco achieved independence, but
continued to be dependent on France. Eventually it became clear to the
leaders of the national movement that their alliance with the monarchy
had no programmatic basis; it was based on total fealty to the
monarch. After Morocco declared its independence in 1956, Mohammed V
held all the powers of government in the framework of an absolute
monarchy. The alliance with the monarchy, says one of the opposition
movement leaders, Mohammed Bensaid, in the film, turned out to have
been an error into which the Istiqlal Party and Ben Barka, one of its
important leaders, had been lured.
`No angel'
Gradually, strife increased among the three centers of power in the
country: the royal family and its governing mechanisms, the Istiqlal
Party and the opposition movement. In this struggle for positions of
power in the government, the members of the Istiqlal Party were also
involved in reciprocal killings, many of which have not been solved to
this day. In this struggle, says Bitton's film, "Ben Barka was no
angel." Amid the growing struggle within Morocco, the conflicts in the
Istiqlal Party also grew more fierce, pitting conservatives employed
in the government system against those who were demanding reforms. Ben
Barka was among the latter. In 1959, Ben Barka and his colleagues who
had been thrown out of their party founded the Union Nationale Des
Forces Populaires and put out a new newspaper, Al-Tahrir (Liberty).
They fought against corruption and for a constitution, free elections,
agrarian reform and women's liberation. A wave of arrests among
opponents of the absolutist government and the closing down of
Al-Tahrir led Ben Barka to leave Morocco for France. His former
friendship with the heir to the throne, Hassan, was of no help to him.
In the film, one of his comrades in the struggle explained the
regime's hostility toward Ben Barka: "The government's philosophy," he
says, "is that if there is a flower growing in the garden, it must be
cut down before it gives its scent and people enjoy it." In exile, Ben
Barka formed widespread international ties, especially with heads of
movements that were fighting colonialism. Various intelligence
agencies followed his every move. The death of Mohammed V in 1961 and
the ascent of Hassan II to the throne exacerbated the internal
struggle in Morocco. With the pretense of implementing reforms to
engender international recognition and international aid, Hassan II
approved a new constitution that preserved the authority of the king
as the sole ruler "by divine right." Despite the opposition of Ben
Barka and his colleagues to the proposed constitution, it was ratified
by a majority of 85 percent of the voters. After his return from exile
in 1963, Ben Barka succeeded in being elected to parliament as the
representative of the poor neighborhood Yakub Almansour at the
entrance to Rabat, but he was again forced to leave Morocco, said one
of his friends in the film, and thus avoided the new wave of arrests
and torture. During his years in exile, Ben Barka traveled to world
capitals, particularly in the Third World, and met their leaders. He
lived everywhere and in effect nowhere. He made friends with Henri
Curiel, an internationalist communist of Jewish-Egyptian origin who
ran an international network that helped national liberation
undergrounds. Thirteen years after Ben Barka was murdered, Curiel was
also slain. With the founding of the Tricontinental movement that
joined together communist countries, including Vietnam and Cuba, the
Third World countries, including India and Egypt, and national
liberation movements, as in South Africa, Ben Barka was elected to
head it and to organize the first convention in Havana. In January,
1966, the convention was held, but Ben Barka did not participate.
During the course of 1964, admit some of the opponents of Hassan II,
the possibility came up of assassinating the king, but the plan was
not implemented. One of those involved in this plan testifies in the
film that he received an unambiguous instruction not to reveal to Ben
Barka anything about the assassination attempt, as he was not party to
the secret. The king responded with mass arrests and show trials at
which many were sentenced to death, among them Ben Barka, who was
tried in absentia; others were sentenced to life imprisonment. In
March, 1965, violent demonstrations broke out in Morocco and were
forcibly suppressed. About a thousand dead were buried in mass graves.
In June, Hassan II declared an emergency government and his agents
embarked on a campaign to capture Ben Barka. In Bitton's film, when
the brother-in-law of Hassan II, Ahmed Othman, was asked who had
killed Ben Barka, he kept mum. Bitton's film presents an alternative
to the official Moroccan narrative. The film reveals another Morocco,
a land that is not known to many, from the days of French rule to
independence and the absolute rule of Mohammed V and Hassan II. The
major part of the film was shot in Morocco after the death of Hassan
II in July, 1999. Gradually, all too gradually, people's tongues are
loosening up there, hidden files are being opened and taboos are being
broken. "But still," Bitton sums up, "when you drive along the roads
of Morocco you still come upon those same walls behind which they hide
the slums and distress of this country."
Updated
info - from
Wikipedia
Israeli Jew Ronen Bergman, author and senior
correspondent for military and intelligence affairs for
Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, in his book "Rise
And Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted
Assassinations" (2018) wrote: "The Mossad supplied the
Moroccans with safe houses in Paris, vehicles, fake passports,
and two different kinds of poison with which to kill
[Barka], as well as shovels and 'something to disguise the
traces'".
After the Moroccans, "with the help of
corrupt French police officers" tortured and murdered
Barka
in a Mossad safe house, a team of Mossad operatives took care of
the disposal of the body, burying it in the Saint-Germain forest
outside Paris, carefully scattering a chemical powder over the
grave which would dissolve the body. "[A]ccording
to some of the Israelis involved" what was left of Barka's
body was then moved again and buried either under the road
leading to or under the headquarters of the Louis Vuitton
Foundation.
