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French culture and civilization
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Theme: 5 pages on a person or note (artist, writer, poet, politician or military) who came to France and because of that visit had their life, views or art changed.
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Mehdi Ben barka
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Mehdi Ben Barka was a Moroccan politician, head of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces (UNPF) and secretary of the Tricontinental Conference. An opponent of Hassan II, he "disappeared" in Paris in 1965. Despite countless theories attempting to explain what really happened to him, the exact circumstances of his disappearance have never been established, and as of 2009, investigations are on-going.
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To understand who Mehdi Ben Barka was and how France changed his life, we must understand the situation of morocco at this time and his relationship with a king who was subject to controversy.
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Morocco in 1956:
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When France granted independence to its protectorate in 1956, Morocco was a largely feudal kingdom of 12 million inhabitants, with a handful of university graduates, and a well-developed infrastructure of ports, airports, railways, highways, and diverse industries. King Hassan II, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his widely loved father, Mohammed V, in 1961, ruled the country with a firm and arbitrary hand for 38 years. Admired as a statesman, Hassan II's main legacy was in having made Morocco a pro-Western bastion of stability in a volatile area and a leader in Middle East peace efforts, as well as having laid the foundations for a modern constitutional monarchy. At the time of his death on July 23, 1999, there were thousands of Moroccan engineers, doctors, and other professionals, many of whom were women, and a dynamic civil society.
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Historians will point out; however, that Moroccan peace and progress have come at a high cost to human rights. Fearful of the rise of Arab socialism in the 1960s, King Hassan's security forces carried out waves of repression against leftist trade unionists, politicians, and students. But the threat to the monarch actually came from army dissidents, and he miraculously escaped two coup attempts in the 1970s. There followed purges in the armed forces and the creation of a dominant Interior Ministry with a powerful security apparatus. As Commander of the Faithful, Hassan II encouraged Islamic associations in the early 1970s as a counterweight to the left. The king succeeded in forging national unity with his "Green March" of 300,000 citizens, followed by troops, to dramatize Morocco's claims to the Sahara in 1975. Soon there was new unrest as people chafed at widespread corruption, abuses by security forces, unemployment, and the growing gap between rich and poor. Pressured by the rise of the Islamists in the early 1990s, the king cautiously began to liberalize his regime but could not relinquish his absolute power.
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Ben Barka’s Background:
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Ben Barka was born in Rabat, Morocco to a civil servant, and became the first Moroccan Muslim to get a degree in mathematics in an official French school in 1950. He was the private mathematics teacher of the king Hassan II. He became a prominent member of the Moroccan opposition in the nationalist stiqlal party, but broke off after clashes with conservative opponents in 1959 to found the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP).
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In 1962, Ben Barka was accused of plotting against King Hassan II. He was exiled from Morocco in 1963, after calling upon Moroccan soldiers to refuse to fight Algeria in the 1963 Sand War.
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The exile and global political significance
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Ben Barka was exiled in 1963, becoming a "travelling salesman of the revolution". He left initially for Algiers, where he met Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral and Malcolm X. From there, he went to Cairo, Rome, Geneva, Havana and Paris to finally spend the rest of his life in France, trying to unite the revolutionary movements of the Third World for the Tricontinental Conference held in January 1966 in Havana, where he affirmed in a press conference, "the two currents of the world revolution will be represented there: the current emerged with the October Revolution and that of the national liberation revolution".
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As the leader of the Tricontinental Conference, Ben Barka was a major figure in the Third World movement and supported revolutionary anti-colonial action in various states, provoking the anger of the United States and France.
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Just before his death, he was preparing the first meeting of the Tricontinental, scheduled to take place in Havana, Cuba - the OSPAAAL (Spanish for "Organization for Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America") was founded on this occasion.
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Chairing the preparatory commission, he defined the objectives; assistance with the movements of liberation, support for Cuba subjected to the United States embargo, the liquidation of the foreign military bases and apartheid in South Africa. The underlying reason for the removal and assassination of Ben Barka is to be found in this revolutionary impetus of Tricontinentale.
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He was a revolutionary theoretician as significant as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara", who’s "influence reverberated far beyond their own continent. His writings have been collected and translated in French by his son Bachir Ben Barka and published in 1999 under the title Écrits politiques.
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Theories on the disappearance of Ben Barka:
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At this point of his life he wasn’t in danger, he was exiled by the Moroccan government who tried to negotiate his comeback but ben barka stayed on his positions. They approached him using the reason that the king has accepted all his terms and that he wanted him to meet him in morocco
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On the gray afternoon of Oct. 29, 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka—a self-exiled left-wing Moroccan politician and a well-known critic of King Hassan II —was stopped outside the Brasserie Lipp on Paris's Boulevard St. Germain by two French agents. "You have a rendezvous with some politicians," said one of them. Ben Barka, 45, who was accustomed to being tailed by the police, climbed into the back of an unmarked Peugeot 403. The car drove off. Ben Barka has not been seen in public since.
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The disappearance of Ben Barka grew into a scandal that rocked France
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French trial
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In the 1960s Ben Barka's disappearance was enough of a "scandale public" that President De Gaulle formally declared his government had not been responsible. After trial in 1967, two French officers were sent to prison for their role in the kidnapping. However, the judge ruled that the main guilty party was Moroccan interior minister Mohamed Oufkir. Georges Figon, a witness with a criminal background who had testified earlier that Oufkir stabbed Ben Barka to death, was later found dead, officially a suicide. Prefect of Police Maurice Papon (1910–2007), later convicted for crimes against humanity for his role under Vichy, was forced to resign following Ben Barka's kidnapping.
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Ahmed Boukhari
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A former member of the Moroccan secret service, Ahmed Boukhari claimed in 2001 that Ben Barka had died during interrogation in a villa south of Paris. He said Ben Barka's body was then taken back to Morocco and destroyed in a vat of acid. Furthermore, he declared that this vat of acid, whose plans were reproduced by the newspapers, had been constructed under instructions from the CIA agent "Colonel Martin", who had learnt this technique to make corpses disappear during his appointment in the Shah's Iran in the 1950s. Henceforth, a pattern of "disappearances", starting from Iran, passing by Morocco in the 1960-70s, and continuing on into South America's dirty wars during the 1970s-80s was discovered. (See link below
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Ali Bourequat
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Moroccan-French dissident and former Tazmamart prisoner of conscience Ali Bourequat claims in his book, In the Moroccan King's Secret Garden, to have met a former Moroccan secret agent in a prison near Rabat in 1973-74. The man, Dubail, recounted how he and some colleagues, led by Colonel Oufkir and Ahmed Dlimi, had murdered Ben Barka in Paris.
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The body was then encapsulated in cement and buried outside Paris, but his head brought by Oufkir to Morocco in a suitcase. Thereafter, it was buried on the very same prison grounds where Dubail and Bourequat were held.
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CIA documents
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In 1976, the United States government, due to requests made through the Freedom of Information Act, acknowledged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was in possession of some 1,800 documents involving Ben Barka, but the documents were not released.
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French documents
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Some secret French documents on the affair were made public in 2001, causing political uproar. Defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie had agreed in 2004 to follow the recommendations of a national defence committee and release the 73 additional classified documents on the case. However, the son of Mehdi Ben Barka was outraged at what he called a "pseudo-release of files", insisting that information had been withheld which could have implicated the French secret services (SDECE), and possibly the CIA and the Mossad, as well as the ultimate responsibility of King Hassan II, who conveniently was able to put the blame on Oufkir after his failed coup in 1972.[6]
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Driss Basri
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Driss Basri, Interior Minister of Hassan II and his right-hand man from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, was heard by the judge Patrick Ramaël in May 2006, as a witness, concerning Ben Barka's kidnapping. Basri declared to the magistrate that he had not been linked to the Ben Barka Affair. He added that "it is possible that the King knew. It is legitimate to think that de Gaulle possessed some information..."
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King Hassan II, the probable abduction sponsor will never be questioned, it is the General Mohammed Oufkir who will be convicted in absentia by French courts in 1967.
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It is unclear how far the French government was involved in the assassination of Moroccan opposition.
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For de Gaulle, when asked by reporters in 1966, the French involvement would be limited to junior level.
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Four decades later, the case is still not classified. A commission has been launched in May 2005 at the request of the family Ben Barka, they will never have any answer.
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