The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

Vol. 15 No.9 (September 2005), pp.885-889

THE PERFORMANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN MOROCCO, by Susan Slyomovics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 288pp. Cloth. $55.00 / £36.00. ISBN: 0-8122-3858-3. Paper. $24.95 / £16.50. ISBN: 0-8122-1904-X.

Reviewed by Mark Welton, Department of Law, United States Military Academy. Email: Mark.Welton [at] usma.edu.

The protection of human rights in the modern world is increasingly promoted as an international effort, relying on universal norms derived from sources such as regional and international human rights declarations and conventions. Violations of human rights in the many forms that occur within individual nation-states, from physical torture of prisoners to psychological assaults on the families and friends of those who have disappeared, are assessed as much against these international standards as against domestic laws. This approach can indeed be beneficial, as it may raise the standards of behavior and accountability to which all governments and officials should be held in the treatment of their citizens.

What can be lost in this “macro” approach, however, is an appreciation that the individual and collective experiences of torture and other human rights violations can vary considerably among the nation-states in which these events occur, each with their own cultural, religious, legal and political histories. If human rights abuses are to be publicly recognized and officially acknowledged as a prerequisite to ending such practices, these experiences must be exposed to the public sphere through the types of “performances” that can best be understand in the context of those specific histories. Susan Slyomovics makes this clear in her engaging and enlightening description of efforts by prisoners and other victims to open to the public square the story of human rights abuses in post-colonial Morocco.

Best read as a series of stories and vignettes, the book depicts the variety of forms in which the victim/storyteller seeks to translate and communicate the intensely personal experiences of torture and abuse. For example, in the second chapter entitled “Disappearance,” various forms of expression are used by victims, their families and friends, as well as the perpetrators, to give meaning to the word itself and to the experience of being disappeared. Poetry, interviews, and books are utilized to overcome the difficulty in uncovering layers of thought and emotion. The increasing number of publications of these stories has led to reluctant official acknowledgement of previously hidden history and events, though such acknowledgement is often followed by offers of indemnification and other measures that seek to constrain further revelations by silencing victims’ voices.

Similarly, the pilgrimage of victims and families to prisons such as Tazmamart, one of the most notorious secret detention centers, can be an effective public performance. The author relates how, upon arrival of the pilgrims at the site, a lone guard swears that no one [*886] remains in the prison, but the physical barriers to the pilgrims’ entry belies the truth of that statement. Through such actions the officially denied history of human rights abuses can be uncovered.

THE PERFORMANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN MOROCCO is at its best when the letters and poems of those who experienced imprisonment and torture are revealed. The selections in the third chapter, “Prison,” effectively convey the determination of the political prisoners to make known the facts and truth, necessary before the “page can be turned” on this era. Particularly poignant are the excerpts from Salah El Ouadie’s novel, THE BRIDEGROOM, expressing the intensity of the personal experience of torture that is often lacking in more “objective” accounts and statistics. Writing as therapy is well-illustrated in the excerpts from a book by Maria Charaf, widow of Amine Tahini who died of torture at the infamous Derb Moulay Cherif prison, where she herself was also imprisoned. The oral tradition of Arabic poetry is especially appropriate within the context of Moroccan culture for such expression, and Slyomovics provides excellent examples. She reveals how poetry, which remains in the cultural memory, can be an effective counterpoint to the official records of the police, judicial, and prison systems, which through editing or outright falsification often subvert the truth.

The details of the Moroccan government’s arbitrary and violent actions against dissident groups provide a useful context for the theme of public performance. In the chapter on Islamist political prisoners, she relates how during the 1980s Islamists who opposed the government and its policies had divided themselves into two groups: those working within the system and those operating clandestinely. Yet little distinction was made by the government in its response to their activities, and both groups were subject to the same summary policies. Moreover, the prison populations of “Group 71” and “Group 26” were augmented by the arrests of family members and others who knew of but were not part of the groups. Those subject to abuse thus came from a variety of backgrounds. Here artwork, clandestine prison photographs, trial records, and letters form the basis for the chronicles of their experiences. Like the Marxist prisoners, the Islamists formed organizations and committees in prison, despite the primitive conditions, in which these performances could be designed and shared. Hunger strikes, such as those that took place at Safi Prison, constituted another form of performance that was used to project the message of deprivation and abuse.

The importance of language and words, both as tools of torture as well as the response to it, is made evident throughout the book. The chapter entitled “Rānī nimḥik: Women and Testimony” reveals how words are used to try to extinguish the psychological sense of the individual, especially that of women. Encapsulated in the oft-used phrase “I will erase you,” political prisoners were given new and different names, and women were given male names to further suppress their identities. Women often fought back with new forms of language; the story of Fatna El Bouih relates the interesting act of communicating in prison by placing fingers on bodies in place of forbidden verbal speech. The model of [*887] Scheherazade expands from the feminine viewpoint to a broader one representing the powerless, imprisoned, and disappeared, and women increasingly assumed responsibility for exposing the fates of their imprisoned male relatives, beginning with the 1977 sit-in at the al-Sunnah mosque in Rabat.

The legibility theme reappears throughout the text. To the oft-cited metaphor of “turning the page” on this period is added the importance of the family passbook as tangible evidence of individual and family existence. Confiscation of the passbook means the person no longer exists; removal of a birth record means a family member did not exist.

The descriptions of the construction and uses of the various “spaces” of Casablanca, created by the French to control public activity and later turned into centers of public resistance, first to the French colonizers and then the Moroccan government, are vivid. The 1981 Casablanca uprising began as a collective demand for economic justice, in particular inadequate housing and employment opportunities, that took place in the city’s public squares. Despite the harsh reaction of the authorities, with widespread arrests, the public expression of opposition was carried forward into other venues. What took place in the courtrooms during the trials of the demonstrators would be familiar to an American critical legal scholar: the opening of the courtroom by defendants and their lawyers as public space in nontraditional (and officially improper) forms, such as mock trials, demonstrations by spectators, speeches to the media, and refusal to acknowledge the judicial authority of the judges. Legal testimony became opportunities for personal performances.

Interspersed throughout these stories is an outline of the historical and political context of the Moroccan government’s efforts to suppress political dissent through intimidation, detention, and various forms of torture. This context is a colonial past in which French methods of control over the population, such as the garde à vue procedure that allowed police and other authorities wide latitude in the grounds, lengths, and conditions of pretrial detentions of suspects, were adopted and continued by the regime following independence in 1956. That the post-colonial regimes of Muhammed V and Hassan II were authoritarian, using torture and other forms of abuse to suppress dissent and opposition, and have been forced into reluctant and incomplete admission of this history through the types of performances described here, is made abundantly clear.

The book’s first chapter, an introduction to the Moroccan legal system (“Law and Custom”), outlines the development of the country’s laws and procedures, and discusses the Indemnity Commission as the instrument of the government’s efforts to redress the history of abuses. As noted earlier, it is important to understand the story of human rights within the particular cultural, religious, legal and political context of a particular society, and an opening chapter that establishes the contours of context is appropriate. The discussion encompasses a wide range of human rights law: decisions of American federal courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act (the FILARTIGA case), decisions of regional human rights [*888] tribunals (the VELÁSQUEZ RODRÍQUEZ case), Islamic (Shari’a) law and Berber customary law, the Nürnberg war crimes trials, the Anglo-American cause of action in tort and writ of habeas corpus, French colonial legal procedures and post-colonial Moroccan criminal procedure. Because so much is covered here, the relationship between and significance of these various sources of law in post-colonial Morocco is sometimes unclear. For example, the definition of a tort as “a wrong inflicted regardless of intention” (p.31) is incomplete, and its relevance to Moroccan law is uncertain; in fact many torts require proof of intent, including most that arise from human rights cases (such as FILARTIGA) brought under the (specifically American) Alien Tort Claims Act – itself an act that provides American courts with jurisdiction, not with a standard or norm of substantive international law, which must be derived from other sources. The brief introduction to post-independence Moroccan law and legal procedure, as a combination of French civil law and Islamic personal status law, begins on page 23, well after discussion of particular procedural aspects of that system, such as garde à vue and the writ of habeas corpus – the latter of which is a specifically Anglo-American procedure. It might better be placed at the beginning of the chapter. The role and significance of Islamic law is also unclear; Slyomovics correctly notes on the one hand that Islamic law during the twentieth century was relegated primarily to personal status law under the authority of Islamic courts (p.23), and elsewhere states that it (along with Berber customary law) was shunted aside and replaced. However, Islamic law in the pre-colonial and colonial Morocco context, consisting both of the Shari’a and Berber customary law, is then later revisited within the discussion of remedies for more recent human rights violations; have Islamic law and courts in fact made recent inroads into new areas of substantive and procedural law? The reader is left with interesting insights into some of the legal issues at stake, but with an impression that all law – international, American, French, Islamic, customary, and regional practice – is relevant to the protection of human rights in the Moroccan legal system. Limiting the discussion to the specific criminal procedures applied in Morocco during and after the French colonial period, along with relevant forms of redresss, such as Moroccan courts and indemnity commissions, could perhaps more effectively establish the relevant legal context without attempting to explore the entire range of domestic, foreign, and international human rights law that might potentially apply.

Nevertheless, this is a small problem of context in an otherwise extremely effective portrayal of the author’s main theme. Governments in the Islamic world have, since the rise of the Ummayad dynasty, often been authoritarian, corrupt, and brutal, but they were restrained by the force of Islamic law and the religious/legal scholars who developed and interpreted it, and who mediated between the people and the government. Morocco’s unique heritage of tribal customs, Islam, French colonial domination, and post-colonial membership in the world of modern nation-states makes it a fascinating study of the process of coming to terms with a recent history of government-sponsored human rights abuses, so that (to cite from the title of the final chapter) [*889] “Never This Again.” Professor Slyomovics’ insights into the performance of human rights in that country both provide outsiders with an important understanding of the process, and itself may even contribute to it.

CASE REFERENCES:

FILARTIGA v. PENA-IRALA, 630 F.2d 876 (2^nd Cir. 1980).

VELÁSQUEZ RODRÍQUEZ CASE (Honduras), 4 Inter-Amer. Ct.H.R. (ser.C) (1988).

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