Moroccan human rights activists are claiming that the truth commission (Equity and Reconciliation Commission) investigating four decades of violations had seriously underestimated the number of victims when it said hundreds had died in arbitrary detention and government shootings.
It‘s a deception," said Khaled Bakhti, 41, a former prisoner. "They failed to establish the fate of the missing and to call for the punishment of the guilty who continue to hold senior posts." "In the 1965 Casablanca riots alone, 1,500 people were killed. We estimate as many as 3,000 were killed in riots throughout the country," said Abdullah Abdeslam of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights.
Government brutality was directed against an array of opponents, including leftists and Islamic activists. Prisoners were forced to sign confessions before being convicted in rigged trials. It urged the state to apologize to victims and their families, to deepen reforms and to end impunity for security officials. The commission had no mandate to punish perpetrators or even to name them.
Set up in January 2004, made up of former political prisoners and human rights activists and headed by a former Marxist and political prisoner, the 17-member truth commission heard from 16,861 people. It has recommended compensation for 9,280 victims of various human rights abuses. Some 1,499 victims received compensation between 1999 and 2003. Critics claim the period covered by the commission ought to have extended to the present. They say abuses persist, pointing to the anti-terrorism law under which an estimated 2,000 people were arrested in the aftermath of the May 16, 2003, suicide bombings in Casablanca that killed 33 bystanders.
Meanwhile, the United Nations is "interested in the Moroccan experience" embodied by the work of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER) in breaking the taboo of the past human rights breaches in Morocco. The statement was made by the commission's chairman, Driss Benzekri, who said, in an interview with the Moroccan French-speaking daily "La Vérité" that IER has scheduled a number of meetings in different research institutes in Europe and America in order to bring the commission's expertise into general use.
Benzekri, who deplored the lack of archives to document the violations of human rights that took place between 1956 and 1999, noted that the commission's efforts backed by the research work made by a number of universities have allowed for "establishing large archives for future research."
He deemed that the commission’s report, which was submitted to king Mohammed VI on December 16, will serve as a springboard for future research, and help opening debates that break the taboos which used to shroud this part of the Moroccan history.
“It is, in fact, a two-fold process: establishing the truth on the facts and the contexts (of human rights breaches), and launching a contradictory debate and opening up on dialog,” he said.
The chairman stressed that IER goal was to “create a debate space for a plural, sometime controversial reading that can help stirring up, today, common values, values allowing co-existence.”
The report has shed light on the fate of some 742 victims of human right breaches, while 66 proven cases of forces disappearance still need to be probed.
The commission, set up in January 2004 to seek out-of-court settlement of the human rights violation perpetrated in what has been know in Morocco as les années de plomb (years of lead), recommended in its final report the ruling out of impunity through judicial reforms and the consolidation of laws against such violations.
Tags: Morocco, Fès, Maghreb, news
No comments:
Post a Comment