Tazmamart: 18 Years in Morocco's Secret Prison

By Aziz BineBine

A memoir from a political prisoner in Morocco's notorious Tazmamart prison.

On July 10, 1971, during birthday celebrations for King Hassan II of Morocco, attendant officers and cadets opened fire on visiting dignitaries. A young officer, Aziz BineBine, arrived late and witnessed the ensuing massacre without firing a single shot, yet he would spend the next two decades in a political prison hidden in the Atlas Mountains—Tazmamart. Conditions in this now-infamous prison were nightmarish. The dark, underground cells, too small for standing up in, exposed prisoners to extreme weather, overflowing sewage, and disease-ridden rats. Forgetting life outside his cell—his past, his family, his friends—and clinging to God, BineBine resolved to survive. Tazmamart: 18 Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison is a memorial to BineBine and his fellow inmates’ sacrifice. This searing tale of endurance offers an unfiltered depiction of the agonizing life of a political prisoner.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Jan 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781912208890

Book preview

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Idreamed of being a journalist or a filmmaker; I became a soldier. The son and grandson of court officials, I became a revolutionary despite myself. I was a playboy; I became a convict. But as the saying goes, man proposes and God disposes.

My mother was the daughter of an Algerian captain in the French army. He had arrived in Morocco between 1912 and 1915 with the protectorate army that had come to pacify the country, and he was appointed liaison officer working with indigenous peoples – a role that cost him his life. He was poisoned by high-ranking Moroccans afraid that this soldier – French, Arab and a Muslim, just like them – might take their place. He died serving France: a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, he was awarded the Military Medal, the Croix de Guerre, the Medal of Merit and so on. My mother was eight years old and became a ward of the state; at eighteen, she married my father. A musician’s son, he was living at the court of El Glaoui,* the famous pasha of Mar-rakech, and was his most loyal companion.

My father was an ulema, one of those learned keepers of faith and religious expertise in an Islamic country where religion and reasoning have always been intertwined and are still great sources of power and wealth, especially when developed under the protective, expansive wing of the ‘Prince’.

My father maintained this status quo.

His learning and extensive cultural knowledge had singled him out early to serve the country’s greatest men: first El Glaoui and then King Hassan II, to whom he became very close. Having no official duty other than keeping the sovereign company, he would see him day and night, in privileged, intimate moments when the king was at his most relaxed and receptive. Owing to his phenomenal memory and his eloquence, my father had studied literature and Islamic law at the same time. He could quote the finer points of civil or Islamic law, had learned the manuals of Arabic grammar and rhetoric by heart and, as well as Arabic, had perfect command of Berber and French. To cap it all, he had set about memorising all Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic era onwards. As a young man, he’d been friends with one of the greatest Moroccan poets, Ben Brahim, the ‘poet of the Red’, who owed this honorific to the colour of his native city, Marrakech. But Ben Brahim could only compose his most beautiful poetry when he was blind drunk. Unfortunately, the morning after, all or part of his creation had evaporated with the fumes of alcohol. To remedy this, he would ask my father along – who didn’t join in the carousing – and the following morning Ben Brahim would come to buy his own poems from him. Having heard them just once, my father had memorised them. When he met my mother, it was love at first sight; he married her, carefully refraining from admitting to the modern young woman that he already had a first wife.

Until the age of sixteen, I was French through my mother. When Algeria gained its independence in 1962, she opted for Moroccan nationality, which was a prerequisite for her application to be a tax inspector. I took my father’s nationality as a matter of course; he was Moroccan born and bred, equally at home in Berber and in Arab culture, since his heritage fused the two. When, after taking my baccalaureate, the moment came to choose a career, the easiest solution was to sit the exam for the Royal Military Academy. Since I was part of the very first intake of baccalaureate-holders to this prestigious institution, I became an officer, to my mother’s great pride. A pride that would be short-lived, so fate had decreed: a trivial incident, an act of student bravado that in the first instance placed us at the mercy of Colonel Ababou, would alter our lives dramatically, making us protagonists in the darkest act of our country’s recent history.

In 1970, at the end of our final year at the academy, we were entitled to some leave, as had been the custom for generations, but for no good reason the director decided to cancel it, sending us instead on an utterly pointless course in mechanics. We considered this a gross injustice and promptly abandoned the course. When we returned the following term, instead of being posted to different army corps – which was what usually happened – our year and the one above were assigned to Colonel Ababou, a man with a reputation for brutality, as a disciplinary measure. We were seconded to Ahermoumou as instructing officers.

Ahermoumou is a small village in the Middle Atlas, huddled at the foot of Jebel Bou Iblan. Winters there are harsh and snowy and the summers extremely hot. The military school was just outside the village on a plateau overlooking an immense sheer cliff, constantly pummelled by the wind. It housed around two thousand cadets as well as the staff and their families. This community sustained the village and was expertly run by Colonel Ababou, assisted by loyal NCOs tasked with managing the barracks. The officers – in this case, us – took care of the teaching.

In Ahermoumou, discipline was ironfisted – for the cadets as well as for staff, whether they were officers or not. No favouritism was shown, even to those soldiers closest to the colonel. In fact, they were the most fearful of all, since they were in the front line and had more to lose. Not all his men were on a level, however; besides the administrators, a group of henchmen were assigned the dirty work. They were a real mafia, devoted body and soul to their master and led by the infamous warrant officer first-class Akka, who was Ababou’s eyes, ears and right hand.

Discipline might have been severe, but the advantages were enormous, and we knew it; when they felt the need, our superiors were only too ready to remind us. Most of us had escaped a nasty punishment, we were put up rent-free in beautiful villas, ate for nothing in the mess and had all the military kit we needed, none of it itemised and with no obligation to return or reimburse it should it be damaged or lost.

Time passed in Ahermoumou as we began to learn about life, about power and responsibility, both in Morocco and within the army. Schoolbooks had taught me that a military career was about ‘glory and servitude’, when in fact it was glory for the few and servitude for everyone else – if that can be called glory.

We were getting used to authority and discipline. Not everything was black and white; we had to learn the importance of nuance, there being so much of it in our country. Above all, we needed to learn hypocrisy, which was as vital to someone making a career in the army administration as swimming is to a sailor. In this, we had a great master, the grand champion of illusionists and tricksters: Ababou. He’d built a legend around himself in the Royal Armed Forces, according to which he was a kind of Joha* or Ali Baba – a brave-hearted thief at the head of a dedicated commando unit, whose mission it was to scour Fez and the surrounding countryside and seize equipment from communities, businesses or private individuals. Anything that might be lying around and could prove useful for the garrison, or for reinforcing infrastructure on the colonel’s farms, was fair game. I wouldn’t be surprised if heads of cattle came into it, too. Their audacity was boundless. Unscrupulous men were highly valued at the time; lack of conscience was seen as courage, highway robberies were feats of arms. They were admired, feared and often idolised rather than hated. Attracted to power like flies to honey, these lords grovelled lower than anyone else, the better to bite when the moment came. They knew each other, socialised together and kept a close watch on one another, attempting all the while to conceal their teeth and claws.

The colonel was a short, rather chubby man whose pudgy face drew attention to his cold, hard stare. He ruled by force, stopping at nothing, and woe betide anyone who stood in his way, because Ababou never forgot a grudge. No doubt it was this resentment that drove him to the insanity of the putsch, which would mean ruin for him and for us. He was furious with the entire world for his having been born small and poor – which was only partly true since the Ababous were an eminent family that had once counted a vizir among them. During the protectorate, the colonel’s father was himself a sheik* under the command of Caid Medbouh. Medbouh’s son – the famous General Medbouh – would be our man’s chief supporter and, more importantly, the mastermind behind his attempted coup. Excel though he might, Ababou would remain Medbouh’s subordinate. Every time he stood before the general, decades of stifled resentment stirred within him. His fateful enterprise proved how desperately he dreamed of one day having not just the Medbouhs but many others under his command – and why not be rid of the king himself…? One day, he would be lord and master… And he was certainly up to the job. One of the best in his year at the Royal Military Academy, and the very best at the officers’ training school, he had succeeded brilliantly in his exams at the École de Guerre in France. This earned him the honour of directing the armed forces’ general manoeuvres in Marrakech in 1968, in the presence of King Hassan II himself. During these combat drills, which involved the entire army, each unit had to act according to very precise, predetermined orders so as to support or fight other units, depending on whether they were acting as allies or enemies. Live ammunition or blanks might be used in these exercises: a formidable trap. Ababou represented the new generation of officers to emerge from that very young Moroccan army, of which he was such a talented member. As the outstanding laureate of the École de Guerre, he was the first officer of that generation to direct manoeuvres on a national scale and perhaps, one day, he would be commander-in-chief of the army. The tiniest blunder could bring his career crashing down. The test was more than conclusive: he received the compliments of the king and the entire military command. That day a new leader was born and with him, perhaps, a lust for power that would jolt the Moroccan political and social system from its