The Political Left

The political left has been the most frequent target of repression in Morocco, although only the particulars of its relationship with the Palace explain what otherwise seem arbitrary and inconsistent reprisals directed its way. In a nutshell, the moderate socialist left, represented by the USFP, maintains a difficult relationship with the Palace, whereas more radical parties of the left are tolerated in their more outspoken criticism of political practices. The Party of Progress and Socialism (PPS), a permutation of the dismantled Moroccan Communist Party, was sanctioned in 1974, and in 1983 the rival Organization of Democratic and Popular Action (OADP), a spur of the outlawed March 23 Movement,^[45] also joined the ranks of the recognized left. Once forced to operate clandestinely, both of these smaller groups were ultimately able to claim a seat or two in parliament. By contrast, unsanctioned groupings with policy interests similar to those of the OADP and the PPS continue to suffer harsh repression. Only a combination of size, influence, and political opportunism explains the variation in their experience over time. Forerunners of the PPS such as the Moroccan Communist Party and the Liberation and Socialism Party (PLS), for example, were banned through the 1960s, and Ali Yata, their leader, was imprisoned. Only when the USFP emerged in 1974 was the new—and potentially rival—PPS allowed to form, and with communism appearing an ever decreasing threat, Yata's small party has since enjoyed considerable political freedom.^[46] A manifestly militant position on the Sahara has made its followers, like those of the OADP the "king's leftists."^[47]

Even those who enjoy the mantle of legitimacy must not take political liberties for granted. The history of the UNFP and its successor the USFP, as well as the stories of groups obliged to operate clandestinely, is replete

with cheap successes, serious defeats, and sobering lessons. Even a partial history illustrates the arbitrary nature of access to the political arena.

Almost from the outset, relations between the monarch and the political left were difficult. In late 1959, Mohammed V unsuccessfully attempted to control the UNFP by according it the prime ministry,^[48] and the UNFP's popularity at the polls in June 1963 won it only the monarch's wrath. Before the first parliament was even seated, more than 100 UNFP leaders—including 21 of the 28 newly elected UNFP representatives—were arrested on the pretext that they had plotted against the king. The accusations were not substantiated at the trial, which was quite obviously about political power and its exercise. Only after eleven death sentences were handed down and some time served did the king "retouch his own image of the magnanimous father of the country by pardoning his errant subjects."^[49] The death sentences were eventually commuted, and an amnesty in 1965 put an early end to most of the other sentences.

The drama was reenacted several times over the next decade, with some variations. By 1972, Fqih Basri, a charter member of the UNFP, had been sentenced to death no fewer than four times.^[50] A dozen political trials involving the UNFP or the left-wing National Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM) and the National Syndicate of Secondary Students (SNL) took place from 1963 to 1976.^[51] Even as one wave of repression ended with measures of clemency, another opened. Coincidental with the 1965 amnesty was the disappearance of one of the UNFP's most outspoken and most popular leaders. Medhi Ben Barka was abducted while in France. A French court tried General Oufkir in absentia and found him guilty of complicity in Ben Barka's presumed murder.

The Palace in this period occasionally held out carrots but continued to wield the stick. In 1971, for example, Hassan II reportedly summoned the UNFP leader Abderrahim Bouabid to the palace at Fez, but Bouabid declined: the king's prosecutor in Marrakesh was asking for forty-eight death sentences and he was needed to defend his UNFP colleagues.^[52] Efforts at rapprochement were renewed following the 1972 coup attempt, but neither the UNFP nor the Istiqlal Party was willing to participate without guarantees of civil liberties. Soon thereafter, hundreds of UNFP members and supporters were arrested on charges of a plot against the king. Their 1973 trial at Kenitra marked the nadir of UNFP relations with the Palace: the seventy-two defendants acquitted by the court—including thirteen Rabat barristers—were kept in custody for three more years.^[53]

Greater tolerance was extended to the left from 1976 to 1981, but it came at the expense of political independence. Spanish retreat from the

Western Sahara in 1976 created an unexpected basis of national unity, and the king's new mastery of the political moment made him more disposed to reconciliation. In the interim, Bouabid's faction within the UNFP had evolved into the USFP and had largely supplanted its forebear. The new party's leadership were early advocates of incorporating the Western Saharan territories, and their enthusiasm for the issue offered a politically valuable tool to the king. The enfants terribles were transformed into emissaries and dispatched on diplomatic missions to promote the cause.^[54] National fervor, now in the service of unity—and the monarchy—softened the Palace's view of the USFP, and demands for elections and political amnesty that had previously been rejected were now heard in the Palace. By the end of 1976, most of those sentenced from 1971 to 1976 had been pardoned.

The reprieve, however, was short-lived. The compromised electoral contest of 1977 almost surely underestimated the USFP's popularity, and within the party a vocal minority actively pushed a progressive social program. When riots erupted in Casablanca in 1981 over the precipitous announcement of price hikes for basic commodities, hundreds of USFP members with no apparent connection to the unrest were arrested. The party's leadership subsequently faced capital charges for a memo criticizing the king's Western Sahara policy as too conciliatory.^[55] Eventually, a new compromise was worked out with authorities. Rank-and-file members of the USFP's radical wing shuffled in and out of prison throughout the 1980s, but legislative elections in 1984 strengthened the USFP mainstream. As a party, the USFP "found a niche where it could survive near the edges of political consensus."^[56] A decade later, after their disappointment with the 1993 legislative elections, the Kutla parties have resolved to use the consultative mechanisms of parliament as a means to press their agenda and institute a process of seeking government accountability, a strategy that seems safer, and likely to be more efficacious, than direct confrontation.^[57]

Greater tolerance of the USFP did not necessarily extend to radical leftists who contested the rules of the political game more frontally. Out of the student unrest of the mid 1960s, a political coalition known as the Progressive Front had been assembled. Its several splinter groups included most notably the 23 March Movement and Il'l-Amam, whose leader Abraham Serfaty eventually achieved notoriety as a political prisoner. The Frontistes dared leave the demarcated terra firma. Their Marxist-Leninist rhetoric implicitly called the monarchy into question, and the liberationist position many adopted vis-à-vis the Western Sahara isolated them further. Beginning in 1972, successive waves of arrests, followed by incommuni-

cado, secret detention and a mass trial in 1977 resulted finally in lengthy prison sentences for 173 individuals, including 3 women.

As time passed, Il'l-Amam was identified as the extremist group par excellence, whereas 23 Mars was eventually accorded a significant measure of legitimacy. In 1984 and 1985, seventy-two individuals, most of them members of UNEM or the SNL, were charged with threatening state security in conjunction with efforts to revive the defunct Il'l-Amam and were given long prison sentences. By contrast to the threat presumed to reside in Il'l-Amam, the remnants of the clandestine 23 March Movement were allowed to reconstitute it as the OADP and run in legislative elections. Its formal recognition followed by only five months a published article clearly stating the group's position in favor of Moroccan territorial integrity. The political crimes of secretary-general Mohammed Bensaïd, twice condemned to death in absentia, are long forgotten, and the OADP's widely sung motto, "Law, Constitution, and Respect for Procedure" raises no untoward eyebrows.^[58]