US ‘needs to find a scapegoat’: Mother dwells on Moussaoui’s childhood
By Angelique Chrisafis
LONDON: Only in the quiet moments, when she is sitting alone in her surburban house in south-eastern France with its sea view and framed pictures of her children on the wall, does Aïcha El-Wafi wonder if she did anything wrong bringing up her son, Zacarias.
El-Wafi says she isn’t to blame for the fact that at 14 she was forced into an arranged marriage in Morocco with an alcoholic older man, who moved her to France, and beat and starved her and their children. She had no choice but to put the children in a French orphanage when she left her husband, illiterate and penniless, aged 24. “But I went back to fetch them a year later when I’d found a job,” she says. And yet, though she says she did her best for her children, her ‘sweet affectionate child’ Zacarias Moussaoui would grow up to become the Al Qaeda ‘hanger-on’ who is currently awaiting a death penalty or life sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring with the 19 men who carried out the September 11 suicide attacks on New York and Washington. El-Wafi blames her son’s transformation on the lack of a father figure, the racism the young Zacarias encountered growing up in France, and later his encounter in London with extremist Muslim preachers.
Moussaoui, 37, a French citizen, is the only person to be charged in the US in connection with 9/11. But El-Wafi believes that although he is an extremist, he was not involved in September 11 and is the victim of a show trial by the US government which, she says, ‘needs to find a scapegoat’.
“There is no justice for Zacarias,” she says. “This case is just a piece of theatre, a spectacle that the US has to perform for its audience. It’s a masquerade and I am helpless to do anything. Jacques Chirac doesn’t care because my son is an Arab so means nothing. If my son was called Jean-Pierre or Jean-Paul, France would have stood up and done something for him.”
El-Wafi, 59, went to the US to meet and sympathise with parents and relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks, which she utterly condemns. “The relatives are very, very good people,” she says. She appeared for the television cameras outside the Virginia courthouse waving a photo of her son in a Hawaiian shirt to prove that he was once just a ‘normal man’. She went to London to meet the preacher Abu Hamza and to find out how he ‘turned’ her son. She publicly denounced her elder son, Adb Samad, when he wrote a bestselling family memoir in which he accused her of being cruel to her children and incapable of human kindness.
But this week, as Zacarias Moussaoui’s court-appointed defence team argued that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, picking apart his dysfunctional, deprived childhood and showing videos of his two schizophrenic sisters, El-Wafi has taken to her bed. In Narbonne, the southern French town where she lives, she hasn’t changed out of her nightclothes for days. Doctors have diagnosed bronchitis, and the anti-biotics aren’t working because of the stress caused by journalists asking questions, she says in a series of long phone conversations after she withdraws an invitation to visit on the grounds that she cannot host me in her pyjamas. She is deciding whether to drag herself back to the US for the sentencing: the jury is expected to retire to consider Moussaoui’s fate on Monday.
Moussaoui, who was born in France, was arrested by the FBI in August 2001 and held on immigration charges. He had attended flight training school in Minnesota earlier that year and had aroused suspicion for trying to learn how to fly a Boeing 747. He was in custody at the time of the September 11 attacks. But prosecutors argued that he knew about the 9/11 plan in advance and concealed what he knew from FBI interrogators. Last year Moussaoui pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to attack the US. His erratic behaviour in court in recent weeks has included outbursts against Jews and Americans and comments that he wished that more people had died on September 11.
El-Wafi says she knows he is not guilty of the 9/11 attacks because he told her in a letter and in a prison visit. When she saw him in court last month, for the first time in almost three years, she said he was unrecognisable, he was ‘bloated’ and she felt he had been drugged. She claims he is being held “in a cell measuring two metres by three metres, is woken every half an hour, has a light over his head and doesn’t know if it is day or night”. She says this amounts to torture.
She now rejects her son’s court-appointed defence lawyers, despite having spent months in France helping them gather documents and find witnesses from his childhood. The defence argues that Moussaoui is mentally ill — both his sisters have been treated for schizophrenia and his estranged father is in a mental institution in France. But El-Wafi disagrees, saying that defence psychologists have not interviewed her son because he refuses to cooperate. Nor does she think Moussaoui is seeking to become a martyr. She believes he changed his plea to guilty because he thought he could save himself.
El-Wafi was born in Morocco’s Middle Atlas in 1944. At two, when her father died, her mother was too poor to raise all the children and Aïcha was given to her uncle who brought her up in what she remembers as an idyllic childhood — ‘those memories are the only thing that keep me going today’. At 14, she had an arranged marriage with a builder and a former boxer, Omar Moussaoui. He was 27 and she had never met him before. Her education consisted of little more than sewing and cookery lessons; she didn’t want to marry but had no choice.
Omar Moussaoui, it has emerged in court, was a violent drunk who beat her. In Morocco, she had two sons who died within a year of each other, the first of dehydration at six months, the second after a botched circumcision when he was a week old.
“I’m sorry to say this, but Zacarias was the child I never ever had a problem with. Even as a baby, he was a good, placid boy. He slept straight through until 6am. No one ever had a complaint to make about him at school. As a teenager, he went out, he saw his friends. He loved American films, he wore American clothes. If a French film came on TV, he would complain, ‘Oh no, not this boring stuff.’ If an American film came on, he could sit watching it all night. I ask myself, what have they done to him to make him hate America now?”
From the age of 15 to 22, Zacarias, a keen tennis player, had a steady girlfriend called Karine with whom he would enter dancing competitions. She was French, blonde and blue-eyed and he was thinking about spending his life with her, she says. “But one day her father said to Zacarias: ‘Don’t think you’ll ever have a place around my table,’ because he was an Arab. He was very sensitive. That affected him badly.”
On the telephone from prison in America, she says, he told her: “Mum, I’ve done my time with French racism. I’m never going back to France.”
When Zacarias and his brother were in their early 20s, El-Wafi says, they were living it up at home with their friends. They had student grants and she told them to contribute some money to the household, but she and Zacarias fell out and he left. Shortly afterwards, he left for London ‘to perfect his English’. She kept up with what he was doing only through what he told his sister.
El-Wafi says the British government is partly to blame for what happened to her son. She claims he was a vulnerable man who was embittered by racism when he arrived in London and was ‘indoctrinated by Abu Hamza and radical preachers’ at the Finsbury Park mosque.
“I went to see Abu Hamza myself. I wanted to understand him, to understand what had gone on...I have never met anyone who preached such hatred. It is him that has destroyed the youth of Europe. The British sentenced him to seven years in prison, but how many children are dead or in prison now because of him? He was their master, he was their teacher. England must bear its part of the guilt because that country allowed Hamza to preach this hatred.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
