TOWARDS the end of last month a section of the French press revived the memories of a mystery that had taken place in Paris 49 years ago and has remained unsolved ever since.
On Oct 29, 1965, Mahdi bin Barqa, a Moroccan leftist leader living in exile in Paris, was to meet someone at the Brasserie Lipp, a favourite haunt of French intellectuals in the Latin Quarter area. The man who had telephoned him had introduced himself as a movie scriptwriter keen on discussing with Bin Barqa the scenario for his next film about red revolutions in Arab, African and Latin American countries. Bin Barqa agreed to meet but he never entered the legendary bar-restaurant and since then has not been seen again.
For half a century contradictory theories abounded, ranging from his kidnapping by Moroccan security agents at the orders of the late King Hassan II, to his arrest by the French secret service men, and to his assassination by a criminal gang in complicity with the then Moroccan interior minister, General Mohammad Oufqir.
To add to these hypotheses there is the claim by a former Moroccan secret service official Ahmed Boukhari that Bin Barqa was picked up at the doorsteps of Brasserie Lipp by two men dressed in French police uniform but in reality were Oufqir’s men. He was later taken to an isolated house in a Parisian suburb where he was tortured by Oufqir and then killed. Boukhari, who had also links with the CIA, says the body was then taken to Morocco where it was dissolved in acid.
There is yet another theory by Georges Fleury, a well-known French writer who specialises in the history of the Arab world. According to his version Bin Barqa’s body was incinerated and his ashes were dispersed in the Essone River near Paris. In an article published by the weekly Journal du Dimanche, Fleury claims he is in possession of a French police report containing these details.
In 1965 the one-year-old Prince Moulay Hicham el Alaoui, a cousin of the current Moroccan monarch Mohammed VI, could possibly not have grasped the meaning of the conversations in the royal court in Rabat concerning the affair and would definitely not have been allowed to witness a macabre scene that he mentions, but his references to the Bin Barqa affair in his recently published memoirs Journal d’un Prince Banni or The Diary of a Banished Prince are hair-raising.
Alaoui who completed his studies at Princeton and Stanford universities and lives in the United States and France was initially being groomed by Hassan II as a possible heir to the throne in case something happened to his two sons, Abdullah and Mohammad. But, as he developed his own independent ideas about power and democracy, Alaoui was gradually edged off the royal court. Today he says he has been banished from Morocco by his cousin, King Mohammad VI.
But coming back to the Bin Barqa affair, Alaoui recalls a terrifying conversation that he had overheard as a teenager through a closed door, the late Moroccan monarch ordering Oufqir to go to Paris and ‘taking care’ of the revolutionary leader. Later, Oufqir not only had Bin Barqa murdered but brought back his severed head to Rabat and laid it at the feet of Hassan II.
The book paints a picture of the late king as a ruthless monarch who now and then conceded to the people’s demands for greater democracy, but only in the interest of saving his crown. He succeeded in outmanoeuvring at least three coup attempts, later taking revenge against those who had betrayed him.
But all the stories in Alaoui’s memoirs are not that scary, in fact some are quite amusing. One concerns frequent complaints by his father Moulay Abdellah, brother to the king, about total lack of etiquette in the makhzen, or the royal court, whose members wore loose jellabas, smoked water pipes and chattered all day long, lying in easy chairs.
When Abdellah visited Pakistan in the early 1970s, he was so impressed by the ramrod discipline of Pakistani soldiers he brought back with him three army officers who were supposed to instil military discipline into the slackened lifestyle of the makhzen.
“Hardly a year had gone by when these officers themselves could be seen in loose jellabas, smoking water pipes and chattering endlessly!” writes the prince. “Instead of teaching us their rigorous discipline, the Pakistanis were themselves makhzenised.”
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2014
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.