Transitional Justice and Human Rights in Morocco

Negotiating the Years of Lead

Fadoua Loudiy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780367867249
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317929567
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the Moroccan experience of transitional justice, more specifically the negotiation of the legacy of the period commonly referred to as the Years of Lead. This period of Moroccan history roughly spans from the early 1960s to 1999 during which thousands of citizens were arbitrarily detained, tortured and killed because of their political opinions.

Through an analysis of testimonies, public documents and personal interviews, Transitional Justice and Human Rights in Morocco seeks to shed light on Moroccan citizens' struggle for recognition and reparation in the aftermath of a long history of grave human rights violations, ranging from arbitrary arrest and torture to state sponsored disappearances and murders. While Morocco's experience is often presented within a historical global context, this book offers a comparative analysis, discussing other national examples to situate the Moroccan experience within the relatively recent history of political transitions.

Seeking to advance a rhetoric of symbolic justice that privileges the voice of the victims and offers hope for the renewal of a community's ethos through public discourse and ethico-political practices, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars with an interest in Human Rights and Middle East Politics.

1 Public memory

One of the hallmarks of the 20th century is memorialization, the incessant drive to record everything for posterity’s sake. The fear that no trace will be left of those who perished in wars, genocide, civil wars and other catastrophes, or that their memory will be distorted, has led to this memorializing of life and death. Of course, this obsession with memory can also be attributed to the fact that the 20th century was probably one of the most brutal in recorded human history as well as one of the most technologically advanced.¹ Jeffery K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy (in their impressive volume on public memory) suggest that in recent history a new phase has opened in memory studies. With the fall of communism and abandonment of utopian ideologies and visions, a more nostalgic turn toward collective pasts has developed, which has come to serve

as repository of inspiration for repressed identities and unfulfilled claims … The memory boom … unleashed a culture of trauma and regret, and states are allegedly now judged on how well they atone for their past misdeeds rather than on how well they meet their fiscal obligations and inspire future projects.

(4)

This near obsession with the past, and the pressure on states to atone for past sins, are also driven by various groups’ searches for new sources of political fulfillment and ideological grounds.

This trend, linked largely to identity politics, is evident in the immense array of artifacts, practices and virtual places that seek to remember all things past. The intellectual boom in memory studies is also a direct consequence of postmodern thought that problematized historical work, suggesting that history-making is seldom an objective endeavor but rather a commodification or “an ideologically motivated recuperation of the past.”² Conversations and debates about the Holocaust, the Vichy syndrome, the Spanish Civil War and other remembrance/oblivion struggles that emerged post-war and post-trauma have contributed in making memory one of the most contested and exciting metaphors for those interested in history-making, political transitions, reconciliation, forgiveness and justice in the aftermath of politically motivated violence.

Because memories are almost always emotionally loaded, they can be a powerful political instrument, open to all kinds of appropriations and misappropriations. Avishai Margalit notes that “Memory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliation” (5), suggesting that remembering has many horizons and uses, as does its opposite, forgetting. As human beings, we are more prone to remembering that which is painful and unjust, which might explain why some people resist engaging the past, even try to block it or erase it, while others can get “stuck” in it. Besides its sentimental, nostalgic and romantic value, memory (the impulse to remember) also has an epistemological horizon since it is also through repetition (of remembered actions and things) that we learn to function in the world. Most importantly, memory is an “exercise,” a doing, as Ricoeur puts it, remembering “is not only welcoming, receiving an image of the past, it is also searching for it, ‘doing’ something” (Memory 523).

Memory is not solely about things remembered for posterity’s sake, it is also about the future and justice. In this chapter, I delineate the different levels of memory and explicate their potential uses and abuses. The argument I attempt here is that public memory, as a forensic genre, is the most relevant for the discussion of issues of transitional justice. This does not mean that other forms of memory are irrelevant and need not be considered but simply that because transitional justice is a public issue, the public form of memory is the one with most relevance for such discussion. Public memory is also a type of memory that relies on and subsumes other forms of memory, as will become evident in the discussion below. Suffice to say for now that the connection between memory and the quest for justice can be initially and most obviously seen in the role memory plays in the courtroom. But more importantly, beyond the technical or even legal role that testimony plays, memory contributes symbolically to serving justice to the extent that it grounds judgment in general and serves as the basis for the making of history.

Marianne Hirsch offers the metaphor of “postmemory,” which she defines as

the relationship that ‘the generation after’ bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation … These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the structure of postmemory and the process of its generation.

(5)

This form of memory is certainly relevant to discussions of events that continue to haunt our present and future because it brings to the fore the importance of pathos in mnemonic experiences. Postmemory is a metaphor that problematizes the nexus between memory and imagination, and sends us back to Ricoeur’s idea that “remembering is not only welcoming, receiving an image of the past, it is also searching of it, ‘doing’ something” (Memory 56).

To remember is to actively seek something; it is to be in search of something; it is a doing, an exercise with a purpose. For survivors of atrocities that purpose is first to be recognized as victims of an injustice. To help frame the discussion about the uses and abuses of memory that brings together the cognitive and the pragmatic aspects of remembering, it is helpful to remember, as Ricoeur explains, that recognition (the goal of the exercise of remembering) is the cognitive aspect of recollection while the search itself (that leads to recognition) is the practical aspect of memory. This understanding of memory in its many manifestations and aspects problematizes the relationship between the phenomenological, the cognitive, the epistemological, the political, the ethical and the pragmatic, as the following discussion details.

Uses and abuses

Scholars from a variety of fields have investigated the uses and abuses of memory during critical times. The aftermath of the Nazi regime in Germany and neighboring European countries has become the paradigmatic example of the kind of impassioned efforts of survivors not to forget what happened in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, which can be contrasted with the national policy of collective amnesia in Spain after the death of Franco (El Pacto de Olvido). Violent and traumatic memories evoke a plethora of disturbing emotions such as sadness, fear, hate, shame, horror and guilt, and thus remembrance and oblivion are necessarily and dynamically affective, not simply cognitive. Events remembered belong to a different time frame but the emotions associated with those events are very much present-lived and become enacted in the now. Interestingly enough, emotions that are triggered by painful or traumatic memories can also be present in postmemory experiences as Hirsch suggests. I simply wish to emphasize that this emotional aspect of memory is what allows the past to have a future.³

To investigate the emotional aspect of memory is not solely or even primarily a psychological endeavor, though this approach is clearly the most common owing to the critical role memory plays in Freudian psychoanalysis. But to emphasize the psychological is to valorize the private contexts of memory, whereas I wish to emphasize critical public discourse in the aftermath of traumatic events. Such discourse constitutes a “rhetorical interruption,” a moment that is defined and propelled by how individuals (victims primarily) remember the past publicly as well as privately. There are, according to Ricoeur, three levels of memory that should be considered when attempting to grasp the complexities associated with the dialectic between public and private memory in the aftermath of atrocity. These are the psychological, the practical (pragmatic or functional) and politico-ethical. I should note here that Ricoeur does not dissociate the political from the ethical, a point we will come back to later, as this form of memory is most salient for my purposes here. First, we should be clear on what constitutes psychological and practical forms of memory before discussing how the political-ethical incorporates them.

The psychological approach to memory focuses on pathologies and therapies, and how individuals (and clinicians) deal with the trauma caused by painful events. One of the most popular pathologies (a legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis) is “blocked memory,” where pain and loss would inhibit remembrance for fear of re-stimulating the horrors one has experienced or witnessed. This pathological-therapeutic (blocking/unblocking) level is best understood in the individual context because each person lives or feels emotions and deals with memories differently; blocked memories (repressed traumatic experiences) can also be a collective and deliberate effort. Many communities make a concerted effort to not remember (or at least, not celebrate or commemorate) shameful events in their past, as Spanish history exemplifies. The outcome of collective amnesia is a wounded national memory; it is a pathology at a national level that needs to be cured at some point for that society to be freed of the demons of its past. It is often easier to try and forget that which causes one pain. As Ricoeur explains, the act of remembering is rarely a spontaneous occurrence; it is a travail, a work that can be difficult and painful (Memory 79) but it is a necessary travail, especially at the societal or national level.

But amnesia is not the only pathology; excessive remembrance can prevent individuals and communities from living in the present and envisioning the future. They too contribute to a sick memory where the past is not allocated its proper “healthy” place. Obviously, collective remembering or commemorations can be cathartic as people experience the commonality of their loss and plurality of their pain. Ricoeur argues that

such mourning behaviours constitute a privileged example of the intersecting relations between private and public expression [of memory]. It is in this way that our concept of a sick historical memory finds justification a posteriori in this bipolar structure of mourning behaviors.

(Memory 79)

Collective mourning in funerals and commemorations can provide individuals with solace in that they recognize that they are not alone in their feelings of pain and loss but, again, the danger lies in staying stuck in enforced images and meanings of the past.

In contrast to the pathological-therapeutic, the practical aspect of remembering refers to the active side of memory where remembering becomes an instrument to achieve something; it is a manipulated memory. Abuses of memory occur when there is “a concerted manipulation of memory and of forgetting by those who hold power” (Ricoeur, Memory 80), as in the dynamic relation between collective memory and political identity. The relationship between memory and identity, both collective and individual, is exactly what makes memory vulnerable to all kinds of appropriations and misappropriations. It is the dynamic nature of identity and the temporal difficulty in locating and fixing its essence that “justifies the recourse to memory as the temporal component of identity, in conjunction with the evaluation of the present and the projection of the future” (Ricoeur, Memory 81). One of the problems posed by the relationship between memory and identity concerns national identity construction, which often occurs via a claim of distinction from other national narratives and histories. Such a claim suggests another reason for the fragility of identity—the perceived threat of the other and the potential for humiliation and exclusion that comes with claiming national (historical and political) distinction. The threat of the other with respect to the fragility of identity can be exacerbated by what Ricoeur refers to as “the heritage of founding violence” (Memory 82). Since historical memory is a collection of violent events where there is glory and pride for some and shame, death and humiliation for others, it follows that political and collective identities are always constructed against a backdrop of violence or the threat of violence. As such, memory is vulnerable to abuse and manipulation because of the demands that ideology puts on the construction of national identity.

In this particular context of practical memory, Ricoeur suggests three additional levels that aid in understanding the workings of ideology: “distortions of reality, the legitimation of the system of power, and the integration of the common world by means of symbolic systems immanent in action” (Memory 82). Following Marx, for whom there is a language of real life that pre-dates distortions, ideology is a distortion of reality. The language of real life is the distance of praxis resulting from the symbolic mediation of action. Ricoeur insists that the structure of action is necessarily symbolic because:

It is through the narrative function that memory is incorporated into the formation of identity … It is, more precisely, the selective function of the narrative that opens to manipulation the opportunity and the means of a clever strategy, consisting from the outset in a strategy of forgetting as much as in a strategy of remembering.

(Memory 85)

It is only on the basis of this symbolic mediation that we can understand and situate ideology as distortion. As part of the social imaginary that is constituted by mythical and symbolic discourses, memory provides motivation for action, and can either serve as rupture (a break) or reaffirmation (legitimation); or, as Muldoon says, it is “in its reaffirmation mode that the imaginary functions as ideology, which repeats and represents the foundational symbols of discourse of a society thus preserving its identity” (79). Examples of these types of distortions are commemorative events that nations hold to remember founding events and originary myths. The threat comes from the fact that such reaffirmation can also become abused by the elites who use it to uncritically legitimize, at all costs, the established political powers. Ricoeur argues that in such instances, the symbols of a community become fixed and fetishized, they serve as lies (Memory 475). This is the danger of ideology that serves as motivation or frame for memory, where it becomes the pretext for domination, manipulation and violence. The official narrative of history is the best example of the triangular relationship where memory is put at the service of identity-making in the name of nationalist ideology. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Ricoeur views memory as “the womb of history, inasmuch as memory remains the guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the past” (Memory 87). History is then a “forced memorization,” but it is not only memorized, it is also taught and celebrated (Memory 85). The obsession with the past that excesses of memory and official histories produce is not only a political problem to be reckoned with, it is primarily an ethical problem.

Finally, the ethico-political level refers to “obligated memory” and constitutes the telos of practices of memory, especially in the political realm. What is the aim of remembering, beyond the practical aspects discussed above? More specifically, what does a duty of memory entail for individuals and communities? When one speaks of an ethics of memory, one is necessarily speaking about justice, a duty to serve justice for the past, for those who passed. Ricoeur defines this duty in the following terms: “The duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to another than the self” (Memory 89). Indeed, is it not a sense of justice, or, more accurately, a sense of injustice, that compels one to tell a story of a relative or a friend, have his or her side of the story heard and made public, lest one’s suffering and accounts of it fall into oblivion? An obligated memory is an impassioned memory that forces itself upon the living, it is an attempt to pay a debt to those who can no longer tell their story, it is a debt to victims of the past, echoing Nietzsche’s commitment to history. Although the pathological-therapeutic and practical forms of memory inform this work, the ethico-political reflects the principal form of memory that compels it, a memory that is best defined as public memory. In addition to being political, public memory is also an “emotionally invested phenomenon,” because of the powerful linkages between remembrance, language/culture and identity. Surely, for survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, Apartheid in South Africa, the Years of Lead in Morocco, and other atrocities, publicly recalling experiences of torture, rape, loss of loved ones, and other forms of inhumanity is an emotionally charged experience.

Rhetorical and political

French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ claim in the early 1900s that memory is a social phenomenon and that remembering is a collective process opened up the field of memory studies to many disciplines, resulting in an important body of scholarship that focuses on issues of identity, collective/public memory and nationalism. Halbwachs’ argument was a rebuttal to Henri Bergson’s contention that memory was an individual/personal phenomenon. Edward Casey, following Halbwachs, identifies four major genres of human memory: individual memory, which is unique since it refers to a person remembering or being reminded of something. Even in this individual aspect, every act of remembering has a social feature. The second genre, social memory, is a shared memory but not necessarily a public one. Social memory can be very private. Collective memory, the genre popularized by Halbwachs, is a memory that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Public memory
• 2 Transitional justice
• 3 The Years of Lead
• 4 Symbolic justice
• Conclusion
• Works cited
• Index