Bringing Si Abd El-Krim, the Rifi Warrior Home to Morocco

Here is a piece from Public Radio International' show the World on the valant man from the Rif who fought Spanish and French colonizers in Morocco, and attempts by his relatives to get his remains repatriated to Morocco from Egypt. If you clink on the link, you can access the audio.
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Abd El-Krim: A Moroccan Hero who Never Was
By The World ⋅ March 17, 2011

By Gerry Hadden

As North African and Arab citizens cast about for leaders to fill the political vacuums in their countries, a quick remembrance of one such leader from days gone by. Abd El-Krim made his name liberating northern Morocco from Spanish colonial rule, in 1921. He was a scholar, a warrior and, for a brief time, even an emir. But Abd El-Krim was also a Rif, an ethnic group within the region’s larger Berber community. And that’s kept him sidelined in Morocco’s official history.

It began with the decisive battle against the Spanish, in 1921, at Annual, in the
mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco. The fight pitted Abd El-Krim and his rag-tag Rif militias against thousands of Spanish troops. One former Rif fighter, an elderly man named Chaaib Si-Mohand N’aali ,spoke of their victory in a Spanish documentary three years ago.

“Abd El-krim was our leader,” the old man recalled. “We surrounded the Spanish. They resisted. But they were afraid and exhausted. We wiped them out.

The Rif are ethnic Berbers … the indigenous people who’ve lived in North Africa for more than two millennia. The story of how their leader, Abd El-Krim, liberated them from colonial exploitation has become a legend for them. Journalist Merieme Addou’s grandfather fought alongside Abd El-Krim. Addou said Abd El- Krim was far outnumbered by the Spanish and knew he couldn’t fight an ordinary war.

“You need to have a tactic to win,” she said. “The Rif is a region of mountains. As foreigners, if you come here you don’t know this place. You don’t know where you are. So it was kind of using this very hard, difficult land, using it as a way to defeat the Spanish; using guerilla fighting.
Declaring independence

After victory, Abd El-Krim established the Rif Republic, a state independent not only from Spain and Morocco’s other colonizer, France, but from Morocco itself. The Republic’s new emir sent letters to every European head of state to announce it.

But his declaration fell on deaf ears. Five years of fighting later, the combined Spanish, French and Moroccan armies drove Abd El-Krim into exile, in Egypt. He died there in 1962 without ever setting foot back in Morocco. Not even after it gained full independence from France in 1956.

The Rif rose up once more, in 1958, and were brutally put down by then King Mohammed V. The repression continued under the next king, Hassan II according to Samed Assid, a Berber activist.

“Hassan II had a policy of vengeance,” Assid said. “He punished the Rif. Like Ghaddafi is doing now to his own people, in Libya. Hassan massacred the Rif population. And we have never forgotten. And we have not integrated. Today we are still a separate population.”

As for Abd El-Krim, Assid said the Moroccan government has simply fabricated his role in history.

“His story has been falsified in our schoolbooks,” he said. “Open a Moroccan textbook today. It says that Abd El-Krim fought against the French and Spanish …for the Moroccan throne. The books don’t mention his project to set up an independent Rif
republic. That is taboo.”

Assid said the taboo started in 1921, the moment Abd El-Krim declared his Rif Republic. The Moroccan state, dominated by Arabs, never wanted to mention the subject again.
Disappearing taboos

But 90 years later, some taboos surrounding the Berber have disappeared.
Assid, who is now president of the Morocco’s Royal Institute of Berber – or Amazigh – Culture, demonstrated on a recent day, sitting in his office. He sang a traditional Berber poem. In his hands he held a book with the lyrics, written in the Berber alphabet.

“Our current King, Mohammed VI, created this Institute,” he said. The king has also allowed our language back in public schools. And he’s allowed it to be written down, in its own alphabet. Before 2001 this was forbidden. If someone wrote in Berber letters on a sign or hotel awning, for example, he would be jailed.”

But one Berber wish remains unfulfilled; Abd El-Krim remains buried in Egypt. And there’s no indication that the government will let his relatives bring his remains home. But the pressure is mounting, said journalist Merieme Addou. She said that during Morocco’s largest pro-democracy march this February, some Rif carried Abd El-krim’s photo, and signs asking for his repatriation.

“I think there is no real reconciliation with the Rif people until his body is back and buried in his home town,” she said.

Moroccan Berbers are also talking about forming their own political party. If they do, and democratic elections are held, the Rif may just be able to vote their legendary hero home.

A Community Museum Records Real Moroccan Life

Here is an interesting article from The National about a project being done through the Hassan II University in Mohammedia to put the oral histories of living Moroccans in a museum.
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Museum records ups and downs of Moroccan life

John Thorne, Foreign Correspondent

* Last Updated: December 13. 2009 8:11PM UAE / December 13. 2009 4:11PM GMT



BEN M’SIK, MOROCCO // It is a bright cold day in Ben M’sik, a ragged Casablancan suburb, and Nourdine Daif is late for his neighbour’s funeral.

A station wagon is idling beside his telephone kiosk, but Mr Daif, 53, is deep in conversation with Wafaa Afkir, a student researcher from the university across the road.

“I want future generations to know what happened to my forefathers,” he says. “And to me.”

Ms Afkir’s pen flies across her notepad. Soon, Mr Daif’s memories of life in Ben M’sik will join those of other residents in an oral history project for the Ben M’sik Community Museum, part of the local campus of the Université Hassan II Mohammedia.

The museum is the first in Morocco to examine the ups and downs of contemporary life, a tricky undertaking in a society with a strong taboo against airing one’s problems in public.

“We’re not interested only in artefacts displayed behind glass,” said Samir el Azhar, an English and American Studies professor at the university who is heading the project. “We want people’s stories of their own experiences in Ben M’sik.”

In most cases, that experience is migration. For decades, waves of rural poor have landed in Ben M’sik and other Casablanca suburbs, seeking a better life.

“Ben M’sik represents the dream of Casablanca,” said Youssef el Dafali, 29, a student researcher whose parents came to the neighbourhood from the crumbled red hills of the Draa Valley, hundreds of kilometres to the south. “Come here and make money.”

A century ago Casablanca was a modest collection of white houses inside brick ramparts beside the Atlantic. But the city’s destiny changed overnight when France took control of Morocco in 1912 and chose Casablanca as the country’s main port.

The harbour was enlarged and a modern city of long, straight boulevards and piecrust facades soon dwarfed the old medina.

As migrants streamed in from the countryside, Casablanca gave the French language the word bidonville – “slum” – coined from the labourers’ shanties made from flattened tin drums, or bidons.

Most workers never intended to stay in Casablanca, but the bidonvilles evolved into the scruffy working-class neighbourhoods that ring the city today. Since Morocco gained independence in 1956, Casablanca has ballooned to about four million inhabitants as the country has sought to become a business and commercial hub for North Africa.

By the 1980s, overpopulation, unemployment and the rising cost of living turned Casablanca into a pressure cooker. In 1981, the city exploded in riots that human rights groups say ended in clashes with security forces that killed hundreds.

Since then, the state has graced Ben M’sik with apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, a cultural centre and the university campus. But the neighbourhood remains a grey zone between city and country.

The larger boulevards are flanked by anonymous housing blocks. Elsewhere, the bloody hides of sheep slaughtered for Eid are piled for sale in carts beside a woodlot and horse-carriages clatter down the streets. Old men hawk meagre collections of junk and trinkets: watches, rings, shoes.

For Mr el Azhar and his researchers, these scenes show strands of rural culture twining together.

“Anyone coming to Ben M’sik brought with him the songs, proverbs and customs of his region,” he said. “The museum is meant to make people aware of that heritage, to make them proud of it.”

With help from Kennesaw State University in the United States and a grant from the US state department, Mr el Azhar’s researchers collected about 80 folk stories and have begun conducting interviews.

The idea is to combine the findings in a multimedia exhibit, planned to go public by next September. The project will incorporate sound and video, using recording gear due to arrive from the United States. Meanwhile, a new wing of the university is going up that will house the museum, giving it direct access outside the campus walls. “Sometimes there’s a social barrier,” said Youssef el Fadali, the student researcher. “We have to reach out to people and make them understand that this is their museum, their stories.”

Mr Daif has absorbed that message already. Ignoring the waiting station wagon, he continues recounting his life to Ms Afkir.

He is a large bearded man who grew up in the neighbourhood. She is a slight girl in a headscarf whose fair skin and high, rounded cheeks suggest her Amazigh, or Berber, roots.

“Relations between people are pretty good, although sometimes kids get into drugs, which causes friction,” Mr Daif says. “But now mentalities are changing, more people are working better jobs.”

Ms Akfir concludes her questions, but Mr Daif has more stories he wants presented in the museum.

“In 1981, the army fired on demonstrators,” he says in response to a question from The National. “They buried the bodies together in a pit near the fire brigade station.”

Afterwards, he was scooped up by police and jailed until 1992, he said, a case reviewed by a truth commission set up by King Mohamed VI in 2004 to look into human rights abuses during the reign of his father, Hassan II.

Suddenly, voices beckon from the station wagon.

“I really must go,” says Mr Daif, grasping the crutch he has used since a car crash in 1993. “Even if I hadn’t known him, I’d still go to the funeral. He was my neighbour.”