Morocco Crushed Dissent Using a U.S. Interrogation Site, Rights Advocates Say
RABAT,
Morocco — After landing at the Rabat airport in 2010, Zakaria Moumni, a
former kickboxing world champion, was distressed when he was taken
aside by security agents, arrested, blindfolded and taken on a ride
under a blanket in the back seat of a car to a secret facility. He says
he was held there for four days, during which he was deprived of food
and water.
“There
is no worse feeling than this hopelessness of being blindfolded and
handcuffed naked without being able to control anything,” said Mr.
Moumni, 34, who spoke from Paris, where he now lives. “They told me that
I was in a slaughterhouse and that I was going to leave in small
pieces.”
The
facility where Mr. Moumni was taken, on Interior Ministry property in a
forest in the city of Temara, a few miles south of Rabat, had been
established years earlier as a black site for the Central Intelligence Agency
to hold “enhanced interrogations” of terrorism suspects. But over the
years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, it proved to be a handy tool for
the security forces of the Moroccan government as well.
The release of the United States Senate report on torture
last month renewed debate about the merits of harsh interrogation
techniques in fighting terrorism. But less attention has been paid to
what human rights advocates call the damage the sites have done in their
host countries, which they say have used them as a tool for terrorizing
their political opponents.
“In
the early 2000s, many beautiful speeches came from Washington on the
necessity to democratize,” said Aboubakr Jamai, a Moroccan journalist
and international relations professor at IAU College in Aix-en-Provence,
France. “They were meaningless because at the same time the C.I.A. was
sending people to get tortured in Morocco.”
Senate
Democrats said in their report that the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogation
methods failed to produce valuable information that saved American
lives. In Morocco, the government was targeting international terrorists
as well as its own citizens, who had not necessarily been identified by
the C.I.A. Mr. Jamai and others believe that the local authorities
exploited the United States’ war against terrorism to intimidate the
Moroccan opposition and independent press.
“Torture polluted any efforts of democratization in Morocco,” Mr. Jamai said. “It encouraged authoritarianism.”
After
he was tortured, Mr. Moumni was sent immediately to trial, where he was
convicted on criminal fraud charges that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
said were trumped up in retaliation for his criticism of the monarchy.
He was sentenced to three years in prison and served 18 months before he
was pardoned by the king to end a diplomatic feud with France — Mr.
Moumni is also a French citizen. He has filed suit against the Moroccan
officials he says authorized the torture. The Moroccan government denies
the allegations and has filed a legal complaint in France to challenge
them.
Several human rights organizations claim the Moroccan intelligence services used the Temara center heavily after a 2003 terrorist attack in Casablanca that killed 45 people. A Human Rights Watch report issued a year later said the authorities held people beyond legal time limits without contacting their families or lawyers.
When
King Mohammed VI of Morocco succeeded his father in 1999, he promised
to end human rights abuses and even spoke vaguely about democracy. A
hallmark achievement in the king’s early years was establishing the
Equity and Reconciliation Commission to prevent a return to the
atrocities committed during his father’s reign.
Under
the commission, people spoke out about their suffering and were
compensated. But torturers were not prosecuted. In 2003, after the
adoption of an antiterrorism law, human rights advocates sounded alarms
about secret detentions, kangaroo courts and torture. They gained little
traction as the United States prepared to invade Iraq.
“What
we saw in Morocco is what we saw in the U.S.,” said Eric Goldstein,
deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human
Rights Watch. “After the attacks, security agencies were caught
unprepared, they took the gloves off to interrogate massive numbers of
people, and we saw a regression in both countries.”
During
this period, Morocco was among Washington’s staunchest allies in the
campaign against terrorism. “In the area of security cooperation,
Morocco is one of our closest counterterrorism partners in the Middle
East and North Africa region,” William Roebuck, then the deputy
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said in testimony to Congress in April.
But
the Senate’s report recounts how C.I.A. officers heard the cries of
non-C.I.A. detainees tortured in Temara and complained to their Moroccan
counterparts about the abuses. The report states that the relationship
between the two sides deteriorated after the C.I.A. complained. American
intelligence officials even contemplated building their own facilities
in Morocco, but eventually gave up on the idea.
The Moroccan Interior Ministry, which oversees the intelligence services, did not respond to requests for comment.
The
Moroccan authorities have denied that they tortured people. In 2011,
protesters held rallies to ask for democratic changes. In May 2011, the
pro-democracy February 20 Movement that led the protests, organized a
picnic in front of the Temara center but was violently repressed by the
authorities. An investigation was ordered, without much result.
“I
visited the so-called secret detention center in Temara on May 18 to
see what they say is a place where human rights violations and shameful
violations of human dignity are practiced,” Moulay Al Hassan Al Daki,
prosecutor general, said in 2011, “but all I found was administrative
offices. I have not seen anywhere what could be considered a secret
detention center or a place where people could be maltreated or abused.”
For
Oussama Boutahar, who said he was detained in Temara twice — after 9/11
because he had fought with Islamic militants in Bosnia in the ’90s, and
also in 2003 — the abuses were real.
“Everyone
who was suspected to have any ties to terrorist groups went through
Temara,” said Mr. Boutahar, 44, who is now an advocate against torture.
“My torturers have told me that the Americans were pressuring Morocco to
do this. America legitimized brutal treatments.”
Though
most detainees were tortured as part of a larger campaign against
terrorism, others with no ties to militancy also landed in Temara.
Mr. Moumni is suing the Moroccan intelligence chief, Abdellatif Hammouchi, and Mounir Majidi, the king’s private secretary.
“If we want to stop torture, we must judge those responsible,” he said.