![]() The day after his burial, the family was placed under house arrest. “For everybody, he was the monster,” a powerful man with a reputation for directing torture and “disappearances” of political enemies. ![]() She points out that there were five bullet wounds, the last one in his temple, “the execution.” It pained her to find that Moroccans didn’t care that the second-most important man in the kingdom was dead. Nonsense, says Oufkir, who cleaned up his body. Oufkir, his hopes of forming a constitutional monarchy with Hassan’s son, Sidi Muhammad, derailed, paid with his life. But she is certain he was behind the second attempt a year later, a thwarted midflight attack on the king’s private jet. To this day, she says, she does not know whether her father was involved in the coup attempt. But Oufkir had a terrible premonition that her father was a marked man. The 10 officers who were killed in retaliation were close friends of her father, who that month was named minister of defense. In July 1971, an unsuccessful coup was staged against King Hassan during his birthday party at the palace. The mere mention of his name sent a chill down their spines.” She knew nothing, for example, of his alleged role in the kidnapping and killing of Moroccan opposition leader Ben Barka in Paris in 1965. The creme de la creme of Moroccan society came to her 18th birthday ball.īut, knowing nothing of the world of politics and intrigue in which her father was embroiled as minister of defense and head of the army and the police, she was shocked to learn that he was to her friends “public enemy number one. Eager to make up for time lost, she wore boots and miniskirts and would sneak out of the house at night to go dancing. By then, a baby brother, Abdellatif, had been born. Finally, when she was 17, the king let her return home to Rabat. She had tried several times to run away from the palace, unwilling to be married off to a general’s son of the king’s choosing. Oufkir desperately missed her family, which included four younger siblings who were virtually strangers to her. ![]() She remembers evenings with Lalla Mina at their villa, with Oufkir playing the piano or banging the drums as the princess danced with her brother, the new king. In her memoir, written with French author Michele Fitoussi, she describes a palace that seems lifted from the pages of “The Arabian Nights”: Servants standing at attention, acres of gilt and marble, caftan-clad concubines lying about.īut it was a cloistered life, one Oufkir describes as of “another century, another mentality.” In February of 1961, when Oufkir was 7, the king died and was succeeded by his 32-year-old son, Hassan II, who also “adopted” Oufkir. Perhaps, she muses, “this is the bill you have to pay to be free.” While writing her horrifyingly gripping memoir, “Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail” (Talk Miramax Books), was somewhat therapeutic, it also forced her to relive the nightmare years. “Sometimes I feel a teenager, with all the desire to be a teenager-and also I am the old woman.” Only 18 when she was imprisoned with her mother, Fatima, and five younger siblings, she is 48 now, a woman robbed of her youth and yet to come to grips with being middle-aged-and free. How does she make peace with the reality that her adoptive father killed her real father in retaliation for the attempt the one had made on the other’s life? She lights a cigarette and starts talking about the demons she has yet to conquer. She is a beautiful woman, but etched in her face are the weariness and pain of having relived it over and over in recent months. Malika Oufkir thumbs through her French-English pocket dictionary, searching for the words as she attempts to describe the horrors of her nearly 20 years as a political prisoner in Morocco and her unfinished journey to peace of mind in the decade that has followed.īut her body language and her fragile emotions require no translation-the tears that well in her eyes as she recalls what her family endured: rat- and snake-infested cells, hunger so gnawing that they were driven to eating mouse feces.
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