Tazmamart (Ar., Tāzmāmārt) was a secret prison, where military personnel and a few civilians were forcibly detained for various periods between 1973 and 1991, when an international human-rights campaign forced Morocco to release the survivors and demolish the two buildings where they had been imprisoned (Hayʾat al-Inṣāf, 63). Despite the evidence collected by human-rights activists in France during 1980s, the Moroccan authorities denied the existence of Tazmamart until 1991 (Dalle, 513).

Named for a southeastern Moroccan village in the present-day governorate of Er…