Search

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…

Abraham Serfaty (Abrāhām al-Sarfātī, 1926–2010) was a Moroccan engineer, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, leftist intellectual, and opposition leader, who suffered political exile and detention during the French Protectorate (1912–56) and under the regime of King Ḥasan II (1961–99). Before he became a revolutionary activist, Serfaty had been, between 1944 and 1970, a member of the Moroccan Communist Party, which inherited the local chapter of the French Communist Party under the leadership of Ali Yata (1920–97) in 1945. Born in Casablanca to a middle-class Jewish family…