Morocco: The Missing Exile

Morocco’s most troublesome political exile, Mehdi ben Barka, 45, flew into Paris from Geneva a fortnight ago and made a date for lunch at a Left Bank restaurant with some friends. He never showed up there or any place else.

French police began a nationwide search, for Ben Barka was no routine case. The founder of Morocco’s leftist National Union Party, he has twice within the past two years been sentenced to death in absentia for plotting to overthrow King Hassan II. Such notoriety naturally led to speculation that political skulduggery might be involved.

For four days the police got nowhere. Then last week an Air France public relations man at Orly Airport stepped forward with information which he said his conscience compelled him to bring to the police. He was Antoine Lopez, a Frenchman who had struck up an acquaintance with Ben Barka some years ago in Morocco. Lopez frankly admitted that at the behest of another old friend, one Georges Boucheseiche, he had intercepted Ben Barka in front of the restaurant, persuaded the Moroccan to drive with him to Boucheseiche’s villa on the outskirts of Paris. There, Lopez was given to understand, “important Moroccans” were waiting to confer with Ben Barka.

Who were they? Lopez didn’t stay around to find out. Boucheseiche, whom police promptly identified as a notorious French gangster with connections in Morocco, was no help either; he had flown off to Casablanca a few days earlier.

Ben Barka’s followers in Morocco charged that he had fallen victim to a conspiracy of right-wingers within the Rabat government, who wanted to block any chance of a reconciliation between the King and Moroccan leftists —something for which Hassan has been ardently working. A part of the reconciliation plan calls for a full pardon for Ben Barka and his eventual return to Morocco. But there were just as many reasons for believing a handful of other hypotheses, including one that members of his own party had pulled the snatch to keep Ben Barka from returning to Morocco and thus reducing their own political power.