Worldandnation: Silence haunts kin of 'the Disappeared'

Silence haunts kin of 'the Disappeared'

In 1964, Abdel Skalli became one of thousands who just vanished. Today his family still knows little about his fate.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent

In 1964, Abdel Skalli became one of thousands who just vanished. Today his family still knows little about his fate.

CASABLANCA, Morocco -- Looking back on it, Fatima Skalli thinks she and her 25-year-old son, Abdel, shared a premonition something terrible would happen that day.

It was Oct. 10, 1964. Abdel, who worked in a bank and lived alone, asked his mother to save him a place at dinner. For some reason, she started to weep.

"Don't cry," he told her. "There will be time to cry later."

That was the last she ever saw of him. Abdel Skalli had become one of "The Disappeared."

Over the four decades that the late King Hassan II ruled Morocco, thousands of political opponents and others vanished under mysterious circumstances. Many were members of the military implicated in coup attempts, including one in 1972 in which Moroccan air force pilots tried to shoot down Hassan's plane while he was flying home from Paris.

But others who disappeared were like Abdel Skalli, ordinary citizens who had done nothing more than organize strikes for social and economic reforms, their relatives say.

"During 40 years really terrible things happened," says Abdel's sister, Khadija Rouissi. "We want to know what became of our loved ones and who was responsible."

A week before his disappearance, Abdel had been called into a police station and warned not to join more strikes against the government. After he failed to show up for dinner that night or for work the next day, his worried parents went to his apartment. It had been ransacked but there was no trace of him.

The family filed a complaint with the government seeking information. They got no answer. But over the following months and years, they heard reports from former prisoners and others that Abdel had been seen in detention camps throughout Morocco. As recently as 1995, witnesses said he was alive.

Amnesty International took up the case and filed a complaint to get Abdel released, his sister says. It was only then that the government claimed he had been killed shortly after being kidnapped in 1964. But there was no body and no death certificate.

Abdel's family and other relatives of the missing were encouraged when, in one of his first acts after becoming king in 1999, Mohamed VI created a royal commission on the disappearances. But critics say the government has done little so far except to compensate some families.

Abdel's relatives refused to take the money. "We don't want money, we want the truth," his sister says.

Rouissi is now general secretary of the Forum for Truth and Justice, an organization devoted to getting the full story of what happened to her brother and the hundreds of others whose fates remain a mystery. The forum wants death certificates and return of the bodies, a public investigation of the disappearances -- similar to South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission -- and prosecution of those responsible.

Some of those alleged to have been involved in the kidnappings and torture are still on the government payroll.

"We want to believe the king wants to do something and help the country move toward democracy," Rouissi says. "But for the moment, nothing moves forward."

Abdel's father died in 1998, not knowing if his son was still alive. His 80-year-old mother refuses to give up hope.

The handsome young man in the photo would now be 63.