Neither a Perpetrator Nor a Victim, and Yet. Questioning the “Years of Lead” in Morocco By a Biographical Approach

This paper relies on a ten-year biographical research I conducted on Ahmed Benkirane, a key figure of the Moroccan political and entrepreneurial landscape, that I published in Un entrepreneur du national au Maroc. Ahmed Benkirane, traces et discrétion (Karthala, 2024). Ahmed Benkirane was born in Marrakech in 1927 and has been a member of Morocco's generation of young nationalists, a senior government official in the aftermath of independence, a leading figure in political debate and an entrepreneur in journalism and finance, active in business representation and trade union relations. Initially focused on the period of the struggle for national independence, the research I conducted on his biography, combining oral history with the analysis of his private archive, gradually shifted to the “years of lead” - a controversial period in Moroccan history, characterised by state violence and repression against all forms of opposition.

This paper will explore the forms of violence that Benkirane experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, in journalism, business activities and in high civil service, and the different ways of speaking about and silencing them. These forms of violence were silenced by the transitional justice process initiated in the 2000s, whose witnesses, unlike Benkirane, have been involved in politics in anti-system parties and movements, are at least 20 years younger than him and come from less privileged social backgrounds than his.

Starting from different ways that Benkirane has adopted for speaking with me about the forms of violence he experienced, and for silencing them, the paper aims at contributing to a methodological reflection on how to talk about forms of violence that generally remain under silence, and will raise questions on the implication for the public debate of documenting them that I am experiencing in the construction of the website https://fondsahmedbenkirane.archiui.com/.