Moroccans were known as some of the fiercest fighters among the troops of right-wing General Francisco Franco in Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war.
But 70 years later, Moroccan campaigners see Franco’s “Moorish troops” as victims and seek an investigation to establish “the truth” about their fate.
Moroccans who fought for Franco were often recruited by force, says Abdesslam Boutayeb, president of the Moroccan Center for Common Memory and the Future (CMCA), which is trying to raise the issue with Spain.
Spanish historian Maria Rosa de Madariaga questions such views, saying Moroccans joined Franco’s troops voluntarily.
When Franco set out to topple Spain’s republican government, he launched his uprising from Morocco, the north of which was a Spanish protectorate at the time.
An estimated 80,000 Moroccans were recruited to fight alongside Francoists in the war, which claimed about 500,000 lives.
The Moroccans had a savage reputation and were greatly feared, as was Franco’s personal Moorish Guard after the war.
Francoists spread stories about the Moroccans’ cruelty to frighten their opponents, Moroccan researcher Boughaleb El Attar wrote in the Spanish daily El Pais.
The stories, which El Attar sees as having a racist component, contributed to a negative image of Moroccans that still lingers in Spain to this day.
Franco’s Moroccan soldiers were usually poor inhabitants of the northern mountainous Rif region, who joined the general’s troops to be fed and to get a salary, according to testimonies of war veterans.
Despite Catholicism forming an important part of his nationalist ideology, Franco did not hesitate to recruit Muslims to whom he presented his uprising as a joint Christian-Muslim fight against godless “reds.”
The Moroccans joined a foreign war the real causes of which they knew nothing about, El Attar writes.
Many were recruited against their will, Boutayeb said.
The CMCA wants to take advantage of Spain’s 2007 Law of Historic Memory, which seeks to restore the dignity of Franco’s forgotten republican victims.
Measures include support to groups digging up remains of republicans from mass graves.
The mass graves are also believed to contain bones of Moroccan soldiers, tens of thousands of whom went missing in the war, according to figures given by Boutayeb.
The CMCA has the backing of the National Rally of Independents, one of the main parties in Morocco’s coalition government.
Emilio Silva represents the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory, the biggest group exhuming republican remains from mass graves.
The Moroccan soldiers “supported a coup” against Spain’s legal government, and “came here to kill people,” Silva said.
“They were given pensions, while the republicans got nothing,” he complains.
Most observers, however, agree that the pensions now received by about 2,000 Moroccan war veterans or widows are miserably small.
Although the Franco regime fixed the level of the pensions in an “irrevocable” decision, it would be fair for the Moroccans to get the same — higher — amount of pension money that Spanish war veterans get, de Madariaga wrote.
An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft has acquired imagery data covering all of Mars, including visuals of its south pole, after circling the planet more than 1,300 times since early last year, state media reported yesterday. The Tianwen-1 successfully reached the Red Planet in February last year on the country’s inaugural mission there. A robotic rover has since been deployed on the surface as an orbiter surveyed the planet from space. Among the images taken from space were China’s first photographs of the Martian south pole, where almost all of the planet’s water resources are locked. In 2018, an orbiting probe operated by the European
QUARANTINE SHORTENED: A new protocol detailing risk levels and local policy responses would be ‘more scientific and accurate,’ a health agency spokesman said China’s revised COVID-19 guidelines, which cut a quarantine requirement in half for inbound travelers, also create a standardized policy for mass testing and lockdowns when cases of the disease flare, showing that the country still has a zero-tolerance approach to the virus. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) solidified the position during a trip to Wuhan, where the pathogen first emerged in 2019, saying that China is capable of achieving a “final victory” over the virus. The “zero COVID-19” policy is the most effective and economic approach for the country, Xi said during the trip on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported. The first
A former South Korean Navy SEAL turned YouTuber who risked jail time to leave Seoul and fight for Ukraine said it would have been a “crime” not to use his skills to help. Ken Rhee, a former special warfare officer, signed up at the Ukrainian embassy in Seoul the moment Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked for global volunteers and was fighting on the front lines near Kyiv by early March. To get there, he had to break South Korean law — Seoul banned its citizens from traveling to Ukraine, and Rhee, who was injured in a fall while leading a special operations
Yogesh Zanzamera lays out his bed on the floor of the factory where he works and lives, one of about 2 million Indians polishing diamonds in an industry being hit hard by the war in Ukraine. With the air reeking from the only toilet for 35to 40 people, conditions at workshops such as this in Gujarat state leave workers at risk of lung disease, deteriorating vision and other illnesses. However, Zanzamera and others like him have other more immediate worries: the faraway war in Europe and the resulting sanctions on Russia, India’s biggest supplier of “rough” gemstones and a long-standing strategic ally. “There
RSS