Books: From Palace To Prison

Initially, the Oufkir family, which included Malika and Abdellatif, who began serving his sentence at age 3, were imprisoned in a remote area in southeastern Morocco. For years they lived in almost constant isolation from one another in cells infested with scorpions, rats, cockroaches and fleas. Their possessions, including family photos, were destroyed by sadistic guards in a bonfire. After 15 years of misery came the "Night of the Long Knives": Malika's mother Fatima and her eldest son tried to commit suicide, and Malika slit the wrists of a sister in a frenzied but failed attempt to end her suffering. More striking than the cruelty the Oufkirs endured, however, is their heroic will to overcome it. Despite their weak state and a formidable force of prison guards, they spent years planning escape. From a prison near Casablanca, they made it 200 miles north to Tangier and got word to French journalists in 1987 before being rearrested.

A deep embarrassment to Hassan II, their travail prompted a series of efforts to address Morocco's human-rights abuses. The Oufkirs were immediately transferred to a luxury villa in Marrakech, where they spent four years being fattened up under house arrest before finally being freed in 1991. Not long afterward, Hassan II released the Tazmamart prisoners--58 ex-soldiers who had allegedly taken part in another coup and had been locked in tiny cells with little food and no light 24 hours a day for 18 years. After Hassan II's death in 1999, his son, King Mohammed VI, hastened the turning of the page, allowing the publication of two Tazmamart memoirs and permitting a commemorative march to the notorious, now closed Tazmamart prison. "He is very courageous," says Oufkir. "Speaking about the past freely is the best way to build the future." Toward that end, Oufkir, now 48 and married to a Lebanese-born architect, has done her part.