Torture survivor says he would do it all again

Morocco's famous dissident, the man who stood up to the late King Hassan II, laughs and sips wine as he holds court in a Paris restaurant. Only then do you notice that 75-year-old Abraham Serfaty sits in a wheelchair, the result of a spinal disease aggravated by 14 months of torture at the Derb Moulay Cherif centre in Casablanca in 1974-75.

Morocco is the only Arab country where Jews have played a political role, and Serfaty describes himself as "an Arab Jewish militant".

"Torture is international," he explains. "These people took courses in the US. They used a technique called the `Brazilian parrakeet perch', where they put your hands over your knees while you're wearing handcuffs, then run a bar between your hands and knees. For several hours they inflict every imaginable torture upon you."

Serfaty's sister Evelyne was arrested and tortured in 1972 because Moroccan authorities suspected she was assisting him in hiding. She died of the effects two years later, without ever talking.

His father died while Abraham was on the run; his mother while he was in prison. Serfaty's son never recovered from two years he spent in jail. "The wounds stay with you," Serfaty muses.

But asked whether he would do the same things again, Serfaty does not hesitate. "Of course. Yes. But with less belief in the revolutionary utopias of the 20th century."

How does one keep one's sanity and morale for 17 years in a Moroccan prison? "When you're fighting a tyrannical regime you believe in resistance. You are fighting for humanity - for the transcendency of the human being over a regime that destroys people."

After three years of incarceration, Serfaty was sentenced in 1977 to life imprisonment for "plotting to overthrow the monarchy" and "threatening the security of the state". The king implied that the left-wing leader's real crime was opposing Morocco's occupation of the Western Sahara.

"As long as this gentleman does not admit that the Sahara is Moroccan, there can be no royal pardon," the late king told French television.

International pressure forced King Hassan to free Serfaty in 1991. He was immediately expelled to France.

When the ailing king appointed a left-wing prime minister, Abderrahmane Youssoufi, in 1998, Serfaty asked to return to Morocco. His ancestors - Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition - had lived there since the 15th century.

"Monsieur le premier ministre," Serfaty's French wife, Christine Daure, wrote in an open letter in Le Monde, "are you going to let Abraham Serfaty die in exile with his canes and his wheelchair?"

It took King Hassan's death in July 1999 - and the sacking of his eminence grise, the interior minister Driss Basri - for the young King Mohammed VI to allow Serfaty to come back to Morocco. "You have the most beautiful return, more beautiful than you dreamed of," his wife told him. "You are the first strong sign of change in this country."

Mohammed VI gave the Serfatys a villa overlooking the sea near Casablanca. Thirty years after his career as an engineer was broken, Abraham is again an adviser to the national petroleum company. It is, he admits, an idyllic existence, with "the companion of my life".

Christine Daure was a French teacher in Morocco when she sheltered the fugitive, nonviolent left-winger in the early 1970s. In exchange for an official visit to Morocco in 1986, the French first lady, Danielle Mitterrand, insisted that the two be allowed to marry and that Christine be granted unlimited prison visits.

But Christine was never one to give in to pressure. She revealed the existence of the terrible, secret prison at Tazmamart, saving half of the 59 officers whom Hassan II had sent to die there. It was Christine who did the research for Gilles Perrault's 1990 indictment of King Hassan's reign, Notre ami le roi. King Hassan banished her with her husband.

Now hopes raised by the accession of King Mohammed VI are waning. The Yousouffi government has so far proved incapable of bringing social change to the country.

Vestiges of what Serfaty calls "the black days of tyranny" are still there - the imprisonment of Capt Mustapha Adib for denouncing corruption in the military; the arrests in December of relatives of the Islamist leader, Abdessalam Yassine.

Forty-seven members of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights were also detained after staging a sit-in demanding "the truth about the kidnappings, arbitrary arrests and acts of torture committed under the reign of Hassan II." Mr Serfaty makes the same demands.

Mr Serfaty is angry that his old left-wing cohort, Prime Minister Youssoufi, banned three of Morocco's best weeklies, As Sahifa, Demain and Le Journal.

The first two dared to publish a letter implicating Youssoufi in the 1972 attempted coup against King Hassan, while Demain was about to publish its investigation into links between Moroccan drug traffickers and the regime.