The latter is described in a Passion as having incurred the Roman governor’s wrath by adhering to Christ’s pacifistic teachings.
Agricolanus said, “What madness possessed you to cast aside aside your oath and say such things?”
Marcellus said, “No madness possesses him who fears God.” …
Agricolanus said, “Did you hurl down your weapons?”
Marcellus said, “I did. It is not proper for a Christian man, one who fears the Lord Christ, to engage in earthly military service.”
Agricolanus said, “Marcellus’ actions are such that they ought to be disciplined.” And so he stated, “It pleases (the court) that Marcellus, who defiled the office of centurion which he held by his public rejection of the oath and, furthermore, according to the praeses’ records, gave in testimony words full of madness, should be executed by the sword.”
So that’s Marcellus’s martyrdom. (His feast date is October 30.)
Cassian gets in on the act by allegedly refusing to fulfill his judicial duty to record the verdict, out of sympathy for the godly ex-warrior, a professional dereliction of his own that has paradoxically made him the patron saint of stenographers. There’s a very good chance that his is a legendary just-so story.
On this date in 1973, Morocco shot 11 officers for a regicidal mutiny.
Amekrane (left) with the coup’s leading spirit, Mohamed Oufkir
Their deaths were the consequence of the near-miss bid to bring down Morocco’s King Hassan II by bringing down his airplane, a plot to which Lt. Col. Mohamed Amekrane, the commander of the air base that launched fighters against the king’s convoy, was utterly pivotal. It’s no surprise that he’d be in the way of the royal revenge domestically after this incident; more surprising and controversial was the role the British would play in dooming the man.
As he discovered that the king’s passenger plane had somehow escaped the predations of his F-5s, Amekrane (it’s also sometimes spelled Amokrane) alertly requisitioned a helicopter and fled with another officer to British soil at nearby Gibraltar, where they requested asylum on Aug. 16.
This put Westminster in an awkward situation: repatriate the men to sure execution, or give refuge to the would-be assassins of a friendly head of state.* Still more was it a procedural twilight, where the power of bureaucratic discretion prevailed by declaring the form of the law in ambiguous circumstances.
After a flurry of consultations “at ministerial level” that also weighed “the possibility of repercussions with other governments,” (London Times, Aug. 18, 1972) the Heath government classified the fugitives as refugee illegal aliens and repatriated them within days, lamely explaining that Gibraltar, a small place, didn’t have much room for asylum claimants. And once they were fitted with the “illegal alien” hat it was simple: “they were returned to Morocco because that was the place from which they came.” (the Times, Aug. 19) Application, rejection, and deportation all took place within a mere 15 hours, purposefully too fast for anyone to get wind of what was happening or to mobilize resources in support of the Moroccans.
London’s legal chicanery drew a discomfited response from some other elites as well as members of the public or at least those with a propensity towards letters to the editor in the early 1970s. Parliamentarian Ivor Richard fumed that “there was surely no necessity in international law or in humanity deliberately to have sent them back to what appears to be their deaths.”
The Times would editorialize in that same Aug. 19, 1972 edition against the “haste and informality in the procedure which contradict Britain’s long tradition of care in such cases” — noting the irony that
the absence of an extradition treaty [might have been thought] would make it more difficult for the Moroccan authorities to reach out to fugitive offenders on British soil. In fact it has made it easier for them … because of British ministers’ willingness to use the power to deport aliens whose presence is judged undesirable in such a way as to achieve the result of extradition. And the exercise of that power is not subject to the same safeguards.
Amekrane had no safeguards at all once he was back in Moroccan hands. That November, he was condemned to die along with his companion on the Gibraltar caper Lt. Lyazid Midoaui, plus nine other members of the Moroccan Air Force complicit in the coup attempt; the whole batch was executed together on this date at a prison in Kenitra.
But in Britain his case outlived the fusillade. For the overhasty asylum refusal, Amekrane’s widow filed suit against the UK in a European Commission of Human Rights court, eventually winning a £37,500 settlement.
* The relations between the states in question went beyond mere chumminess: Franco’s Spain was maintaining a blockade against Gibraltar, in consequence of which the imperial outpost was heavily supplied by and from Morocco. The men’s lives were sold, so critics carped, for “lettuces.”
LONDON, Jan. 4 (U.P.) — The Morocco radio tonight quoted an announcement from General Henri Honore Giraud’s headquarters that an unspecified number of “native” parachutists, dropped in North Africa from German planes, had been executed for trying to swing local populations to the Axis cause. [Vichy North Africa had only recently gone over to the Allies -ed.]
The “fifth column” chutists found “only rare complicity,” the announcement said.
“The natives and their accomplices have all been arrested and executed immediately after court-martial,” it continued. “Military authorities contributed efficiently to the arrest of these enemy agents.
“Large rewards have been distributed to all those who helped capture the culprits.”
On this date in 1936, Spanish aviator Virgilio Leret Ruiz was shot for resisting the fascists’ opening gambit in what would become the Spanish Civil War.
The first vignette of this recent film supporting justice for victims of the civil war is voiced by film director Pedro Almodovar, who says “My name is Virgilio Leret Ruiz … I’m a pilot, head of the air force in the eastern part of Morocco. I refuse to support the uprising, and at dawn on 18 July 1936, my comrades turned me into the first military officer assassinated for fulfilling his duty.”
Leret (Spanish link, as are all the ensuing links in this post), who has the incidental distinction of having patented an early jet engine design, was, circa 1936, stationed at the Atalayon Seaplane Base on the outskirts of Spain’s Moroccan exclave of Melilla.
This would put him in the front row for the very first action of the terrible civil war — the July 17 military uprising (Spanish link) that secured Spanish Morocco for the putschists within hours.
North Africa, correctly rated as easy pickings, was to be the first target of Franco’s rising, with the main event on the Iberian peninsula following the very next day. From their standpoint, it pretty much went off without a hitch.
This pro-Franco plaque in Melilla celebrates the city’s distinction as the place where his “glorious national movement” was launched. Image (c) Joshua Benton and used with permission.
Leret’s wife Carlota, spent 4+ years locked up and wrote this book about her fellow prisoners. She later moved to Venezuela, where Leret progeny still remain.
Despite the absence of any effective resistance elsewhere in Melilla, Captain Leret scrambled from a relaxing day swimming with his family and commanded his base to hold out for the Republican government.
While it was no real threat to the rebelling officers, the gesture required a slight detour by Franco’s forces, and even a couple of casualties before the Seaplane base surrendered that night to obviously overwhelming opposition.
The next day at dawn, “half-naked and with a broken arm,” Virgilio Leret Ruiz became — along with two ensigns under his command, Armando Corral Gonzalez and Luis Calvo Calavia — the first people executed in the Spanish Civil War.
A 2011 documentary, Virgilio Leret, the Blue Knight, retrieves the reputation of this “exceptional man”, and the experience of 20th century Spain through the fate of his family.
Mohamed Oufkir’s wife and six children were “disappeared” to a desert prison, not to emerge for 18 years. Daughter Malika, a royal favorite in happier times, wrote Stolen Lives about that ordeal. (Interview | Another)
We find him today, 13 months later as the arrow of time flies, in the same story — on the other end of the gun-barrel.
At around 4 o’clock this afternoon, a stunning attempt on the monarch took place as he flew back to Morocco from France. The king’s 727 was attacked by F-5 fighters of the Moroccan Air Force, surviving, it is said, when the quick-thinking king himself took the radio, pretended to be a flight engineer, and informed the attacking fighters that the pilots were dead and the king mortally wounded.
The ruse tricked the attacking pilots into allowing the crippled plane to make its landing in Rabat; they returned too late to strafe the airfield when they realized their mistake.
This quashed coup was swiftly laid at the door of Oufkir, the powerful Defence Minister.
Oufkir was declared to have committed suicide late this night, or else in the small hours of August 17; this still-standing official explanation has always had its doubters, with more extravagant versions implicating the offended sovereign himself in dealing out the punishment. Probably not, but here’s foreign correspondent Stephen O. Douglas’s reconstruction in Morocco Under King Hassan:
[Interior Minister Mohamed] Benhima said that when Oufkir arrived at the Skhirat palace at 11 p.m. he was met in an anteroom by General Mawlay Hafid and Colonel Dlimi, and when he realised that the king knew he had masterminded the plot he pulled out a revolver saying, ‘I know what to expect.’ Benhima added, ‘The two witnesses tried to stop him. In the struggle he fired three shots, one wounding him in the chest, the second I don’t know where, but the third was the most fatal.’ He said this was ‘the truthful and authentic version’.
‘General Oufkir committed suicide. He was not killed. It has been asked if it was a suicide of loyalty or a suicide of treason. Well then, I am authorised to tell you, to certify that since 1 p.m. today, and considering the elements of inquiry we have in our possession, I can affirm that it was a suicide of treason and not a suicide of loyalty,’ Benhima said.
Later at the same news conference, Benhima indicated he was just as astonished as most of the journalists. He said he and Oufkir were ‘great friends. We appreciated each other very much and had confidence in each other. We had a common denominator: our loyalty, and I think we wore the same decoration, given to us on the same day for the same reasons. He was a great patriot, a great minister. As I just told one of your colleagues, I cannot figure how he could have done what he did. But he is one of the most attractive people I have known, and what I have said about him today is painful to me, but the truth had to be told.’
I learned later that during the fatal night a military ambulance took Oufkir’s blood-stained body back to his Souissi house where it was placed on the floor of a playroom. His wife Fatima was away on vacation on the Mediterranean coast and there were very few people in the house. They found Oufkir had four bullet wounds, three in the back and the fourth having gone through the nape of his neck and out through his left eye, shattering his glasses, the coup de grace. Suddenly someone decided it was a mistake to send the corpse back to his family and it was hastily retrieved the same night. Thus evidence that he may have been ‘suicided’ disappeared.
Hassan somehow escaped the day with his crown, but with two attempts to overthrow him over the previous 13 months and a need to purge the many unreliable Oufkir loyalists in the armed forces — well, as the London Times put it (Aug. 22, 1972), “short of his incredible good fortune there is little else that can be cited in real terms to guarantee the perpetuation of his rule.” You could have made good coin wagering informed observers of the time that Hassan would live and reign another 27 years and be internationally saluted at his peaceful death at age 70.
On this date in 1971, four generals, five colonels and a major who had attempted a coup d’etat in Morocco less than three days before were shot without trial at the military barracks in Rabat.
The senior officers* had taken military cadets and stormed the palace where birthday celebrations for King Hassan II were taking place. They captured the monarch himself before the cadets themselves wavered, and loyal troops successfully counterattacked. Ninety-two people, including the Belgian ambassador, were killed in the affair; the king was at their state funeral on this date at the time the putschists were being shot.
This selection of the coup’s leadership gunned down this day in Rabat did not make an end to the reverberations; other trials followed later in the year, and some others who were implicated were simply “disappeared”.
Although we lack the testimony of any of the coup leaders themselves for their motivations, it occurred in the context of political and social upheaval in post-colonial Morocco. Frank H. Braun (“Morocco: Anatomy of a Palace Revolution That Failed”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1978)) argues that it was rooted in an eclipse of the traditional prerogatives of the military — and especially of the Berber nobility, who can be said to be the authors of the attempt.
So too can its failure be ascribed to the scant support this parochial and backward-looking cause commanded; non-Berber officers didn’t join the plot. Even so, with one of his government’s traditional pillars of support so heavily compromised (and decimated by this day’s executions and other reprisals), the coup led Hassan II to somewhat liberalize Morocco’s constitution the following year.
Which did not exactly still the tumultuous power politics scene in Rabat.
Mohamed Oufkir, the general who had coolly suppressed the 1971 coup** to become the preeminent military officer in the country, mounted his own bid for power in 1972 and suffered the same fate as this date’s doomed rebels.
* Notably, Mohamed Medbouh (French link), “one of my closest collaborators” in the estimation of the king himself (but also of “the mentality of a jackal”). His surname actually meant “cutthroat,” and was earned by his father’s literally having his throat cut — and surviving — in the 1920’s.
** A Berber himself, Oufkir may have been aware of the earlier coup — and cunning enough not to commit himself until he saw which way the wind was blowing.
On this date in 1993, the police chief of Casablanca was shot in Kenitra Central Prison for abuse of power.
Mohamed Mustafa Tabet (or Tabit) wasn’t exactly Captain Renault.
While Morocco still has prisoners on death row, Tabet’s was the first execution actually carried out in 11 years, and it’s the last execution in Morocco to date. He went on the rocket docket, just five months from his arrest to standing up against a wall.
To earn that rare distinction, Tabet exploited his official power to rape or sexually exploit hundreds of women. Tabet confessed to some 1,500 victims over 13 years; the minimum figure matches the 518 personal identity cards found in his apartment. (Also found: 118 video cassettes — many of them violent — and a computer list of his crimes.)
The “Tabet Affair” — actually called “Tabetgate,” proving that the United States retains the power of exporting ideas — opened a discomfiting window on gender and power in Morocco.
Webster University Prof. Don Conway-Long was in Morocco at the time researching gender and masculinity for his dissertation. His paper “Sexism and Rape Culture in Moroccan Social Discourse” (pdf) is probably the most illuminating readily-available English* document on the affair — and the many contradictory reactions it drew from contemporaries, and the pressure it put on the government to contain the fallout as “a morals case, instead of looking further into overall police corruption.”
Prof. Conway-Long was good enough to spare Executed Today a few minutes to explore power and gender in Morocco, then and now.
ET: The scale of the crime spree seems just unimaginable, that he could get away with victimizing hundreds upon hundreds of women.
DCL: And not that many came forward! It was just a couple of women. If it’s difficult to talk to rape and sexual assault survivors here [in the U.S.], it’s exponentially harder in Morocco.
You were in Morocco in the years leading up to this trial. What was the country like in terms of its gender outlook?
It’s more like our 1950’s in terms of the attitudes towards women. Some educated professors at one point were laughing at the idea that a man could be charged with raping his wife in the West. In some ways, attitudes in Morocco are maybe 20 years behind what we see in the West. We had that same conception in the 1950’s — Missouri actually finally changed that law in 1993. [See here and here -ed.]
Morocco was also probably one of the most liberal countries of the Muslim world in the sense of being more closely connected to the West. Morocco has had more openness, more tourism.
How did the Tabet case impact women’s position?
[In 1995,] about a year after I left, a battered women’s shelter was set up in Casablanca, the first one in Morocco. By comparison, our first shelters in the U.S. and U.K. were set up in 1971, 1972.
In 2004, they passed a new family law that changed a lot of the freedoms that women have — e.g., women can ask for divorce, and don’t have to obey their husbands.
But I have no idea if you can claim there’s any causal relationship between the discovery of Tabet’s crimes and these later events. At the time, some men thought he was this great sexual hero, very virile.
So what lies ahead?
The old king died in 1999; his son Mohammed VI is in there now and he’s young and more aware and one of the rising stars of the monarchs of the middle east, like the king of Jordan. His [Mohammed’s] head is on the right way, but running a country like this with so much variation — there’s 50% illiteracy, the Western Sahara conflict, a certain level of Islamist opposition, and around twenty political parties all the way out to the Communists.
So there’s no certain future, absolutely not.
As far as cases like Tabet’s — let’s hope it’s not happening still, but Morocco when I was there was a place where you pass six different kinds of uniforms walking down the street with Uzis that would be pointed at your body as you passed.