Historical Knowledge between Pain Recollected and Societal Reconciliation Realised: the Moroccan Experience as a Model

The paper deals with wounded memory and memory of pain, the memory of those who have suffered arrest, forced abduction and other forms of abuse, and the role these play in writing a more objective national history; one that is compatible and reconciled with the past. The relationship between memory and history is a relationship between collective action and individual memory, in that the historian relies upon it for documenting the history of a specific event, as well as on the testimony of the political actor and campaigner. The purpose of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission that Morocco launched in 2004 was to reconcile with the past, overcome its gross violations of human rights and turn the page on “years of bullets,” and move towards transitional justice, and this paper monitors the extended political dialogue that nationally planted concepts of reparation, equity, reconciliation, transitional justice, and democracy. It emphasizes that testimonies and arrest warrants presented during hearings were important in order to produce historical knowledge benefitting from the widened margin of freedom and the individual’s transformation into an actor and witness in History, provide a hearing to voices of the marginalized, and reduce the hegemony of the central and dominant figure in the act of historical writing. The paper approaches the topic through examining samples of notes and testimonies of former perpetrators and detainees aimed at identifying the extent to which these memoirs contribute to expressing landmark cases in the history of Morocco, noting the characteristics of these notes as re-enactments of the experiences of detention and torture, albeit written in a present characterized by something of a detente and reconciliation

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The paper deals with wounded memory and memory of pain, the memory of those who have suffered arrest, forced abduction and other forms of abuse, and the role these play in writing a more objective national history; one that is compatible and reconciled with the past. The relationship between memory and history is a relationship between collective action and individual memory, in that the historian relies upon it for documenting the history of a specific event, as well as on the testimony of the political actor and campaigner. The purpose of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission that Morocco launched in 2004 was to reconcile with the past, overcome its gross violations of human rights and turn the page on “years of bullets,” and move towards transitional justice, and this paper monitors the extended political dialogue that nationally planted concepts of reparation, equity, reconciliation, transitional justice, and democracy. It emphasizes that testimonies and arrest warrants presented during hearings were important in order to produce historical knowledge benefitting from the widened margin of freedom and the individual’s transformation into an actor and witness in History, provide a hearing to voices of the marginalized, and reduce the hegemony of the central and dominant figure in the act of historical writing. The paper approaches the topic through examining samples of notes and testimonies of former perpetrators and detainees aimed at identifying the extent to which these memoirs contribute to expressing landmark cases in the history of Morocco, noting the characteristics of these notes as re-enactments of the experiences of detention and torture, albeit written in a present characterized by something of a detente and reconciliation

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