At a Glance
Fez and Casablanca: Between the Old World and the New
Omar Benjelloun was born in 1935 in Fez — twenty-five years after the French protectorate was established, in the generation that had grown up entirely within colonial Morocco rather than in the Morocco that preceded it. His was the generation that had the colonial system's specific character as its formative political environment rather than as an interruption of a remembered precolonial order: the generation that had experienced, from childhood, the specific combination of colonial inequality and colonial educational formation that produced the independence and resistance generation's political consciousness in its most acute form.
He trained as a pharmacist — a professional formation that placed him in the educated Moroccan middle class that the colonial educational system was producing in increasing numbers by the 1950s, and that gave him the specific professional independence of a healthcare provider whose livelihood was not dependent on state patronage or on the commercial networks of the traditional notable families. The pharmacy in Casablanca — where he eventually practised and where he was killed — was the professional home of a man whose political commitments were maintained alongside his professional practice rather than replacing it, and whose pharmacist's community standing gave him a social position in the working-class and middle-class communities of Casablanca that complemented the political position he built through the USFP and the UMT.
The USFP and the Democratic Left's Second Generation
Benjelloun belonged to the second generation of the Moroccan democratic left — the generation that had grown up in the independence movement's political world rather than having built it, and that inherited the specific commitments and the specific tensions of the UNFP tradition in the form that the founding generation's struggles had bequeathed them. He had joined the UNFP as a young man, absorbing the specific political formation of the democratic socialist tradition that Ben Barka and Bouabid had built, and he became increasingly central to the USFP — the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires that emerged from the UNFP's 1972 reconstitution — in the period immediately before his death.
His specific political strengths were the strengths of the effective second-generation leader: the ability to translate the intellectual programme of the founding generation into the practical organisational demands of a party that needed to build and maintain a genuine mass base, the capacity to combine the trade union work that gave the USFP its working-class roots with the political analysis that gave it its intellectual credibility, and the personal courage to maintain public political commitment in conditions of sustained state pressure. He was, at forty, still developing the full scope of what his political career might become; the assassination closed that development before it was complete.
The Trade Union and the Left's Working-Class Roots
Benjelloun's role in the Union Marocaine du Travail maintained the connection between the Moroccan democratic left and the organised labour movement that the independence generation had built and that was essential to the USFP's claim to represent the interests of the Moroccan working class rather than simply the interests of the educated professional left. The UMT connection gave the USFP a presence in the workplaces of Casablanca's industrial zone, in the ports and the railways, in the public sector enterprises whose workers were the primary constituency for socialist politics in the specific conditions of post-independence Morocco.
The specific political importance of this connection in the mid-1970s was its relationship to the broader strategy of the Moroccan democratic left: the attempt to build enough of an organised working-class constituency that the USFP could claim to be a genuinely mass party rather than a party of intellectuals and professionals, and that the pressure it could generate through strikes and collective action could complement the political pressure it generated through electoral competition and public advocacy. Benjelloun's trade union work was the specific contribution he made to this strategy, and his assassination removed from the USFP's leadership one of the figures most effective at maintaining the labour movement connection.
18 December 1975: The Night of the Killing
The assassination of Omar Benjelloun on 18 December 1975 was carried out at his home in the Maârif district of Casablanca — the comfortable middle-class neighbourhood where many of Casablanca's professionals and political figures lived. He was shot multiple times by men who gained access to his home on the pretext of a visit, and who fled after the killing. The immediate identification of Chabiba Islamiya members as the perpetrators — which the police investigation established relatively quickly — gave the killing its official narrative: religiously motivated political murder by Islamist extremists who regarded Benjelloun as an enemy of Islam for his socialist and secular political commitments.
The official narrative was not false in its identification of the direct perpetrators, but the Moroccan left consistently maintained that it was incomplete — that the question of who had provided the weapons, who had identified Benjelloun as a target, and whether the cultivation of Chabiba Islamiya as a political tool by elements of the Moroccan security apparatus created a line of responsibility that led further than the direct perpetrators. The weapon used in the assassination was traced to an individual with connections to the Moroccan intelligence community; this trace was not pursued to its institutional conclusion by the investigation or the trial. The founding leader of Chabiba Islamiya, Abdelkrim Moti, fled to Saudi Arabia after the killing and remained there for decades, never being extradited to face Moroccan justice for his organisation's role in Benjelloun's murder.
The Unanswered Questions and Their Political Significance
The specific questions that have remained officially unanswered about Benjelloun's assassination — the weapon's provenance, the possible intelligence service connections, the relationship between the cultivation of Islamist extremism as a counterweight to the left and the specific act of violence that cultivation produced — are not merely historical curiosities. They are questions whose unanswered character is itself politically significant: the sustained failure of the Moroccan state to pursue the full accountability that the killing warranted reflects the specific political calculations that have shaped the Moroccan state's management of its own history.
The Moroccan left's persistent maintenance of the question — its refusal to accept the direct perpetrators' conviction as a complete resolution of the accountability question — is the expression of the political consciousness that the experience of the Years of Lead had produced: the understanding that the full truth about political violence in authoritarian systems requires more than the conviction of those who pull the triggers, and that the institutional and political responsibilities that create the conditions for political murder are as real and as morally significant as the individual acts of violence that express them. The question of who bears full responsibility for Omar Benjelloun's death remains, as of this writing, a wound in Moroccan democratic politics that has not been officially healed.
Forty Years, Incompletely Lived
Omar Benjelloun was forty years old when he was killed — younger than Ben Barka at his disappearance, younger than most of the Morocco section's figures at any comparable political moment. The specific tragedy of his age — the sense of a political career ended before it had reached the full scope of what it might have become — is part of the political meaning of his death in the same way that the specific tragedy of Kamil's death at thirty-four or Sankara's death at thirty-seven is part of the political meaning of theirs. The political systems that found them most threatening eliminated them before they could complete the work they were doing, and the assessment of what was lost has to include the assessment of what they might have achieved had they been allowed to live.
Benjelloun's specific potential — the combination of trade union experience, USFP leadership, personal courage, and the specific political intelligence that his contemporaries consistently recognised — was cut off at the point where it was still developing rather than at the point where it had been fully expressed. The democratic Morocco that the alternance of 1998 partially realised, and that the political development of the 2000s and 2010s continued to advance imperfectly, was a Morocco that figures like Benjelloun had spent their lives working toward. That he was killed before it arrived, and that the killing was never fully accounted for, are the closing notes of a political life that deserved better and that Morocco's democratic tradition should not allow to be forgotten.