Abderrahim Ouazzan: My family wants to know the fate of my father

Abderrahim Ouazzan, son of Belkacem Ouazzan, a victim of past human rights violations committed in Morocco, affirmed Saturday that the only thing his family requires is to know what became of his father, because "money would never compensate for our suffering."

Speaking during the third session of the public hearings, instigated by the Justice and Reconciliation Commission (IER), on human rights violations committed between 1956 and 1999, Abderrahim Ouazzan, depicted, in a moving testimony, the sufferance, humiliation and oppression sustained by his family after the arrest of his father, who had for long fought the French protectorate, to join, after independence, the auxiliary forces.

Belkacem Ouazzan, says his son, was arrested on April 17, 1973, while working in the Algerian borders, as he was accused of housing persons who were plotting against the regime. His family lost ever since track of him until he managed to send a letter from the penitentiary of Kenitra.

Ouazzan was acquitted by the court, which some parties did not appreciate, and, therefore, started their own plot to abdicate him from inside the prison of Kenitra. The Ouazzans, encouraged by the mother, immediately responded to this transgression by addressing letters to several officials, in brave defiance of pressures and threats.

Though Belkacem Ouazzan was reported among the dead by the Advisory Council of Human Rights in 1998, his family refuses to believe such a statement so long that they don't have a tangible proof of his death. "If misfortune deprived us from Belkacem Ouazzan alive, nobody can deprive us from him dead," noted Abderrahim Ouazzan.