From Palace To Prison

By Scott MacLeod

For a prison memoir, Malika Oufkir's story opens sweetly, as if her life were a fairy tale in reverse. She is a rebellious 5-year-old in frilly dresses when she is adopted by King Mohammed V to become a favorite daughter's perpetual playmate. For the next 11 years, until well after King Hassan II succeeds to the throne, she lives the incredible life of a Moroccan princess. Beautiful palaces become her playgrounds; her every wish is a servant's command. She rides horseback with royalty, giggles through Cabinet meetings and travels on state visits. She greets so many foreign dignitaries it makes her yawn. As a spoiled teenager, she cavorts with jet setters and fancies becoming a film star.

Desperately missing her natural parents, Malika hardly considered her forced adoption a dream come true. But that confinement paled next to the one that was to last more than 20 years and that began suddenly one afternoon in August 1972. A few years earlier, she had been allowed to return to the home of General Mohammed Oufkir, her father. Oufkir, Morocco's feared police chief and Defense Minister, tried to seize power by having the King's plane shot down. The coup d'etat failed, and Oufkir was summarily executed. Exacting further vengeance for the betrayal, Hassan II had Oufkir's wife and six children banished to a series of desert prisons. In 1987, Malika and three of her siblings briefly escaped and alerted the world to their plight, forcing Hassan II eventually to free the whole family from their medieval detention.

Oufkir's Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (Talk Miramax Books; $24.00; 293 pages) is a unique story of true life behind the palace walls. Living in Paris since 1996, Oufkir reports on the kindnesses as well as the cruelties and exposes secrets that few outsiders could learn, like the sex lives of royal concubines. Her heartbreaking confessions and the breathtaking plot have made the book a best seller in France in 1999 and now in the U.S. as well, thanks in large part to its selection by Oprah's book club. Writing her story, Oufkir explains between stops on an American book tour, allowed her to get some sweet vengeance of her own. "Living in silence for 20 years, you lose your dignity," she says. "You need to talk, you need to be a witness. I wanted Hassan II to know exactly what he did." Just as important to her is the cleansing effect the book is now having in Morocco. Though it is still banned, it has been widely read and discussed in the press as part of a debate on the country's feudal past.

Initially, the Oufkir family, which included Malika and Abdellatif, who began serving his sentence at age 3, were imprisoned in a remote area in southeastern Morocco. For years they lived in almost constant isolation from one another in cells infested with scorpions, rats, cockroaches and fleas. Their possessions, including family photos, were destroyed by sadistic guards in a bonfire. After 15 years of misery came the "Night of the Long Knives": Malika's mother Fatima and her eldest son tried to commit suicide, and Malika slit the wrists of a sister in a frenzied but failed attempt to end her suffering. More striking than the cruelty the Oufkirs endured, however, is their heroic will to overcome it. Despite their weak state and a formidable force of prison guards, they spent years planning escape. From a prison near Casablanca, they made it 200 miles north to Tangier and got word to French journalists in 1987 before being rearrested.

A deep embarrassment to Hassan II, their travail prompted a series of efforts to address Morocco's human-rights abuses. The Oufkirs were immediately transferred to a luxury villa in Marrakech, where they spent four years being fattened up under house arrest before finally being freed in 1991. Not long afterward, Hassan II released the Tazmamart prisoners--58 ex-soldiers who had allegedly taken part in another coup and had been locked in tiny cells with little food and no light 24 hours a day for 18 years. After Hassan II's death in 1999, his son, King Mohammed VI, hastened the turning of the page, allowing the publication of two Tazmamart memoirs and permitting a commemorative march to the notorious, now closed Tazmamart prison. "He is very courageous," says Oufkir. "Speaking about the past freely is the best way to build the future." Toward that end, Oufkir, now 48 and married to a Lebanese-born architect, has done her part.