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7 - Travelling The orist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental
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- By Nate George
- Edited by Laure Guirguis
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- Book:
- The Arab Lefts
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 08 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 01 May 2020, pp 127-147
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
It is hard to imagine language more alarming to European and American imperialists and their allies than the terms Mehdi Ben Barka used to describe the conference he was organising. In May 1965, the Afro-Asian People‘s Solidarity Organisation elected the exiled Moroccan dissident to chair the preparatory committee for the upcoming ‘First Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America’. Better known simply as ‘the Tricontinental’, the conference was the first that was set to bring Latin America into the framework of Afro-Asian anti-colonial summitry. In conversation with the Havana press on 30 September 1965, Ben Barka pinpointed the forces that converged to make the 1960s a moment pregnant with global revolutionary possibilities:
[TheTricontinental] is historic because of its composition, because the two great contemporary currents of the World Revolution will be represented in this Conference: the current which started with the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, and which is the current of socialist revolution, and the parallel current of the revolution for national liberation …
This Conference is also historic because it takes place in Cuba; because the Cuban Revolution is in effect the concretisation of the union of these two historic currents of the World Revolution; because Cuba has known her revolution for national liberation and is now accomplishing her socialist revolution; therefore, it was the best choice for the celebration of this meeting.
Less than one month after making this link between the traditions of socialist and anti-colonial revolutions, Ben Barka was abducted from the streets of Paris, never to be seen again. His disappearance sparked an international scandal, leading to a highly publicised trial and a break in diplomatic relations between France and Morocco. While the question of who was behind the ‘Ben Barka Affair’ has been an international mystery leading to intense speculation for decades, a recent confession by an Israeli Mossad agent involved in his assassination has shed light on many uncertainties. On 29 October 1965, French police kidnapped Ben Barka off the streets of Paris, Moroccan intelligence officers tortured him to death, and agents of Mossad doused his body with acid and buried him in a forest on the outskirts of Paris.
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