Rabat/Madrid - Moroccans were known as some of the fiercest
fighters among the troops of right-wing General Francisco Franco in
Spain's 1936-39 civil war.
But 70 years later, Moroccan campaigners see Franco's 'Moorish
troops' as victims and seek an investigation to establish 'the truth'
about their fate.
Moroccans who fought for Franco were often recruited by force,
says Abdesslam Boutayeb, president of the Moroccan Centre for Common
Memory and the Future (CMCA), which is trying to raise the issue with
Spain.
Spanish historian Maria Rosa de Madariaga, however, questions such
views, saying Moroccans joined Franco's troops voluntarily and that
they cannot be compared with Franco's opponents killed in reprisals
during the war and the general's ensuing 36-year dictatorship.
When Franco set out to topple Spain's republican government, he
launched his uprising from Morocco, the north of which was a Spanish
protectorate at the time.
An estimated 80,000 Moroccans were recruited to fight alongside
Francoists in the war, which claimed about 500,000 lives before the
republicans were defeated.
The Moroccan soldiers had a savage reputation and were greatly
feared, as was Franco's personal Moorish Guard after the war.
Francoists spread stories about the Moroccans' cruelty to frighten
their opponents, Moroccan researcher Boughaleb El Attar writes in the
Spanish daily El Pais.
The stories, which El Attar sees as having a racist component,
contributed to a negative image of Moroccans that still lingers in
Spain to this day.
Franco's Moroccan soldiers were usually poor inhabitants of the
northern mountainous Rif region, who joined the general's troops to
be fed and to get a salary, according to testimonies of war veterans.
Despite Catholicism forming an important part of his nationalist
ideology, Franco did not hesitate to recruit Muslims to whom he
presented his uprising as a joint Christian-Muslim fight against
godless 'reds.'
The Moroccans joined a foreign war the real causes of which they
knew nothing about, El Attar writes.
Many of the Moroccans were recruited against their will, Boutayeb
told the German Press Agency dpa. De Madariaga - author of a book on
the subject - disagrees.
In an article she wrote for El Pais, de Madariaga also doubts
Moroccan claims that the Moroccan soldiers included 10,000 children.
The CMCA wants to take advantage of Spain's 2007 Law of Historic
Memory, which seeks to restore the dignity of Franco's forgotten
republican victims.
Measures include support to groups digging up remains of
republicans from mass graves.
The mass graves are also believed to contain bones of Moroccan
soldiers, tens of thousands of whom went missing in the war,
according to figures given by Boutayeb.
The CMCA has the backing of the National Rally of Independents
(RNI), one of the main parties in Morocco's coalition government,
though the government as such has remained silent on the subject.
Spanish political parties are also not keen to discuss what Emilio
Silva describes as a 'complicated and delicate subject.'
Silva represents the Association for the Recovery of Historic
Memory (ARMH), the biggest group exhuming republican remains from
mass graves.
The Moroccan soldiers 'supported a coup' backed by fascist Italy
and Germany against Spain's legal government, and 'came here to kill
people,' Silva told dpa.
'They were given pensions, while the republicans got nothing,' he
complains.
Most observers, however, agree that the pensions now received by
about 2,000 Moroccan war veterans or widows are miserably small.
Although the Franco regime fixed the level of the pensions in an
'irrevocable' decision, it would be fair for the Moroccans to get the
same - much higher - amount of pension money that Spanish war
veterans get, de Madariaga wrote.
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