Join on WhatsApp
Join on Telegram
Rabat – A seminar held in Rabat on Monday aimed to document the experiences of Moroccans who were expelled from Algeria in 1975 in response to the Green March.
Several Moroccans who experienced the expulsions first-hand participated in the seminar, giving their accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the Green March in 1975.
Tens of thousands of families (with 350,000 people in total) were expelled in December of that year, with some being separated from their families or having their land taken away.
During the seminar, the International Gathering in Support of Moroccan Families Expelled from Algeria gave the Moroccan Archive Foundation an archive of documents, photos, and videos documenting the history of the expelled Moroccans.
The archiving operation aims to make data accessible to researchers and historians in the hopes that they can defend the case of the people in question more robustly in the future.
Driss El Yazami, president of the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad, said the archive is a “significant event in the history of the cause, because the archive has been documented and is the start of a historic work, as you cannot write history without archives.”
Morocco’s National Human Rights Council (CNDH), which was represented at the seminar, said the cause was a human rights one, citing violations of national and international laws by Algerian forces during the expulsion.
The event also featured first-hand accounts from survivors, such as Bouasri Houssein, who serves as the Vice-President of the International Gathering in Support of Moroccan Families Expelled from Algeria.
“I still remember the story of our expulsion because I was 16 years old. I still remember it like it was yesterday,” he said.
Houssein, who was born in Oran, recalled that Algerian police barged into his family’s home on that day in 1975 and started yelling at his mother and siblings before taking them all to a police station.
“When we entered we heard wailing and crying, some were looking for spouses, some for their brothers, some for their children,” he added, stressing that the Algerian authorities “ripped apart families.”
