Ben Barka Family Rejects Cold War Espionage Claims Against Moroccan Opposition Leader

In a statement, Bachir, Mehdi Ben Barka’s son, reacted to the article in The Observer, the Sunday edition of the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled "Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka was a spy, suggest Cold War files". "Like weeds, slander constantly grows back. For a few years now, attacks on the memory of Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the important leaders of the Third World, a symbol of resistance to colonialism and the fight against neo-colonialism, Zionism and imperialism, have been spreading insidiously. They come through disinformation, slander, innuendo or amalgamation," he denounces.

He regrets that The Observer has taken up a publication dated November 2020, by the Czech academic Jan Koura, on December 26th. "The Observer almost entirely takes up the theses put forward by Jan Koura. These two articles (especially that of Jan Koura) reproduce in detail an article by a Czech journalist, Petr Zidek, published by the French weekly L’Express in July 2007. Nothing new under the sun of slander," notes the son of the former Moroccan opponent. According to Jan Koura’s work, previously classified Prague files show that Ben Barka not only had a close relationship with the dreaded Czechoslovak intelligence service StB, but also received substantial payments from it, both in cash and in kind.

Bachir Barka makes another remark: he raises a problem of terminology. "From the point of view of the StB - the only one presented in Jan Koura’s article and taken up by The Observer - Mehdi Ben Barka is presented either as a source or as an agent. The nuance is important. One can be an involuntary source without becoming an agent. [...] None of the documents consulted by Koura resolves the doubt. In the only document relating to his alleged "recruitment", dated 1963, Mehdi Ben Barka’s first name becomes "Mohamed".

The Ben Barka family says it is "deeply shocked and outraged by these deliberately fabricated ’pseudo-revelations’ without any hindsight or analysis of the situations, the historical and political context... The objective sought is to undermine the memory of Mehdi Ben Barka, to distort the meaning of his political action and his thought, in favor of the struggle of peoples against colonialism, imperialism and Zionism, for their political and social emancipation and for democracy." "We are surprised by the ease with which some can access thousands of documents, while for 56 years we have, with our lawyer Me Buttin, the worst difficulties in consulting those of other intelligence services that could help us finally know the truth about the fate of Mehdi Ben Barka," it is added.