Jason Goodwin

Consigned to a living tomb: Aziz BineBine endures 18 years in a subterranean prison

His tiny cell was a filthy furnace in summer and freezing in winter. Yet this innocent young Moroccan survived, through faith and true grit

Credit: Getty Images

Imagine being on indefinite lockdown, imprisoned in a dark, underground, 6’ x 12’ cell, freezing in winter, boiling in summer and infested with cockroaches and scorpions. The bed is a narrow concrete ledge, where you can only sleep on your side. The toilet has no U-bend, and your cell, No. 13, at the end of a run of cells, receives all the waste and floodwater from the others. There are no windows.

Aziz BineBine spent his young adult life there, 18 years from 1973 to 1991. His crime was to have participated unwittingly as a young cadet officer in an abortive 1971 coup against Hassan II of Morocco. He escaped, bewildered, from a bloodbath at the palace without having fired a shot. He turned himself in, was tried and imprisoned. A year later, when a second coup attempt was crushed, he and others were sent to Tazmamart, a secret prison beneath a hangar in the desert whose very existence was denied by the Moroccan government.

Over the next two decades BineBine and his fellow inmates lived ‘united by the same suffering, the same misery, and the unspeakable horror of our fall from grace’. They were given a small roll and chickpea broth at midday and plain pasta in the evening. Most of those who drank the water got diseases and died — but people died all the time, year after year, by no means only from drinking the water. BineBine, however, survived, to write this extraordinarily compassionate testament to their lives in and out of prison, and their deaths.

How did Aziz BineBine not go mad, consigned almost by accident to a living tomb?

How, you wonder, did he not go mad, consigned almost by accident to a living tomb? Many of his neighbours did, such as Chmicha, or Little Son, who after six months gave up clothes and food, and sat in the freezing damp with his head in his mother’s lap, begging her to eat, not to be sad.

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