Chronicle of a Death Unseen: Cinematic Treatments of the Disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka

The toussaint holiday weekend in October-November 1965 saw France rocked by one of the most notorious political scandals of the Fifth Republic, one acknowledged by then-Minister of the Interior Roger Frey as "sans aucun précédent historique." ¹ While General Charles de Gaulle prepared to declare his candidacy for the December presidential elections, exiled Moroccan political leader Mehdi Ben Barka arrived unannounced in Paris for a lunch meeting at the Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard St Germain. Ben Barka's appointment on 29 October was with three men—director Georges Franju, aspiring film producer Georges Figon, and a journalist acquaintance, Philippe Bernier. The aim of the meeting was to further discussions between the various parties about Ben Barka's acting as historical adviser on a documentary about decolonization. Impressed by the left-wing credentials of Franju and his proposed scriptwriter Marguerite Duras, Ben Barka had agreed to work with them on Basta!, a film that, as Franju had set out in an earlier letter to him, would be created "à partir de documents d'actualités cinématographiques et de reconstitutions filmées" and would result in "une fresque historique de long métrage retraçant les grandes étapes des luttes des peuples décolonisés pour leur indépendance." ²

Mehdi Ben Barka never kept his lunch appointment, and the Franju-Duras film was never made. On arrival outside the Lipp, he was approached by two police officers who asked him to escort them to a different meeting. Compliant for reasons that have never been known, the politician was taken to the suburb of Fontenay-le-Vicomte, where he is presumed to have been tortured and killed at the home of a notorious gangster, Georges Boucheseiche. His remains were never found, and speculation about his fate still endures, not least because of the length of time that documents related to the case remained classified. ³ Suspicion about the alleged assassination fell on supporters of Hassan II, the Moroccan king whose regime Ben Barka so publicly opposed. General Mohamed Oufkir, Hassan II's Minister of the Interior, and Ahmed Dlimi, the chief of the Moroccan police, are known to have arrived in Paris hours after Ben Barka and to have been present at the Boucheseiche villa. The intermediary between the Moroccans and Boucheseiche was Antoine Lopez, a senior secret service agent at Orly Airport who facilitated their secret arrival and instructed police agents who intercepted Ben Barka at the Lipp. The motivations and goals of the Moroccan visit to the villa remain mysterious. Was Ben Barka to be threatened, persuaded or offered a diplomatic olive branch by his former pupil Hassan II? No evidence has been produced to confirm that he was killed intentionally, or indeed killed at all. But attention quickly shifted to the complicity of the French police and secret services in the abduction. Was it really possible that the French authorities had facilitated the disappearance of a major international political figure from the busy streets of central Paris? The lurid episode made headlines worldwide, with U.S. weekly Time magazine reporting that

France [...] found itself reeling under a scandal bridging two continents and of proportions not felt since the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century. It [has] strained ties between Paris and its one-time protectorate, Morocco, exposed France's security forces to charges of either dark collusion or woeful ineptitude, and forced an angry Charles de Gaulle to admit to the world that the much vaunted probity of his Fifth Republic is badly tarnished. ⁴

Ben Barka's abduction and political martyrdom have provided compelling material for historians and conspiracy theorists in equal measure. At the time of his disappearance, he was the president of the Tricontinental movement, a Third World political alliance that was due to meet formally for the first time at a conference in Havana in January 1966. The movement, which aimed to bring together the governments of the newly liberated, non-aligned countries, and representatives of liberation movements from the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, threatened...