Хасан II: Король Марокко (1961–1999)

King of Morocco from 1961 to 1999

Hassan II (الحسن الثاني; 9 July 1929 – 23 July 1999) was King of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. He was a member of the 'Alawi dynasty, He was the first commander in chief of the Royal Armed Forces and named crown prince in 1957. He was enthroned as king in 1961 following his father's death. He was accused of authoritarian practices and human rights, civil rights abuses, particularly during the Years of Lead. A truth commission was set up after his death, to investigate allegations of human rights violations during his reign.

Mawlay al Hassan bin Mohammed bin Yusef al Alawi was born on 9 July 1929, at the Dar al Makhzen in Rabat during the French Protectorate of Morocco as the eldest son to Sultan Mohammed V and his 2nd wife, Lalla Abla bint Tahar, as a member of the 'Alawi dynasty. In 1943, a 12 year old Hassan attended the Casablanca Conference at the Anfa Hotel along with his father, where he met U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle. In 1947, Prince Hassan participated in his father's speech in Tangier (then part of the Tangier International Zone). In the speech, Sultan Mohammed wished for the French Protectorate of Morocco, the Spanish protectorate of Morocco and the Tangier International Zone to be unified into one nation. The speech became a reference for Moroccan nationalists and anti colonial movements and later led to Morocco's independence. Hassan later claimed that he had "profound resentment" towards the protectorate and that he felt "deep humiliation" from French colonialism, despite paying hommage to Hubert Lyautey, the first resident general of the French protectorate, he was highly critical of Lyautey's successors, noting their "stubborn stupidity" and "total insensitivity". In June 1948, Mawlay al Hassan obtained his baccalaureate from the College Royal. He pursued his higher education at the Rabat Institute of Higher Studies, a department of the University of Bordeaux, from where he received a law degree in 1951. In 1952, Prince Moulay Hassan earned a master's degree in public law from the University of Bordeaux before serving in the French Navy on board the Jeanne d'Arc cruiser. He was a doctoral student at the Faculty of Law of Bordeaux when in August 1953 his family's exile occurred. Having ascended the throne, on June 25, 1963, Dean Lajugie presented him with the insignia of Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Bordeaux. Prince Hassan acted as his father's political advisor during the exile. They later returned from exile on 16 November 1955. During the exile, Mohammed Ben Aarafa was named as the Sultan by the French government in Morocco, however, the Moroccan government does not recognize the title. Prince Hassan participated in the February 1956 negotiations for Morocco's independence with his father. It was during his tenure as Commander in Chief of the Royal Armed Forces that Hassan met General Mohamed Oufkir, Oufkir was later suspected of orchestrating a failed coup d'état to kill Hassan. After Mohammed V changed the title of the Moroccan sovereign from Sultan to King in 1957, Hassan was proclaimed Crown Prince on 9 July 1957. In this position, he was the president of the organising committee of the International Meeting at the monastery of Toumliline in 1957 and held the welcome speech. He was named prime minister in 1961. He was enthroned in the Royal Palace of Rabat on 3 March 1961.

In 1962, Hassan II and his aides wrote the Kingdom of Morocco's first constitution, defining the kingdom as a social and democratic constitutional monarchy, made Islam the state religion, and gave the king, whose person was defined as "inviolable and sacred", the title of Amir al Mu'minin and "supreme representative of the nation". The constitution also reaffirmed Morocco's choice of a multi party political system, the only one in the Maghreb at that time. In June 1965, in the aftermath of prior riots, Hassan dissolved the Parliament and suspended the constitution of 1962, declaring a state of exception that would last more than five years, after which he would rule Morocco directly, however, he did not completely abolish the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy. An alleged report from the U. S. Secretary of State claimed that, during this period, "Hassan [appeared] obsessed with the preservation of his power rather than with its application toward the resolution of Morocco's multiplying domestic problems." In 1991, he pardoned 2000 prisoners, including political prisoners and people held in secret prisons including the ones in Tazmamart. In 1998, the first opposition led government was elected by Hassan.

In the early 1970s, King Hassan survived two assassination attempts. The attempted coups reportedly reinforced Hassan's rule over Morocco. The first coup attempt, dubbed by the media as the Skhirat coup attempt, occurred on 10 July 1971, at 14:02 (GMT), The coup ended the same day when royalist troops took over the palace in combat against the rebels. It was subsequently claimed by the Moroccan authorities that the young cadets had been misled by senior officers into thinking that they were acting to protect the king. Hassan himself supported the thesis that the coup was supported by Libya, raising tensions between the two countries. The next day, Hassan attended the funerals of royalist soldiers killed during the attempted coup. during a second attempt, dubbed by the media as the Airmen's coup, six F 5 military jets from the Royal Moroccan Air Force opened fire on the King's Boeing 727 while flying at 3,000 metres altitude over Tétouan on the way to Rabat from Barcelona, following a meeting with Gregorio López Bravo, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, killing eight people on board and injuring fifty. A bullet hit the fuselage but they failed to take the plane down despite it being badly damaged. Hassan hurried to the cockpit, took control of the radio, and reportedly shouted: "Stop firing, the tyrant is dead! "; After doing an emergency landing at Rabat–Salé International Airport, Hassan escaped to his palace in Shkirat in an unmarked car. The war heavily damaged both countries economy, Hassan asked citizens to not celebrate Eid al Adha due to the economic recession caused by the war. A peace treaty and armistice ended the war in on 15 January 1969. During Hassan II's reign, Morocco recovered the Spanish controlled area of Ifni in 1969, and gained control of two thirds of what was formerly Spanish Sahara through the Green March in 1975.

In the Cold War era, Hassan II allied Morocco with the West generally, and with the United States in particular, after his death, The New York Times called him "a monarch oriented to the west". During Hassan's tenure as prime minister, Morocco controversially accepted Soviet military aid and made overtures towards Moscow. During an interview, Hassan stated that "as an Islamic people, [Morocco has] the right to practice bigamy. We can wed East and West and be faithful to both". BMAQ also gives out scholarship to students living in the city, as well as donating equipment to schools and kindergartens. Hassan II was alleged to have covertly cooperated with the State of Israel and Israeli intelligence. In Operation Yachin, he allowed over 97,000 Moroccan Jews to be migrated to Israel from 1961 to 1964 in exchange for weapons and training for Morocco's security forces and intelligence agencies. In an arrangement financed by the American Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Hassan II was paid a sum of $500,000 along with $100 for each of the first 50,000 Moroccan Jews to be migrated to Israel, and $250 for each Jewish emigrant thereafter. Bergman also alleged that the Moroccan DST and Mossad collaborated in a 1996 plot to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the plot involved a woman close to bin Laden who was an informant for the DST, however, the mission was aborted due to rising tensions between Morocco and Israel. Relations with Algeria have deteriorated sharply due to the previous Sand War and the Western Sahara conflict, with Algeria unconditionally backing and funding the Polisario Front since its creation in 1973. Relations with Mauritania during the Western Sahara conflict were less than ideal, with Morocco recognizing Mauritania as a sovereign country in 1969, nearly a decade after Mauritania's declaration of independence. During the 20th congress of the Organization of African Unity, Hassan II went on stage and declared that Morocco's membership of the OAU was suspended as a result of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic joining the OAU. Morocco entered into a diplomatic crisis with Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara following his decision to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Hassan II was close with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, even hosting him in 1979 when he was exiled.

Economically, Hassan II adopted a market based economy, where agriculture, tourism, and phosphates mining industries played a major role. In 1967, he launched an irrigation project consisting of over 1 million hectares of land. Hassan eventually came to develop very good relations with France, especially with parts of the French media and financial elite. In 1988, the contract for the construction of the Great Mosque of Casablanca, a considerable project in scale, financed through compulsory contributions, was awarded to Francis Bouygues, one of the most powerful businessmen in France and personal friend of the King. His image in France was tarnished however following the publication in 1990 of Gilles Perrault's Our Friend the King, in which the writer describes the conditions of detention in the Tazmamart prison, the repression of left wing opponents and Sahrawis, political assassinations, but also the social situation and the poverty in which the majority of Moroccans live. On 3 March 1973, Hassan II announced a "Moroccanization" policy, in which state held assets, agricultural lands, and businesses that were more than 50 percent foreign owned were taken over and transferred to local companies and businessmen. From the 1990s onwards, a large scale operation to privatize public companies was carried out by the king and André Azoulay, the monarchy's economic advisor. The French group Accor was thus able to acquire six hotels of the Moroccan chain Moussafir and the management of the Jamaï Palace in Fez. This privatization operation enabled Moroccan notables close to the government to control the most prominent public companies, and French companies to make a strong comeback in the country's economy. The royal family acquired the mining group Monagem.

Hassan's reign was infamous for a poor human rights record labeled as "appalling" by the BBC. It was however, at its worst during the period from the 1960s to the late 1980s, which was labelled as the "years of lead" and saw thousands of dissidents jailed, killed, exiled or forcibly disappeared. During this time, Morocco was one of the most repressive and undemocratic nations in the world. However, Morocco has been labeled as "partly free" by Freedom House, except in 1992 and 2014 when the country was labeled "Not free" in those years respectively. The country would only become more democratic by the early 1990s amid strong international pressure and condemnation over the nation's human rights record. Due to the strong rebuke from other nations and human rights groups, and also because of the realistic threat of international isolation, Hassan II would then gradually democratize the nation over time. Since then, Morocco's human rights record has improved modestly and improved significantly following the death of Hassan II. Hassan II imprisoned many members of the National Union of Popular Forces and sentenced some party leaders, including Mehdi Ben Barka, to death. In October 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, the main political opponent and fierce critic of Hassan II, was kidnapped and disappeared in Paris.

On 23 July 1999 at 16:30 (GMT), Hassan II was pronounced dead from a myocardial infarction by the CHU Ibn Sina Hospital in Rabat, having been hospitalized earlier that day for acute interstitial pneumonitis; he was 70 years old. The Moroccan government ordered forty days of mourning, while entertainment and cultural events were cancelled, and public institutions and many businesses were closed upon news of the king's death. Days of mourning were also declared in several other countries, the majority being Arab states. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Mohammed VI. Hassan was buried in a wooden coffin at the Mausoleum of Mohammed V on 25 July, following a national funeral service in Rabat. Mohammed VI was enthroned as the de jure King of Morocco a week after Hassan's death.

On 1 November 2022, Hassan was posthumously awarded the Pan African Prize for his contributions to the establishment of the African Union and Pan Africanism.