➣Original in Arabic, translated by Alice S. Youssef

It is not enough for a state to brand a woman a whore in order to strip her of her dignity. 

Imagine a being who once tried to fight darkness by turning narrative into image, only to find herself its own victim. Imagine  that this ugliness is not the isolated individual cases, but the deliberate work of a state—one where the law evolves with the crime itself.  

During the years I spent defending human rights and the idea of liberating societies from tyranny and authoritarianism, I studied the history of political imprisonment in Morocco. Although the section concerning women's struggles during that period was largely overlooked, I had the opportunity to meet women who contributed to shaping Morocco's collective memory during the years of repression and violence under King Hassan II's iron fist. In those years, the regime's appetite for torture in its secret prisons was insatiable, unleashed upon its opponents without limit, and the period is remembered, rightly, as the bloodiest of all: a long accumulation of abuses, killings, disappearances, and mass abductions. And yet, even then, the state did not turn its vengeance upon the wives of its dissidents, as it has come to do in recent years. 

Once, while I was in a psychiatric hospital, treating my soul for the burden of the injustices I had suffered and the malice of the oppressive authority that had turned my name and life into flame to fan the tabloids, a team of doctors asked me why I had come. I replied, "I feel I am no longer able to protect myself." At this point, the team of doctors asked about the nature of the law in our country. I had not yet spoken about what had happened to me and my family, and of how that law seems to suspend itself the moment one of us tries to invoke it. So I said: "If the law truly existed, none of this would have happened." Stunned, one of them asked, "Who are you?". I replied, "My name is Khuloud, a human rights defender and screenwriter who has been besieged. I am the wife of a Moroccan writer and journalist who was arbitrarily arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. Mother of two children—the first I brought into the world under the polices’ eyes, and my daughter now lives beside her father in the forced exile he entered after leaving prison. This is the sixth year I have endured a barrage of verbal attacks, harassment, and blackmail at the hands of a press that answers to no law. Because of their campaign against me, I have been barred from working." the doctors asked. “ How so?” I replied, "It is a war that costs the authorities nothing," I said, "and yet it works." One of the doctors added, “ How so?” I said, "our country no longer needs to mobilize all its institutions to enforce the law," I said. "It is enough that there exists a press loyal to it, one that performs every role required: it threatens, it blackmails, it attacks, it sues, it accuses, it spies." 

In recent years, during the reign of King Mohammed VI, or the "New Era"—a period marked by the frequent use of the phrase "new concept of authority"—torture has become increasingly blatant.  

The state no longer practices it in the open, sanctioned manner of the old regime, and yet it has no wish to sever ties with it either, bound as it is by its engagement with UN mechanisms, and by the growing responsibilities it has taken on within that body since the sun set on the reign of the late King Hassan II—particularly given that the victims of that earlier era pleaded, in the UN's own chambers, that the crimes committed by his security and military apparatus never be repeated. 

However, the new regime has adopted a different approach and a different kind of torture, one fueled by public funds and emptied of Moroccan citizens' pockets to support its brutality . This is achieved through the establishment of a "private press" that feasts upon reputations, practices blackmail, and violates the dignity of every critical voice. It brands women as whores and accuses "men" of homosexuality, and then, in a bitter irony, turns around to champion their rights the moment it can cast them as victims useful for discrediting its opponents. 

The authorities in our country have chosen to use their subservient press to openly act as intelligence agents, feeding it private information about individuals in order to silence and exact revenge upon them. Not content with hurling the most vile insults at me, they have also branded me with medieval stigmas to discredit me in their war against a just cause,  a cause whose horrors and whose pain I have carried on my own shoulders, without ever once stepping back.  

It was not enough for the authorities in my country to pursue a policy of starvation against me by besieging me and intimidating everyone who works with me. It was not enough for them to strip me of my livelihood so unlawfully, while I am a mother of two children who need me more than anything. It was not enough for them to imprison my husband, with all the hardship and suffering that followed. It is not enough—not for a country, with all its institutions, to have inflicted such tragedies—and still it was not enough for them to brand me a whore. 

Translated by Alice S. Youssef

ARABIC