Death has a remarkable way of making people forget reality.
The western and Arab leaders who flocked last week to the funeral of King Hassan II of Morocco produced the same outpouring of fulsome adulation, cloying hypocrisy and general unreality that marked the internment of the late King Hussein of Jordan. Right on the cue, the western media took up the theme, lamenting the loss of the 'moderate' Hassan who had been such a friend to the US and France. Hassan ruled Morocco with an iron hand for 38 years, using his 196,000-man armed forces and ubiquitous secret police. Thousands of political or tribal opponents, and those who sought to change Morocco's medieval feudal system, were imprisoned, tortured, sent to remote camps in the desert, or killed. The most important Moroccan political dissident, Mehdi Ben Barka, who called for an end to the monarchy and creation of democracy, was kidnapped in Paris by Moroccan and Israeli Mossad agents and murdered.