Freeze frame 1: The march against the Marañosa military complex
On May 7, 2005, the Plataforma contra el complejo militar de la Marañosa organized its seventh march to protest against the continued existence of this factory – more than 80 years after it was set up, in 1923, to manufacture chemical weapons used by the Spanish army during the Rif war (1921-1927). This year, the Plataforma had resumed the marches it had launched on January 30, 1994, and since then, with varying degrees of punctuality, had continued to organize until June 25, 2000, the date of the sixth march.[2]
On this seventh march to La Marañosa, the demonstrators marched from Perales del Río, a district of Getafe, to the pine forest surrounding the Military Complex, in an area declared to be under maximum protection. Under the watchful eye of civil guards on the other side of the gate, the protestors chanted slogans against the continued operation and expansion of the factory and read out a manifesto and letter of support from the Scientific Committee of the Nador Colloquium.
The aim of the renewed marches is to re-launch the mobilization against the La Marañosa complex, all the more so as Madrid was about to become NATO’s spearhead in Southern Europe, making the complex a benchmark technological institute for research into nuclear, bacteriological, chemical, and radiological weapons. The march’s manifesto denounces precisely these expansive projects imposed by the Ministry of Defense on the regional park’s direction, thus bypassing environmental sustainability reports. Working closely with history and memory associations in Spain and the Rif, the Plataforma is waging a socio-political battle to dismantle the factory’s buildings and suspend the military experiments being carried out there, as well as to repair the ecological damage caused throughout its history.
Freeze frame 2: The Nador Colloquium
On the other side of the Mediterranean, the Nador Colloquium was organized a year earlier, on February 14, 2004. Initiated by the newspaper Le Monde Amazigh and Amazigh activists, the symposium, which brought together Moroccan and Spanish researchers, activists and journalists, was a step forward for social activists who, for several years, have been trying to raise awareness of the use of chemical weapons during the Rif war and their harmful effects on health and the environment. The colloquium was an historic event itself since it was the first time that associations have succeeded in organizing such an encounter on the subject, breaking the chain of bans imposed by local authorities.[3]
The Nador symposium was widely covered by Moroccan and Spanish press, and was marked by the participation of eminent historians, including Maria Rosa de Madariaga and Sebastian Balfour. Such academic support reinforced the colloquium organizers’ argument for presenting “a solid scientific dossier” to assert their claims “for reparations, for the harm suffered as a result of the use of chemical weapons against the Rif” (Lemallam, 2021). The demands for reparation include the construction of oncological hospitals and the creation of Moroccan-Spanish research teams to further investigate the issue of cancer in the Rif and its potential relationships to intoxication by mustard gas used by the colonial powers (Raha, 2023). According to Mimoun Charqi, Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Rif Chemical Warfare Research Group, the least that Spain, France, and their former accomplices can do is to express their good faith, by morally acknowledging their historical, political, and legal responsibilities and proceeding to assess and compensate for the suffered damages. In particular, Charqi raises the possibility of taking legal action in Spanish and/or French courts against the concerned states, as well as against the involved German companies, notably those of Dr. Stolzenberg, the designer of the Marañosa factory.
Freeze frame 3: The funeral of Mohamed Benamar
Mohamed Benamar, a 17-year-old boy from Beni Bouayach, died this Tuesday, January 10 [2017], at Mohammed V hospital in Al-Hoceima, following a long battle with cancer [...]. As soon as his death was announced, a hashtag in his memory was launched and widely shared on Facebook [...]. Mohamed Benamar is not an isolated case. The rate of certain cancers has reached an alarming peak among the Rif population [...]. According to specialists, the chemical weapons used by the Spanish during the Rif war have a lot to do with it (Nahhass and Rhani, 2023a).
The funeral of the deceased was transformed into an act of protest against the marginalization of a region which faces the “ghost of cancer, spreading at a frightening pace”, and “accounting for 60 to 80% of cancer cases nationwide” (Dalil Rif, 2017). Akhenzir, the Riffian word given to this chronic disease, is often associated with the colonial chemical weapons, and which is worsened by the ongoing politics of marginalization, including in the domain of public health.
Three years earlier, on January 4, 2014, the death of Fatima Azhiriou, a 14-year-old girl, from leukemia had also set social networks ablaze. Her death, as that of several hundred cancer victims, is considered as a political issue (Tamazgha, 2014).
Despite the huge number of cancer patients in the Rif, the region has no hospital to treat them. Patients are sent to Casablanca, Fez or Rabat [ ...]. Dying of cancer in the Rif is not inevitable. It’s the effect of a politics [ ...]. Fatima Azhiriou’s death is not “normal”. It is an affair of state (ibid).
These excerpts from press articles reveal the mnemo-political significance at stake with regard to the cancer issue in the Rif, recalling the chemical gases and their long-term and persistent health effects.
Freeze frame 4: Arrhash – On Colonial Poison
On Sunday, September 30, 2007, the 9th Platform march against the Marañosa complex took place. Among the demonstrators in the front row was Tarik El Idrissi, the co-director of Arrhash – Veneno (2007). The march was also an opportunity to shoot part of the film, documenting the Platform’s struggle against the silence surrounding the history of chemical warfare. “Before coming to Spain,” says the film’s voiceover, “I had heard rumors, I thought they were just legends, until the day I heard about a group of people demanding the closure of the Marañosa military complex,” the center from which arrhash originated. Arrhash was used “indiscriminately and systematically against civilians, destroying and contaminating crops, killing livestock and poisoning rivers.” The documentary, says Tarik, is an idea that came from the gut:
When I was a kid, we often heard that cancer is passed down from generation to generation [...]. I wanted to document this oral tradition, this memory [...], make it visible. The idea of the film was strengthened by an article published in the national daily al-Sabah about the death of the last survivor of the chemical war: Mr. Faraji [...]. I wanted to see if there were any other survivors. Then, this desire coincided with the protests of ecological and anti-military associations against the chemical gas plant at la Marañosa (El Idrissi, 2022).
Following an initial investigation, Tarik discovers not only that Faraji was still alive, but that there were two other survivors, Laarbi and Mohamed. The first, nicknamed el Manco, was 9 years old when he lost his hand in a bombardment in 1924. His brother lost his life and his mother was wounded. His father was stricken by arrhash in 1925. The second, nicknamed Santiago, was still in his mother’s womb when the gas bombs began falling on the patio of their home. His mother and sisters, he was told, suffered attacks of chronic coughing, which later caused their deaths. His brother, aged 9 at the time, died after drinking water contaminated by the gas. Another brother lost his hair, earning him the nickname “the bald one.” “Arrhash affected the whole house,” says Santiago, “even the sheep lost their sight; the cactus and almond trees were putrefied by the poison, nothing has grown there since, the land has become sterile.”
Arrhash, like the other three “freeze frames,” shows that the Rif war continues to feed memory issues on both sides of the Mediterranean. Through associative activism, popular protests and cultural production, the work of this memory reveals not only a wound that has remained gaping and expansive, but also a politics in action that articulates the problem of the colony and its lingering effects. Indeed, these four freeze-frames, while zooming in on different aspects of this war and its memories – hence the relevance of this photographic approach –, bear witness to the persistence of colonial violence, its incorporation into flesh and soil, like a poison, arrhash, and like a cancer, akhenzir, which is passed on from generation to generation.
The aim of this text is to question the intertwining of the memory of colonial violence and its inscription in the gene transcript, like a chronic disease, while examining the mnemo-political significance of this intertwining, which is at work in social activism and local cultural production. Likewise, the question of healing is significant; for it reveals the underlying issues of recognition and reparation, as well as the embodied process of decoloniality.
La Marañosa chemical complex: A history of a factory of death
Let’s return to la Marañosa to illuminate some dark areas of the geopolitics of chemical warfare, as the history of this factory embodies the history of European colonialism and its dehumanizing and racist nature. An account in which human and non-human beings and objects intertwine: scientific experts, industrialists, bankers, the military, and politicians; rebels and harmful insects; chemical assets, instruments, bombs, and projectiles; economic and geopolitical interests; laws and conventions; bypass strategies and silence (Rudibert and Dieter, 1990[2022]).
Despite the international ban, Spain soon succumbed to the temptation to use chemical gas in its war in the Rif, especially after its defeat at Anoual in 1921. At that time, the Spanish army already had a chemical depository at Melilla to load projectiles and chemical bombs provided by France. Fearing a victory by the Riffian liberation movement that could signal the end of its presence in its Muslim colonies, France, right at the end of the World War I (WWI) and despite the Versailles Accords, began arming Spain to make it a chemical power. But since France had technical difficulties in producing mustard gas, the Spaniards turned to the Germans, who had played a leading role in the production and development of chemical weaponry throughout the 20th century. All the agreements and exchanges show that the Reich’s disguised support for the Spanish army was a priority, to strengthen its presence in the Rif and to regain its economic role, in particular, by rescuing the numerous mining authorizations and land holdings of the Mannesmann brothers.[4]
But the Germans could not immediately respond to Spain’s demands, especially as the majority of their production plants had already been dismantled, following the Versailles Convention, and their chemical gas reserves, gathered at the Munster-Breloh center, were closely monitored by the Allies’ control commissions. Stoltzenberg, who was in charge of processing and destroying chemical weapons, was in fact working through his company Kampfstoffverwertung to prevent the destruction of these reserves.
Following preliminary negotiations in Madrid in 1921, Stoltzenberg realized that not only did Spain urgently need chemical gases for its war in the Rif, but it was also aiming for a long-term program that would eventually culminate in the construction of a chemical gas plant.[5] Indeed, on June 10, 1922, a commercial agreement was concluded, stipulating the construction and commissioning of a chemical gas plant with a minimum production capacity, as well as the provision of technical equipment and expertise. The village of la Marañosa was chosen as a site to build the Fábrica Nacional de Químicos: an ideal location, to test the bombs discreetly and to take advantage of the river’s proximity, which provided needed water for gas production. But while waiting to complete a project of such scale, Stolzenberg was able to meet the urgent needs of the Spanish army, using a German method in which LOST is chemically produced from Oxol, a non-toxic material that is easy to store and transport[6]. Therefore, Stolzenberg planned to manufacture this product at his Hamburg factory and supplement LOST production at the Melilla depository – not far from Nador. Stolzenberg and his colleagues simply built two production units within this depot, to ensure the production in sufficient quantities to profusely pollute the fields and waterways to increase the destructive power of the gas.
The gas bombings, according to Stolzenberg himself, hastened the end of the Spanish war against the Riffians by polluting their scattered and isolated villages like oases in arid rocky and mountainous regions, in turn preventing the cultivation of fields and the maintenance of markets. Riffians were highly exposed; they had no protection against toxic gases, and were completely unaware of all their effects, something they would observe and experience in their own bodies.
Gassing the rebel-insects: Dehumanization and extermination of the colonized
In addition to Germans, France began, from the end of WWI, arming Spain to prevent the victory of the Riffian rebels. Lyautey warned against the Riffian liberation movement, regarding it as the greatest threat to European civilization and peace. As always, the victims of colonial violence have become the ultimate danger to peace and order; barbarians who threaten a civilized world, that of a superior race. This is how the mechanism of dehumanizing and animalizing the colonized begins to legitimize genocide.
In this same logic, Spanish military journals, including Memorial de Artilleria, published a series of articles on chemical gases, referring to their varying influence on different races. Based on “experiments” carried out in the USA on “black races” after WWI, spokesmen for the Spanish army began to announce that gas warfare was humane and not barbaric, given the small number of casualties it could cause and the fact that their chemistry could serve in public health and in agriculture, especially for developing pesticides against harmful insects. Actually, experiments with chemical gas intended for Spain first began on German soil, under the heading “control of harmful insects,” the aim being to produce highly toxic pesticides to solve agricultural problems. Thus, the term “insect extermination” was used to conceal research activities related to chemical weapons in Stolzenberg’s factories. But the word “insect” should not be taken literally, for the Riffian is deliberately equated with the noxious insect to be gassed to protect a civilized environment.
The Rif war took place in a post-WWI context, in which several colonized countries were the scene of experimentation of chemical weapons, despite moral protests and numerous treaties condemning them. The question was whether norms limiting the use of chemical weapons should be applied to “primitive” populations struggling against imperial powers. This tendency to authorize the use of otherwise forbidden weapons against uncivilized “other” was observed by Robert O’Connell (1989), who drew a comparison with the savagery of interspecific competition as opposed to the circumscribed rituals of intraspecific competition. Like the detrimental insects, the colonized belong to another unhuman species.
Fanon (2002[1961]) rightly reminds us that the colonizer, when speaking of the colonized, usually uses a zoological language – constantly referring to her/his bestial nature –, driven by a dehumanizing and genocidal impulse; for colonial ideology is based on a racial power of negation: negation of all human traces of which the other race is made. This is why colonial wars are always characterized by the “generalization of inhuman practices” on a massive scale, leading many colonized people to believe that they are “witnessing a veritable apocalypse” (Fanon 2011: 623-628). And this was also the case in the Rif. In addition to the testimonies of the last survivors, the archives analyzed by the historians Pando (1999), Balfour (2002), and de Madariaga (2005) are telling; all forms of life were severely affected by the poison. The bombardments were aimed at densely populated areas: villages, markets and intensively farmed districts. As a result, animals, crops, women, children, and the elderly, who were not taking part in the fighting, were severely affected.
The immediate consequences of these bombardments were tragic and can be gauged from the Spanish army’s reports. In addition to those who were killed because they were close to the bomb’s impact, the effect of mustard gas significantly affected people living in remote areas. Some, as in the testimonies of Santiago and el Manco, had been completely blinded. Even those who arrived a few hours later had burning sensations all over their bodies. Many other afflictions are also reported: boils, sores, as well as respiratory and gastric problems. The psychological effects were even more severe; the overwhelming majority of those affected were seized by panic and anguish. The inhabitants, as in Santiago’s testimony, also seemed shocked by the death of their animals and the contamination of their environment which further contributed to the spread of famine, disease and death among humans (Balfour 2002).
The colony like a cancer
Chemical gases also have long-term effects. The film Arrhash mentions that in certain areas of the Rif, the land had remained either barren for years or permanently damaged, where plants hardly grow at all or, if they do, they take abnormal botanical forms (Arhash, 2007; Balfour, 2002). The human body has also been afflicted over generations. “Chemical gases are the direct cause of the widespread cancer in the Rif,” says the Rif filmmaker Mohamed Bouzaggo. His film Iperita (2014) recounts the consequences of colonial violence on the inhabitants of a small village in the Rif, who are plagued by cancer. People suffer from it on a daily basis, with persistent coughing, weakening, bleeding, hair loss, and eventually death. Iperita is a tale of double violence; a colonial atrocity embodied as a chronic disease that continues to haunt the local population; then a lived experience of post-colonial cruelty exerted by local authority officers: contempt, corruption, abuse, and prison. Timouch’s tribulation powerfully personifies the deadly entanglement of these two kinds of violence. Her rape by a local officer embodies the post-colonial oppression, which reiterates the entrenched colonial wrong, lung cancer, that eventually killed her, after having slowly killed her father.
The demonstrations following the deaths of Fatima Azhirou and Mohamed Benamar reveal the mnemo-political significance at stake regarding the cancer issue, which is, according to associative actors, including the Nador symposium, a clinical manifestation of colonial toxicity. “I have yet to discover a single Riffian family without a relative who died of cancer. My own father, an uncle, and two cousins were killed by the disease,” says Rachid Raha. Ilyas Omari, former president of the Association de défense des victimes des gaz toxiques dans le Rif, also claims to have lost his father, his grandfather, and several of his uncles to cancer. Both make a direct causal link between chemical gas and cancer. The former claims that “most cancer sufferers are descendants of the victims of the Rif war, which 100 years later is still causing damage” (Raha, 2021).
According to some, chemical gases had a mutagenic effect on exposed victims, which explains the transgenerational transmissibility of their effects. Mimoun Charqi states:
The use of chemical weapons is topical because of the causal relationship between these same weapons and various illnesses, such as laryngeal cancer, which affect people living in the Rif. Moroccan hospital statistics show that the rate of certain cancers is reaching an alarming peak among people from the Rif [...]. Scientific work carried out by experts confirms the mutagenic and carcinogenic effects of the used chemical weapons (Charqi 2014).
These accounts, which inscribe colonial violence in the DNA, are not evaluated here for their scientific merit or as a historically documented truth because it is difficult to establish the inherited mutagenic and carcinogenic effect of mustard gas used by the Spaniards, but for their mnemo-political scope, that is, a feeling of persistent coloniality which is at work in local discourse, representations, and activism. In fact, when such embodied memory calls upon history, it is not only about seeking past factual evidence, but also to reiterate that the wounds of the past are still expansively open. As such, it is rather their socio-anthropological significance, which recalls these traumatic experiences, that should be elucidated.
It is such confusion between these two perspectives that has undoubtedly led the historian de Madariaga to an unnuanced reading of this social reality. According to her, the “supposed” cause-effect relation between chemical gas and cancer is nothing more than “sensationalist speculation” and unsupported instrumentalization of undocumented evidence, since none of these “experts has ever set foot in an archive” (de Madariaga, 2005: 45). In the same vein, La Porte (2012) states that despite medical evidence, it has not been possible to precisely determine a clear link between the use of chemical weapons and the numerous cases of cancer and genetic malformations that exist today in the Rif.[7]
Discursive practices link cancer “high incidence” in the Rif with colonial chemical poisoning, but the question is less whether there is a scientific correlation between the two than how this illness has emerged as a chronic pathological embodiment of colonial violence in the Rif. Commenting on this very debate on the association between gas and cancer, the voice-over in Arrhash retorts that “the bombardment remains permanent, silent, hidden beneath our skin, breaking down the genetic barricades...” The film situates the link at the level of perception, feeling and experience, and therefore at the level of living memory. Hence, beyond the biological aspect of cancer and its genetic transmissibility, it is its embodied memory that is at work in artists’ fictions and the activists’ scientific discourse. But that said, in the face of the unspeakable, scientific and fictional discourse often share the same imaginative and creative power, to bear witness to an unbearable lived experience.
Mnemopolitics, Accountability and Decolonization
Akhenzir is the local term to designate the multiple forms of tumors suffered by the Rif war victims. The word is telling; as it is seemingly derived from the Arabic word khenzir: “pig”. The a/khenzir, both the disease and the animal, are thought to have been imported by European invaders (Kabira, 2023)[8]. The a/khenzir thus represents an imposed proliferating bodily abnormality induced by colonialism (Nahhass & Rhani 2023a). In other words, what is at stake in these mnemopolitics is a desire for accountability, especially since Spain persists to deny its crimes, as evidenced not only by the recent reinforcement and expansion of the Marañosa factory, but also by the Spanish parliament’s vote against the bill calling on the government to acknowledge its responsibilities.[9] Following the 2004 Nador symposium, the organizers have approached some Catalan and Basque parties to support their request for accountability and reparation. As a result, in September 2006, deputies from the Catalan Esquerra Republicana party presented a Proposición no de Ley to the Spanish Congress of Deputies, calling on the Spanish government to acknowledge the State’s responsibility, and to undertake “acts of reconciliation, fraternity and solidarity with the victims, their descendants and the entire Rif population, as a request for forgiveness.” The proposal was jointly rejected by the deputies of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, in power at the time, and those of the Popular Party.[10]
Such a lack of accountability implies that this chapter of colonial history remains open and so does the desire for cathartic decolonization. Hence, decolonization is a pressing topic, which is, moreover, aggravated by current feelings of marginalization and oppression. The question of decoloniality in Morocco has not aroused the interest of social scientists who have mainly focused on questions relating to construction of national identity, in a rather ideological perspective, and for whom postcolonial violence is disconnected from colonial atrocities. The issue of colonial embodiments – an embodiment which recalls the persistence of the colonial in the present and the need to re-examine the problem of decoloniality both as a process of accountability and reparation and as sociopolitical recognition – has aroused even less interest. The “colonial disease” is certainly experienced as a proliferating physical pathology, but it is also experienced as a loss, an incompleteness, an exclusion, and as the repressive and capricious exercise of power (Burman, 2009; Rhani & et. al., 2022; Badiha & Rhani, 2023a, 2023b). Colonial violence, as Fanon (2011) put it is both a political and clinical concept, insofar as it is experienced by the colonial subject at the level of flesh, blood, and muscle: indelible scars, wounds, gashes, pathologies that furrow the body and psyche. In other words, this continued violence is as much the clinical manifestation of a political “disease” as it is a sociopolitical embodiment of its intrusive memory.
Arrhash begins with this solemn affirmation: “El Rif carece de historia escrita. Sus libros son la palabra, la voz, el grito.” The Rif, as a tragic experience of perpetuated violence, is not to be grasped in terms of documented, written history, but at the level of its embodied memory, expressed through the sighs of voice and flesh: for “memory is like a scorpion buried beneath the rocks of lies and silence; if it stings us, we are contaminated from generation to generation,” and only the work of memory – although risky – can heal the scars left by a painful colonial history.
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