Word: oufkir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prison memoir, Malika Oufkir's story opens sweetly, as if her life were a fairy tale in reverse. She is a rebellious 5-year-old in frilly dresses when she is adopted by King Mohammed V to become a favorite daughter's perpetual playmate. For the next 11 years, until well after King Hassan II succeeds to the throne, she lives the incredible life of a Moroccan princess. Beautiful palaces become her playgrounds; her every wish is a servant's command. She rides horseback with royalty, giggles through Cabinet meetings and travels on state visits. She greets so many foreign...
...considered her forced adoption a dream come true. But that confinement paled next to the one that was to last more than 20 years and that began suddenly one afternoon in August 1972. A few years earlier, she had been allowed to return to the home of General Mohammed Oufkir, her father. Oufkir, Morocco's feared police chief and Defense Minister, tried to seize power by having the King's plane shot down. The coup d'etat failed, and Oufkir was summarily executed. Exacting further vengeance for the betrayal, Hassan II had Oufkir's wife and six children banished...
...Oufkir's Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (Talk Miramax Books; $24.00; 293 pages) is a unique story of true life behind the palace walls. Living in Paris since 1996, Oufkir reports on the kindnesses as well as the cruelties and exposes secrets that few outsiders could learn, like the sex lives of royal concubines. Her heartbreaking confessions and the breathtaking plot have made the book a best seller in France in 1999 and now in the U.S. as well, thanks in large part to its selection by Oprah's book club. Writing her story, Oufkir explains between...
Initially, the Oufkir family, which included Malika and Abdellatif, who began serving his sentence at age 3, were imprisoned in a remote area in southeastern Morocco. For years they lived in almost constant isolation from one another in cells infested with scorpions, rats, cockroaches and fleas. Their possessions, including family photos, were destroyed by sadistic guards in a bonfire. After 15 years of misery came the "Night of the Long Knives": Malika's mother Fatima and her eldest son tried to commit suicide, and Malika slit the wrists of a sister in a frenzied but failed attempt...
...deep embarrassment to Hassan II, their travail prompted a series of efforts to address Morocco's human-rights abuses. The Oufkirs were immediately transferred to a luxury villa in Marrakech, where they spent four years being fattened up under house arrest before finally being freed in 1991. Not long afterward, Hassan II released the Tazmamart prisoners--58 ex-soldiers who had allegedly taken part in another coup and had been locked in tiny cells with little food and no light 24 hours a day for 18 years. After Hassan II's death in 1999, his son, King Mohammed VI, hastened...