Moroccan doctor, activist and civil society activist Noureddine Dahan (Al Jazeera)
Moroccan doctor, activist, and civil society activist Noureddine Dahan said, “The Spaniards who came to northern Morocco were not mostly old-fashioned, but rather looking for better opportunities to live.”
Dahhan explained - in an interview with the “Maghreb” podcast via the “Atheer” platform affiliated with Al Jazeera Media Network - that the difficult economic conditions that these Spaniards experienced in their country, and the frantic quest of their empire to search for a foothold among the major players at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, prompted some Historians consider Spanish colonialism a “poor colonialism” because its military power was not compatible with its economic situation at that time.
Dahhan pointed out that "Abdul Karim Al-Khattabi played a pivotal role that went beyond leading the resistance to rebuilding awareness, unifying the ranks of the tribes, and forming an organized and modern resistance force that was able to confront a superior Spanish army heavily armed and equipped, and even defeat it in the Battle of Anwal," the repercussions of which had a tremendous impact. Inside Spain, which led to the Spanish Civil War later.
The Moroccan doctor touched on exciting and forgotten details about the modern history of Morocco, from the Battle of Anwal to the Skhirat coup against the late King Hassan II, which intersected remarkably with the family biography from grandfather to grandson, and from here came the importance of the testimony and its specificity, as it moved away from the academic documentary narrative, and approached the human aspect. Direct.
When colonialism is "poor"
According to what Dahhan reported from his grandfather, the vast majority of Spaniards who came to northern Morocco “belonged to the poor class, and came from the Andalusia region in southern Spain (according to the modern division of the Spanish regions), and they shared housing with the Moroccans in the same neighborhoods, and even Moroccan women The Spanish women took turns breastfeeding their children,” and this differed greatly from the areas of French colonialism, where the French tended to isolate themselves in their own neighborhoods.
To rejoice at the death of your direct commander in battle
In this context, Nour al-Din Dahan presented what could be considered a rare and unprecedented testimony about the Battle of Anwal through the eyes of his grandfather, who participated in the battle, but participated as a soldier in the Spanish army. He explained the details of the difficult social and economic circumstances that led his grandfather to make this decision, and the efforts of the Abd al-Adha forces to The noble rhetorician who was persistent in convincing the Moroccans of the Spanish army to join it, those who fought those battles under duress and without the slightest desire to fight, to the point that his grandfather “rejoiced at the killing of his commander, the Spanish captain, with a bullet in the middle of his forehead because that would avoid him entering into a direct confrontation with his Moroccan brothers.”
What is the relationship of the Moroccans to Franco's army that participated in the Spanish Civil War?
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More exciting details in the full episode of the 🎙️ #Maghreb podcast on #Atheer platforms.
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Moroccan children fuel Franco in the Spanish Civil War
The defeat of the Spanish in the year 1921 had a profound impact politically, militarily, and socially on the Spanish interior. The sequence of events that followed contributed to Francisco Franco’s leadership of a military coup against the Spanish Republic in 1936, which he ironically began in Morocco, leading to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Here, the Dahhan family name will appear again through the father this time, who in turn will enlist in the Moroccan Legion affiliated with the Spanish Army while he is still a 13-year-old child, where he will witness the landing of Moroccan forces on Spanish territory, and fight a number of fierce battles in various cities. The fronts against the Republican forces, and in harsh conditions, as the soldiers were “removing the wooden boards from the churches to warm themselves with their fires from the extreme cold.” He was also wounded twice before entering Madrid with Franco’s victory and the end of the civil war in 1939.
Why did Spanish sappers fight with Abdul Karim Al-Khattabi against #Spain?
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Many interesting stories are waiting for you in this episode of the podcast 🎙️ #Moroccans on #Atheer platforms.
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The Skhirat coup and a childhood in the barracks
Dahhan then moves on to talk about his childhood. Dahhan was born one year after independence, when his father joined the Royal Armed Forces, with what that meant about the childhood that Noureddine lived in the barracks. Then it was the pivotal event in which the family’s fate intersected with the history of Morocco from New when the father refrained from participating in the planning and implementation of the coup attempt carried out by Ababou to overthrow the rule of the late King Hassan II.
A Jew from #Morocco 🇲🇦 rejected Israeli citizenship and fought for the freedom of #Palestine 🇵🇸
Stay tuned for the full story with Mohamed Al-Ramash and his guest, Dr. Noureddine Dahan, in the next episode of the podcast🎙️ #Maghreb pic.twitter.com/hPjZkdCfnC
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Early struggle awareness and dreams of studying medicine
It was not an easy matter for the guest of the episode to achieve his dream of studying medicine, with the years of the seventies being linked to a specific political and struggle reality, especially in the period after the two coup attempts against the late King Hassan II, and the escalation of the pace of strikes and arrests among the oppositionists, so that Noureddine Dahan had a role in fighting “ “A Battle of Struggle” contributed to making room for a number of people from the poor class to continue their studies at the Faculty of Medicine in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, after it had been restricted for years to people from the wealthy classes and influential families. Dahhan was satisfied with three years, before he immigrated to the Netherlands to complete his studies and begin a long, rich and distinguished career with... Specialization in pediatrics.
Lisan Al-Din Boukhbaza.. Biography of a combat doctor
The episode also witnessed a narration of the stages of a forgotten story, as Noureddine Dahane told about the “Arab Guevara”, Lisan Eddine Boukhba, a Moroccan doctor who hails from the city of Tetouan in northern Morocco.
Details of the battle in the third episode of the #Maghreb podcast: https://t.co/ZHB2VarAQU pic.twitter.com/Ar1XwVKbWp
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Dahan and Boukhbaza combined their studies, before they were separated by the choices of Saint Eddine, who volunteered in the ranks of the Palestinian revolution and traveled to the camps of southern Lebanon in the 1980s, before returning to Morocco because he was “not convinced by the approach of the PLO factions and the horizon of their project” before setting off on his journey to Latin America, and specifically to the country of El Salvador, which witnessed a civil war between the opposition and the American-backed government at the height of the Cold War between the Western and Eastern camps. He died in 1987 when he was not yet thirty years old.
White uniform in children's service
At the conclusion of the episode, Noureddine Dahan spoke about the reality of medicine in Morocco today, based on his long experience of more than three decades, which he spent in Dutch hospitals specializing in pediatrics, and the “bleeding of Moroccan doctors” who emigrate in large numbers every year outside the country in search of better opportunities in Europe and elsewhere. , analyzing the reasons for this phenomenon, and at the same time criticizing the transformation of some health institutions into institutions whose goal is only financial profit, in contravention of the “lofty message of medicine.”
Source: Al Jazeera