Hassan II

Hassan II was king of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999, and he survived two attempts by his own army to kill him. He was the eldest son of Mohammed V, was educated in Rabat and took a law degree at Bordeaux, and went into exile with his father when the French deposed him in 1953. He commanded the armed forces before succeeding to the throne. His rule was authoritarian and is remembered in Morocco as the years of lead: opponents were imprisoned, tortured or disappeared, and the secret prison at Tazmamart held survivors of the coup attempts in conditions designed to kill them slowly. In 1971 rebel cadets attacked his birthday party at Skhirat; in 1972 his own air force strafed his aircraft in flight, and he is said to have taken the radio himself and told the attacking pilots the tyrant was dead, which stopped them. In 1975 he organised the Green March, sending 350,000 unarmed civilians into Spanish Sahara to claim it, a manoeuvre that gained the territory and began a war with the Polisario Front that has never been settled. He positioned himself as a mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict and maintained quiet contact with Israel for decades. He also chaired the Al-Quds Committee on Jerusalem. His son Mohammed VI later established a truth commission into the abuses of his father's reign, an unusual step for a monarchy. He was an accomplished golfer and built one of the largest mosques in the world at Casablanca, financed partly by a public subscription that was not entirely voluntary. Tazmamart was officially denied for years and closed only in 1991 after sustained international pressure.

• Lived: 1929 CE – 1999 CE
• Nationality: Moroccan
• Roles: ruler