With heavy hearts, we mourn our dear colleague, the Moroccan activist and human rights defender Sion Assidoun, one of the founders of the BDS movement in Morocco and a tireless voice for Palestinian liberation until his final days.
In the early hours of Friday, November 7th, Sion succumbed to severe wounds he had sustained due to an apparently deliberate attack a few months ago by assailants who remain anonymous and may well be connected to the authoritarian regime in Morocco.
The regime has for many years repressed and silenced dissenting voices. Among them were courageous figures like Sion, who exposed and campaigned against the regime’s shameful betrayal of Palestinians. Sion has fiercely opposed the regime’s military and security alliance with the genocidal Israeli state and with the Zionist movement , which he fought with passion.
From the fires of May ’68 uprising in France to the prisons of Hassan II’s Morocco after the famous 1973 trials, where he was sentenced to 15 years in Prison, Sion never bowed, never broke. His life was a bridge between worlds – Amazigh, Arab and Jewish, a Moroccan and a universal freedom fighter, all bound together by the unyielding belief that liberation and the struggle to end all oppressions know no borders. Even after years behind bars, his heart beat for Palestine, for the oppressed, for the dignity of humanity itself.
Now the comrade rests in dignity, in a long legacy of struggle. Yet that legacy continues to inspire us to continue our struggle, until the just and nourishing world he dreamed of can become a reality.