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Approximately 80,000 Moroccan men fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. When the colonial wars ended, those men were recruited from very poor villages (some of them at the age of 16). Although the core collective memory that remains about those Moroccan troops ('the Regulars') concerns absolute cruelty, particularly towards women, they also form part of the history of the Spanish colonisation. During the Civil War, Franco's General Queipo de Llano promised that the 'castrated' Republican soldiers' women would know about the 'virility' of those Moroccan troops. Departing from fragmented historical data, this contribution presents a brief critical victimological analysis of grey zones and 'Janus' characters to better understand the complexities of victim and victimiser that overlap in the contexts of victimhood, accountability, colonisation, war and violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions of shared history, culture, and ethnicity ensured Muslim Moroccans a secure place in the traditionalist hierarchy of Francisco Franco's Spain. These perceptions shaped the colonial policies of Franco's ‘National Catholic’ dictatorship, which paradoxically portrayed Islam as compatible with Christianity and denied that Spaniards differed in essence from Moroccans. As the dictatorship continued to embrace ultra-conservative and anti-modern ideology, in Morocco its officials increasingly emphasized modern methods of economic development. In Spanish-occupied North Africa, the forces of tradition and modernity did not necessarily conflict. In fact, tradition could be harnessed to promote modernization and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]