‘Hillary Clinton Sold Her Soul When They Accepted That Money’

The day after Bill Clinton feted donors and dignitaries at an extravagant Moroccan feast under a warm Marrakech night sky, a group of local Sahrawi Arabs gathered for tea in a far more humble setting here to share their outrage that Clinton’s family foundation had accepted millions of dollars from a company owned by a government accused of repressing their people.

The four men used to work as miners for a subsidiary of OCP, the state-owned phosphate company that paid more than $1 million to sponsor the lavish outdoor gala and the concurrent two-day meeting of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation headlined by the former U.S. president. Its purpose was to highlight efforts by the foundation , its donors and the Moroccan government to improve the lives of marginalized people in North Africa and the Middle East, and Bill Clinton opened the event by praising OCP, King Mohammed VI and “Morocco’s longstanding friendship to my family and to the United States.”

The former miners have seen a very different side of Morocco’s government and OCP. They say the company, formerly called the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, forced them to retire early and slashed their pensions, leaving them struggling to scrape by while hiring ethnic Moroccans for more senior jobs. The miners also told me how they had witnessed firsthand multiple examples of the “ arbitrary and prolonged detention” and “physical and verbal abuse” that the U.S. State Department says Moroccan authorities mete out to Sahrawis advocating for independence in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

“Hillary Clinton sold her soul when they accepted that money,” declared Mohamed Lahwaimed, who gathered with the other former miners in a second floor walk-up in the Western Sahara capital of Laayoune, a modern-looking desert town with a population of 200,000 people about 500 miles southeast of Marrakech. Wearing traditional Sahrawi dara’a robes and lounging on worn pillows, they sipped green tea and spoke Arabic. “And now we are concerned that if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency of the United States of America, she will take the side of Moroccans even more,” Lahwaimed said through an interpreter.

Added fellow former miner Lahbib Salhi, “All the tainted money that Morocco has gathered from taking away our rights has been used to bribe the Clinton Foundation and the international community.”

The miners—and human rights activists interviewed in Laayoune—put real faces on abstract criticisms swirling half a world away around Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The runaway favorite for the Democratic nomination, Clinton has found herself scrambling to answer suggestions that donations to the family’s sprawling $2 billion global charity influenced her actions as secretary of state and could compromise her objectivity if elected as president.

It’s certainly true that the Clintons have had a long—and lucrative—relationship with Morocco. Moroccan King Mohammed VI, who was traveling abroad during last week’s CGI meeting in Marrakech, nonetheless loaned one of his palaces to Bill and Chelsea Clinton to stay in during the meeting, according to attendees. The king was listed on a donor roll as having pledged as much as $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation to help build Bill Clinton’s presidential library (though the foundation says the donation never came through), while the state firm OCP has donated as much as $6 million over the years to the Clinton Foundation’s efforts. Both Clintons have publicly embraced the king in recent years as an example of an Arab moderate ruler with whom the U.S. should partner, and leaked Moroccan diplomatic cables show that Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state was seen by Rabat as among its most ardent supporters in the Obama administration.