ABSTRACT Since 2016, the Moroccan Rif has witnessed an intense movement of protest following the death of a local fishmonger, inexplicably crushed in a garbage truck. The event has been immediately designated as a ‘crime’ and inscribed within the historical intrigue of human rights violations. The political power’s attitudes toward the movement are likewise considered reminiscent of this violent past, despite a politics of reconciliation implemented so that this ‘will never happen again’. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this embodied feeling of ‘continuity’. The analysis concerns two interrelated temporalities. It refers, first, to the hogging intrusion of a ‘non-pacified’ memory of the past violence, which seriously impedes the work of mourning. The second one refers to the state rebounding violence. In addition to multiple forms of violations, ‘separatism’ is mobilised as a discursive politics to incriminate protest and, hence, to legitimate recourse to repression. We argue that ‘separatism’ is not an issue of cultural structure (or habitus) but rather that of political manipulation of dissensual belongings by the power-system, in order to displace the criminality from its centre to the margins, thereby failing to provide the nation with a ‘renewed ethos’ based on justice and accountability.