Hassan II of Morocco because of Moroccan claims on the country (see Great Morocco). Economically, Hassan II adopted a market-based economy, where agriculture, tourism, and phosphates mining industries played a major role. The period from the 1960s to the late 1980s was labelled as the "years of lead" and saw thousands of dissidents jailed, killed, exiled or forcibly disappeared. King Hassan II had extended many parliamentary functions by the early 1990s and released hundreds of political prisoners in 1991, and allowed the Alternance, where the opposition assumed power, for the first time in the Arab World. He set up a Royal Council for Human
Khaled al-Hassan members, Hassan was one of them. In 1968, al-Hassan was elected to the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee (PLO-EC) after Fatah took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968. Early that year, al-Hassan persuaded Saudi King Faisal to enforce the "liberation tax" which required Palestinians in that country to pay a percentage of their income to the PLO. This, in turn, supplied the PLO with 60 million riyal yearly. Also, in that year, he spoke to the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riyad and Mohammad Hassanein Heykal on behalf of Gamal Abdel Nasser in order to familiarize him with