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Letter from Rabat
From Charles Levinson in Rabat
September 15th, 2005 -- Unlike in most Arab countries, here it is not unusual to find hardened human rights and democracy activists defending the present government. The president of Morocco’s ground-breaking, Palace-appointed reconciliation commission is Driss Benzikri, a man who served 18 years in prison for leftist political activities. Those with more daunting tales from the time of King Hassan II’s rule (1956-99) didn’t live to tell them.
In shops and restaurants here and throughout the country, pictures of King Mohamed VI hang beside those of his father. For many, they serve as a daily reminder of the current struggle in Morocco between the old face of power and the new.
In the six years since assuming the thrown, the son has worked to convince the Moroccan people and the international community that the iron-fisted policies of his father are a thing of the past, and that he is leading Morocco towards true democracy. He has granted recognition to the Berber language, the native tongue of perhaps a third of Moroccans, and in 2003 passed a new family law, hailed as the most pro-women law in the Arab world. Morocco’s independent press has exploded in recent years, with new taboo-busting newspapers appearing faster than they can be tallied, broaching issues that few dared to whisper about just a few years back.
The jewel in the new king’s effort has been the Equity and Reconciliation Commission. Along with Benzikri, the 17-member body contains several former political prisoners and is delving into the human rights abuses committed against activists from Western Sahara, assorted leftist parties and Berber groups, among others. It is the first such commission in the Arab world, the 25th world-wide. It has allowed for over 200 victims to give painful accounts of the abuses they endured and has convinced many that the new king is serious about reform.
“In recent years we have made huge gains with regards to the status of women and with regards to human rights, and I am convinced that we are heading towards democracy,” Benzikri says. “This is not the same Morocco that arrested, tortured me and oppressed me.”
The commission has completed its fact-finding and is now in the process of preparing a report that, most significantly, will include a series of recommendations on how to stop similar human rights abuses from happening again. The commission was overwhelmed by the 22,000 victims who came forward, and it has twice asked for extensions to complete its work. Its final report is due out later this year.
But the march to democracy is stumbling in other respects. Critics remain sceptical of the reconciliation commission for two principal reasons: it has no legal powers to hold the perpetrators of abuses accountable, and there have been no institutional changes to prevent past abuses from recurring. The first accusation prompted the human rights group that Benzikri once headed to conduct a parallel set of hearings, in which victims fingered their abusers by name. Of course, the identities of the regime’s most prominent “executioners” have been published in many freely available books and newspaper.
The second accusation is more worrying to many. When speaking of Moroccan democracy the word masmuh, “allowed”, is frequently heard. A measure of human rights and democracy has been “allowed”, activists say, “democracy by royal decree”, they call it. The only way to prevent the situation from reverting to how it was, they contend, is by altering Morocco’s institutional architecture, by changing the Constitution, stripping the monarchy of its sweeping powers.
“I’m willing to agree to an amnesty for those who carried out human rights abuses, but an amnesty whose counterpart is democratization,” says Aboubakr Jamai, editor-in-chief of the daring human rights weekly, Le Journal.
The progressive family law of 2003 was hailed by human rights and women’s activists, but had to be railroaded through the legal system by the king, who seized on the anti-Islamist feelings (the Islamist Justice and Development Party led opposition to the legislation) that emerged after the Casablanca bombings. Side-by-side with family law, the king passed a draconian set of anti-terrorism laws as well. These led to the arrest of over 2,000 suspected Islamist extremists. Local and international human rights groups reported widespread illegal detentions and torture.
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