The most difficult question for Dr. Abdelhay Moudden came from a teenage boy who wanted to know what Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER)1 was going to do about all those accused of torture and murder during les annees de plomb – the “years of lead” as they are known here. This was the period between independence from France in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999, during which some 50,000 people either disappeared or were killed or raped or detained illegally for years at a time. The commission, the first of its kind in the Arab Middle East, had gone around the country for months listening to testimony from hundreds of people. Some witnesses had received monetary compensation, but the commission had yet to address the very sensitive issue of reconciliation. And so the boy wanted to know whether those accused would ever be brought to trial. And when.
These questions came at a youth camp 20 kilometers south of Casablanca last April, in a cinderblock bungalow with peeling white paint, holding about 60 people, mostly teenagers. They were part of a group of 120 students invited to a series of workshops on human rights and the meaning of citizenship. The program included visits from playwrights, painters, and writers, who introduced the notion of expressing human rights issues – such as suffering and anger – through the arts. Moudden, a big-shouldered man, had heard this question about reconciliation many times before; reconciliation is a popular topic in the national conversation in Morocco. He replied that this was a dilemma faced by truth commissions around the world and that Morocco is actually “not the worst in dealing with it.” After all, unlike in Argentina, South Africa, or Algeria, Morocco’s IER has not proposed amnesty for those accused of perpetrating the horrors. But neither has the commission come up with a plan for charging them with crimes. In addition, some of them still hold positions in the government, particularly in the security services. That kind of justice could take time, Moudden said, pointing out that it took Chile 30 years to call General Augusto Pinochet to trial.
Moudden had been invited to speak here by Abdelali Mastour, the national secretary of the Mountada Al Mouwatana (the Citizenship Forum), a moderately influential NGO in Casablanca. There are perhaps a dozen NGOs that develop or promote similar education programs in the country, often in cooperation with the government. The forum was started in 1999 by 100 cofounders, including Marxists, feminists, Force Islamique, conservatives, and liberals. This potpourri of former party leaders, human rights activists, and concerned citizens share a common vision of forging democratic change – through debate and discussion among disparate groups around the country.
Coalition of the Willing
The forum is part of a vast, emerging Moroccan civil society, which includes social clubs and NGOs, alternative political parties, professional groups, the official press, the underground press, elites and community activists, socialists and Islamicists, Marxists and royalists – not to mention those drawn together by mystical sects or other religious affiliations. For years these disparate voices outside the gates of state were silenced by the “immutability” of Moroccan culture and politics. But now they’re being heard, in part because of the growing awareness of human rights issues, and also because the major political parties, now in disarray, have left a power vacuum that the civil society is filling.
Most visible are NGOs, which have acquired credibility and also offer employment. There are now more than 33,000 NGOs in Morocco (see sidebar, page 34) – dealing with classic problems of infrastructure and poverty; the environment; social ills such as homeless children and the effects of labor migrations into and out of Morocco; and with the matter of governance. Les associations have become nearly a cottage industry – because of a high unemployment rate, even for professionals with advanced degrees, NGOs are luring many young people looking for work, particularly in small towns.
“For example, students who work in NGOs in one of the big cities sometimes go back to their village and create their own association,” says Mohamed Janjar, a co-founder of the Citizenship Forum, and also the assistant director of the King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca. The foundation supports the largest library in the Maghreb. “And this is how the civil society spreads. You see this in Meknes, in Agadir, and Marrakech. Young people may not have le savoir faire to create businesses, so they create associations instead.”
For years, NGOs and political parties were umbilically linked – NGO leaders were invariably political bosses and the organizations themselves served to get out the vote and otherwise represent ideological reform. But in the last 15 years the two have split and this has become the new dynamic that may lead to real change.
“The truth commission has been a great stimulation to NGOs,” says Karim Naitlho, a lawyer imprisoned for political reasons for five years in the early 1980s, “but you have to remember that in this society, political parties, and le politique, have always come first. Now, with the rise of NGOs, there is a divergence. But who will have preeminence? It’s as though the country has a split personality. Political parties criticize the civil society, saying it doesn’t have the power to bring about real change; the civil society considers political parties a poison, which delivers only promises. For the moment, we have a tolerant king leaning toward the civil society and he has adopted much of their agenda.”
One result of this split between political parties and NGOs has been that local NGOs no longer receive money from political parties and so have turned abroad for support. The money often comes from private and public sectors in Canada, Japan, and Germany, and through the likes of Amnesty International or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
So how were these links, particularly with the United States, developed, and how will they affect the work of NGOs like the forum, especially now, when the U.S. image is so precarious in the region? Although it normally escapes much scrutiny by the world press, which of course is focused on events elsewhere in the Middle East, Morocco and what is happening here may contain vital clues for the shape of the future in this troubled part of the world. So the stakes seem high. In this regard, one wonders whether NGOs in Morocco’s realpolitik game of palace politics are anything more than mere journeyman players. To answer that, it’s necessary first to consider a bit of context.
The Problem for Democracy
Among other difficult questions Moudden always hears is this: “How can your commission be effective while investigating a system that is still in place?” And the questioner will sometimes add: “And why does your mandate stop in 1999? Why aren’t you looking into all those arrested and still detained after May 16?” – the day in 2003 when suicide bombers killed 46 people in Casablanca. The day has a resonance not unlike 9/11 in America.
Moudden’s stock response to the second question is, “After May 16 there were abuses, but I personally am not sure whether this suggests a fundamental shift in state policy [away from democratic reform], or whether every now and then the reflexes of the old regime come up.” To the first question, he acknowledges that the commission is the king’s wish. Clearly, the commission “belongs” to the state, but he points out that when the commission set up its headquarters in Rabat, the first thing the staff did was to take down from the wall a picture of the king. This was not a subtle way of asserting authority. Every other public space in Morocco displays the obligatory photograph of Mohammed VI, and very often Hassan II; you will also find one programming on the three Moroccan channels rarely focuses on issues like the meaning of citizenship.
Illiteracy aside, citizenship, and a lasting sense of national identity, depends upon a level of trust in the state and a level of empowerment – neither of which is present in Morocco. People trust their immediate family. They trust in the Koran. Many trust in the tradition of the monarchy. People may trust in their union or political party, and lately, in the last decade, in the new civil society. But no one trusts in l’??tat, which is to say the parliament (“a political souk” as some call it); or the various ministries; or the army and security services, including local police, who are notoriously corrupt.
Moreover, there is no true Fourth Estate, partly because the government doesn’t want it yet and partly because the media that exist have often been irresponsible and unprofessional. “The press mistakes opinion for information” is a common criticism. But the point is moot. As one journalist told me, “The truth is we don’t have much freedom of expression in Morocco.”
Divide and Conquer
Beyond illiteracy, the lack of a free press, and a widespread conviction that the government, and the public sector in general, is irretrievably corrupt,4 there is also the pervasive effect of the Makhzan, one of the great political wonders of the Arab Middle East. The word means literally “storage space,” but the term refers to the system of administrators and advisers around the king, and some would say the “culture” of power that keeps the country together on the one hand and undermines the transition to democracy on the other.
“The history of the Makhzan is the modern history of Morocco,” says Naitlho. “And this has become our dialectic: Makhzan and siba. Oligarchy or anarchy. The great fear has always been that without very strong and central authority the country would fall apart.”
The Makhzan was imported by the French, who adopted their need for a security apparatus to an old Moroccan form of hierarchical authority and used the new system to gather intelligence on dissidents. Even today, for some, the word Makhzan inspires fear.
While some argue the Makhzan is in decline, it retains real political power. “Today, the most powerful groups in Morocco are the Berbers and the Islamicists,” says Jack Kalpakian, a polit-ical scientist at Al Akhawayn University of Ifrane. “In order to keep them off balance, the Makhzan has done a masterful job of encouraging new leaders within these groups. Even if it’s someone they have long opposed, they may suddenly go to them and say, ‘You know, you would make an excellent leader and we will give you our support.’ Which is hard to resist, especially for someone who suddenly has a car and respect. He becomes the ‘man on the balcony’ even as his party is splintered.”
Critics say that another aspect of this divide-and-conquer strategy is to co-opt agendas that might undermine the monarchy’s authority, sometimes at the expense of local groups striving for a voice of their own. One example given is the IER itself, and the whole issue of reconciliation.
“The government is trying to centralize the process of change by using the truth commission,” says Mustapha Khalfi, a moderate Islamicist, and a founding member of the Citizenship Forum. “We don’t want centralization. This process belongs to the people. The problem is that at the same time we don’t want the government to centralize the process, we in the civil society need one strategy to make real improvements in our country, not all the mini-strategies we see now.”
Fear and Despair
Of all the obstacles to democratization, the most relentless is the doubt and despair that goes down to the marrow of people and place. Moroccan academics refer to this as “the culture of despair” or “the culture of defeatism.” As one Moroccan friend put it: “Think of the country like a person who was abused for 40 years and has spent the last five years in therapy. They’ve still got a long way to go. You have to be patient.” One symptom of the culture of despair is a brain drain to both the United States and Europe. High school and college students I’ve spoken to insist there’s no alternative, that without connections to the palace there isn’t much opportunity in Morocco. That’s debatable; others insist this is the whine of upper-middle-class kids who don’t want to struggle for a living. Whatever the truth, there’s no question that large numbers of well-educated people leave the country, as do the energetic poor, the harraq, who make their way into Southern Europe however they can to work in factories in Milan and orchards and fields in Spain and France.
Scholars portray this despair as a result of the overlapping grips of monarchy and French colonialism – whose legacy includes a rote system of education, completely lacking in Socratic dialogue. Perhaps the biggest problem for students coming out of public high school is the inability to think critically. But there’s one other grip – Islam itself. Naturally, this is a sensitive point and it is perhaps more accurate, and certainly more correct, to say that despair comes not from the grip of Islam, but from the perverse and oppressive way it has been misinterpreted, politicized, and co-opted by entrenched powers for their own ends. Those powers include many fundamentalist imams who demand a denotative interpretation of the Koran and discourage the rational nature of the religion – because rationality is labeled as one of the many ills of Western culture. “People in the West keep talking about whether democracy and Islam are compatible,” says Dr. Driss Maghraoui, a history professor at Al Akhawayn University of Ifrane, and himself a Muslim. “Of course they’re compatible. That’s not the question. The question is how the various authority figures and institutions throughout the region have used Islam to deny democracy. That’s the tragedy in every Arab country.”
NGOs: To Be or Not to Be
The Citizenship Forum’s office is on a back street near a Casablanca train station. A narrow red door in a corner building, atop three steps, marks the spot. There is no sign. The office includes three small rooms, one with a conference table. There is a desktop computer and a fax. Mastour is the forum’s administrative head. His assistant, Mustafa Foumissil, is the office manager who in turn has a student intern that occasionally helps him. The forum’s 45-member executive committee meets once a year to discuss the coming agenda; a seven-member secretariat administers the organization.
The forum collaborates with two dozen other associations, as well as the Ministry of Education. The work is focused on the meaning of citizenship, but it’s also about developing savoir faire among associations and strengthening the NGO culture. The forum has started programs in 45 high schools, six middle schools, and three universities. These programs are part of a three-part agenda: to promote understanding of citizenship; to encourage dialogue among constituencies, between different political and ethnic groups, between men and women, and so on; and to develop new ways to draw people into a democratic process.
Although he describes himself as a socialist, and therefore a progressive, Mastour is actually a moderate. And his notion of democracy is certainly not the American model, but rather a variation customized to an Islamic country with a popular monarchy. As an aside, he and others acknowledge that the king may eventually decide to stand in the background as in Spain, which is often mentioned as the political and economic model for Morocco. In the meantime, says Mastour, the United States should not expect to see itself in Morocco’s mirror.
Mastour’s diplomatic reservations about the United States notwithstanding, the Citizenship Forum is a local darling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Last spring, when Liz Cheney stopped in Morocco as part of her tour as the principal deputy assistant secretary of state (in effect the second-ranking U.S. diplomat for the Middle East), she attended a luncheon in her honor in Casablanca. Among those invited by USAID were members of both the public and private sectors, as well as representatives from the civil society, including the Citizenship Forum. In fact, Mastour was the only NGO representative asked to speak.
The forum’s appeal is bolstered by its connection to its main funder, the NED, and a closely related organization, the International Republican Institute (IRI).The forum approached NED in 2002 and has received funds since then, as well as funds from IRI since 2004. NED, a quasi-governmental organization that receives money from the private sector as well as from Congress, has given a total of $99,000 to the forum in 2004-2005, to cover two projects. The forum receives a smaller sum from IRI.
Asked why NED chose to fund the forum, Karen Farrell, program officer for North Africa, replied in an e-mail that, in general, “The endowment is especially interested in programs that originate with indigenous democratic groups.” She went onto say that in gauging the forum’s success, its “meticulous documentation of program activities demonstrates its institutional development, as this sort of ‘institutional memory’ is rare among NGOs in the region.”
The decision to accept NED support was a sensitive issue for the forum. Some members did not embrace the idea initially. Nor did some people who work with the forum. “You know the U.S. has a very bad name here now,” says Moudden. “And this is a difficult matter. Money from America that goes to back microcredit loans or to support development in the countryside is [seen as] a good idea, but money to political organizations makes people very suspicious.”
The problem is made worse by NED’s controversial reputation some years ago when it was accused of meddling in foreign elections,5 as well as recent news reports that the United States has turned over some Islamic prisoners from Guant??namo to Morocco.
Ahmed Herzenni, one of the founders of the forum, is a socialist, and the leader of his own NGO, the National Observatory of Democratic Transition. His NGO is located in a small office off the forum’s own small office. He was also the 12th witness to testify before the IER. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “at the beginning, we hesitated at the idea of seeking or accepting money from NED – or any other foreign source – but we finally decided that so long as we are the ones to identify our purposes and objectives, and the methods of work, then it was OK. If anybody accepts our independence and is still willing to help, why not?”
Had NED ever tried to influence the forum?
“No, no, no. They haven’t tried to influence anything, and they couldn’t anyway, because as soon as we feel there is the least – I mean even the temptation to influence us – then we would break off with that fund.”
Asked if while considering whether to fund an organization, NED factored in the effect of its presence, Farrell replied that it’s up to the organization to decide whether to accept NED money. But in answer to another question about how NGO management styles in local NGOs differ from NGOs in the United States, she noted that NGOs in the Middle East are sometimes caught in a “catch-22 of wanting to assist their governments to reform, become more democratic, and be responsive to citizenry, and to provide a watchdog function of reporting violations and advocating quite vocally for change. , Those that work closely in cooperation [with] the government are often perceived by their colleagues as ‘government-affiliate’ NGOs and therefore not truly independent. On the other hand, those that maintain no cooperation with government bodies are perceived as inciters.”
Mastour, ever the pragmatist, doesn’t seem to worry about this delicate balance. He defends the forum’s link with NED on the basis that in the broad definition of democracy, “We want the same things.” Moreover, he looks at the money as “compensation for the injustices of the past”-injustices perpetrated by King Hassan II with the knowledge, if not the help, of the United States. “We don’t manage the world with proverbs,” he says. “And when my son who’s now 2 is a man, he’s not going to ask me about ‘the struggle.’ The only thing that matters is what we achieved. My generation is the bridge.”
A Matter of Trust
One day in May, I went to a forum-sponsored event in Casablanca, in the Quartier Sidi Moumen. It was from this neighborhood that the suicide bombers emerged on May 16, 2003. The event was held at a community center. Dozens of people arrived, including community leaders, TV reporters, and even the local governor. The purpose of the event was to kick off a program funded by NGOs that would bring a hospital and a school to the area. The highlight came when three schoolchildren, each with knapsacks, or “bags of life” as they were called, stood up on a stage, reached inside their knapsack and read poetry and reflections about their lives. As Mastour later told me, the purpose was to say, “Terrorists do not speak for the residents of Sidi Moumen.”
“This is a neighborhood where no one trusts the government,” Mastour explained. “No one trusts in anything. And what we were saying is that you can make change yourself. This is our greatest challenge, to convince people that they have to make change themselves, to understand that ‘I can no longer depend on anyone else.’”
That applies to the rich as well as the poor. One wonders how long it will take those among the Makhzan to accept a future in which they must depend upon themselves, not upon the monarchy. And how long will it take a struggling middle class to believe that democracy, however it evolves, will provide physical as well as economic security? The problem is time, in a society that sometimes seems deadened by unfulfilled promises and the sense that even positive change is ephemeral. A society seared by despair and by the growing conviction that this generation in power now will also have to pass on before progress can flow more quickly – but a society also drawn to the prospect of a nation, with or without a king, that can finally be free of oppression, mistrust, and most of all, fear.
Source 1 The L’instance d’Equite et Reconciliation (IER) (www.ier.ma/), was established by King Mohammed VI on Jan. 7, 2004, as an independent commission of “truth, equity, and reconciliation.” The commission, headquartered in Rabat, was to focus on human rights violations between 1956 and 1999, particularly those that point to a “systemic” or “massive problem” in government. No individual responsibility could be addressed. The commission has no judicial or investigative powers (no subpoena, no search and seizure, etc.).
2 For background on Moroccan efforts to redress wrongs of the past, see S. Slyomovics, “A Truth Commission for Morocco,” in Middle East Report 218 (Spring 2001). Also Slyomovics, “No Buying Off the Past: Moroccan Indemnities and the Opposition,” in Middle East Report 229 (Winter 2003).
3 A. Driouchi, Introduction to the Knowledge Economy in Morocco (Institute of Economic Analysis and Prospective Studies at Al Akhawayn University, June 2004). According to ArabicNews.com (May 6, 2005), 462,000 people are enrolled in antiilliteracy programs. Women account for 80.3 percent of those who attend literacy courses; 56.2 percent are from rural areas.
4 The Corruption Perception Index in Morocco shows that between 1998 and 2002, the government appeared cleaner than Egypt’s government but more corrupt than in Jordan or Tunisia. Driouchi, Introduction to the Knowledge Economy in Morocco.
5 In a 1996 paper, The Heritage Foundation (Executive Memorandum No. 461), a strong supporter of NED, wrote: “The NED advances American national interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to the U.S. in strategically important parts of the world. The U.S. cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a time when American interests and values are under sustained ideological attack from a wide variety of antidemocratic forces around the world. , The NED has aided Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, Harry Wu’s human rights efforts in China, and independent media outlets in former Yugoslavia. Russian political activists affiliated with the NED also played a major role in President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign against the reinvigorated Communist Party earlier this year. , The NED is a costeffective way to encourage captive nations to liberate themselves without committing the U.S. to a prohibitively risky and costly military crusade to free them from communism.” Nevertheless, critics have suggested that NED is unneeded in an era of “transparency” and even destabilizes countries. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, and who founded the Center for Democracy, one of NED’s funding middlemen, said in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.”
Read more stories by Mark Macnamara.