Moroccan crackdown 'includes torture' The WE News Archives

Saturday, 11 March 2006

The most powerful man in Morocco

By John Laurenson
BBC News

The Moroccan royal family is one of the most ancient and most powerful in the world. It also commands extraordinary loyalty from its subjects.

Morocco's dynasty can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad

I had been round at Moulay's house for at least 15 seconds.

It was, therefore, high time for tea.

I remained sitting on a mat on the red earth floor while the master of the house, as tradition requires, went off to make the sweet, minty national drink.

We were high in the scrubby, green hills of the Middle Atlas.

When we stopped the car, the only sounds were of birds and children.

I waited for the tea. A fly buzzed in from the afternoon sun.

A couple of uncles who had also dropped in nodded benignly from the other side of the room.

I hazarded a bit of small talk.

"One of your brothers?" I asked, pointing to a photo of a rather introspective looking chap with a sweaty face on top of the television.

"The King!" they replied.

Of course it was!

I may have only just got off the plane but I had already seen a good few portraits of Mohammed VI, latest in an uninterrupted line of Moroccan monarchs stretching back to the 1600s.

Many faces

King Mohammed VI

Under the constitution the king can dissolve parliament and dismiss or appoint the prime minister

Morocco's dynasty can be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad

When Moulay turned up with the tea I asked him about the portrait on the telly.

"We love him," he said.

Over the following days and on ensuing trips to Morocco, the young, shy face of Mohammed VI would become very familiar indeed.

In fact most Moroccans probably spend more time with this face than anyone they actually know.

He looks down from billboards in the street and hangs in little frames from taxi rear-view mirrors.

Cafes show him drinking tea; butchers, slitting the throat of a sheep for the festival of Eid.

Fez-sellers have a photo of him in a fez.

Traditional outfitters show him shrouded in a hooded djellabah.

Western-style tailors have him dressed like Cary Grant.

Royal duties

In the capital, Rabat, king, courtiers and servants occupy a city within the city.

There is a royal palace in every town of any size in the country.

In Casablanca, which is surrounded by some of the most miserable shanty towns in Africa, there are three.

On newsstands, the King is all over the newspapers and magazines.

Not for the reasons that the princely family of Monaco or their royal imitators in Britain get in the papers but because, in Morocco, royalty is power.

According to the constitution adopted in 1996, the king appoints the prime minister and his cabinet and sits in on all their meetings.

MPs are not allowed to criticise the monarchy or the king himself.

The king appoints the judges and presides over the High Council of Magistrates.

He is the head of the armed forces and "commander of the faithful".

And that is just on paper.

Kissing culture

Until very recently at least, the king's unofficial powers were fearsome.

During Mohammed's father's 38-year reign, thousands of political opponents disappeared or "were disappeared", to use the chilling phrase of the time, into secret desert prisons. And secret desert graves.

Not surprisingly, Hassan II commanded "hiba", the Arabic word for fear and respect of the patriarch.

But his more constitutionally-minded and modernising son does, too.

The most radical get almost to the shoulder before planting their kiss

Priya Babu, eunuch

Up in the hills, when a son comes into a room where his father is sitting, he goes down on one knee and kisses the hand his father has casually left dangling.

This is how all Moroccans approach the King, although there is some interesting leeway as to where exactly you place your lips.

Some kiss his feet.   Most, his hand.

Others allow their lips to hover, up the royal arm.

The most radical get almost to the shoulder before planting their kiss.   But this sort of familiarity is rare.

Rules of reference

The usual deference is well-expressed in the big circulation French-language daily Le Matin, the paper where news means what the King visited, inspected or inaugurated yesterday.

And it is never just "the King", always "His Majesty the King, Mohammed VI, may God help him in his task..."

The King's instructions, orientations, appreciations and approval are systematically described as High instructions, High orientations, etc.   etc.   And it's High with a capital H

As I was about to fly home from Marrakech at the end of this last trip, I found myself driving along a splendid new avenue — long, wide and full of roses — where there were company headquarters and luxury hotels.

As I waited for some traffic lights to change, I noticed the street name.

Most countries wait for their leaders to die before naming streets after them, but the King is a young man.

Moroccans cannot wait that long.

There it was in black and white, in Latin script and Arabic: Avenue Mohammed VI.

SEE ALSO:

Country profile: Morocco
22 Dec 05 | Country profiles

Moroccan crackdown 'includes torture'
Friday 07 November 2003

King Muhammad's rights record is tarnished by torture claims

Related:

	UN: Arab rulers misusing 9/11
	Moroccan king boosts women's rights

Amnesty International says the practice of torture has widened in Morocco as part of an 'anti-terrorism' campaign.

The London-based rights group found that torture allegations in Morocco resurfaced after the 11 September, 2001 attacks on US targets, when the kingdom began to worry seriously about the possibility of “terrorism” at home.

The allegations prompted Amnesty to send a delegation last month to Morocco, where it studied dozens of cases.

Secret detention

Next week, it will present its findings to the UN Committee against Torture in Geneva.   They should make for disturbing reading.

Some suspects said they were held for weeks on end in secret detention, Philip Luther, an Amnesty researcher on North Africa, said.

Some told of being strung up and beaten with metal poles or wooden rods to extract confessions.

Others were raped with a bottle or club, he said.

In some cases, agents told victims that their wives would be raped if they didn't cooperate.

The North African kingdom has waged a tough “anti-terrorism” crackdown since 16 May when Islamic attackers launched five near-simultaneous human bombings in Casablanca, killing 45 people, including 12 bombers.

About 1100 “terrorism” suspects have since been rounded up by a security dragnet.

Morocco, an important US ally in the Arab world, wants to show it is doing its utmost to fight so-called terror.   But some observers, both at home and abroad, say the crackdown is trampling on human rights.

Trials are being held at rapid-fire speed, raising doubts about their fairness.

Death penalty revived

Since May, the courts have sentenced more than 50 people to life in prison and 16 people to death.   Morocco has not executed anyone since 1993, and it is unclear whether its policy may now change.

“Very often, (suspects) are convicted based on their statements to police, without material proof of their guilt.”

Driss El Yazami,
secretary-general of the International Federation of Human Rights

Moroccan officials say the crackdown is being conducted within the bounds of the law. A new “anti-terrorism” law, which passed just days after the Casablanca attacks, allows terror suspects to be held up to 12 days without being charged, among other measures.

The iron-fisted crackdown is a disappointment for many supporters of King Muhammad VI, the 40-year-old ruler who came to power in 1999 pledging to improve human rights.

Just last month, the king won international praise from feminist quarters for measures to grant women more rights on marriage and divorce.

Luther says the alleged torture victims are so-called suspected 'Islamic militants', but also activists who support independence for Western Sahara, a disputed territory on Africa's Atlantic coast that is claimed by Morocco.

"We have looked into a very disturbing return of what we thought were practices confined to the history books," Luther said.

Protecting 'democracy'

Andre Azoulay, an adviser to the king, says human rights groups raising questions about the crackdown should "go and talk to families" of the Casablanca bombing victims.

"We have to protect our democracy," he told journalists last month.

The International Federation of Human Rights, based in Paris, is also worried about the anti-terrorism law, the allegations of torture and the speed of suspects' trials.

"They're tried in two or three days maximum, with lawyers ... who haven't had time to look at the files," said Driss El Yazami, the group's secretary-general.

"Very often, they're convicted based on their statements to police, without material proof of their guilt."

Agencies

Saturday, 17 December 2005

Morocco abuse report criticised

Nearly 17,000 people filed claims of abuse

A human rights group has criticised Morocco's truth commission for not naming abuse perpetrators during the rule of the late King Hassan II.

The Moroccan Association for Human Rights has made its own list of those it wants prosecuted for the abuses.

It also queried the figures provided by the investigating commission, which said 592 people were killed during the repression of 1956 to 1999.

The panel's report by is the first of its kind in the Arab world.

The document — yet to be released in full — is the result of a two-year investigation.

The 17-member Equity and Reconciliation Committee (IER), set up in January 2004, heard from 16,861 people, and assessed whether victims should be given compensation and how much they should receive.

Gravestones of seven members of a resistance group

A summary of the IER report said that it had recommended 9,280 victims were entitled to payments.

The commission found that 322 people had been shot dead by government troops in protests, and that 174 people had died in arbitrary detention.

The report said political figures opposed to King Hassan II had also disappeared without trace, including the main opposition leader in the 1960s, Mehdi Ben Barka.

The graves of 85 people, who had been detained in secret prisons, were also identified.

Disputed figures

While welcoming the report as a good start, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights criticised its authors for not naming and shaming the perpetrators of abuse.

Morocco's King Mohammed VI has authorised the report

The group also queried the IER's figures.

"The figures cited by the IER are far from the reality," the group's Abdullah Abdeslam said.

"According to the data we have, 1,500 people had been killed in the protests of 21 March 1965, and between 500 and 1,000 died in the protests of 1981."

Even before the IER publishes its report, the Moroccan news agency, Map, has been detailing some of its content — and that could only happen with the tacit approval at the highest official level, the BBC's Africa editor David Bamford reports.

The IER report has urged the state to apologise to the victims and their families, and King Mohammed VI — having authorised the document — is likely to do this in the near future, our correspondent says.