11 - 17 October 2001
Issue No.555
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 October 2001 Issue No.555 |
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Morocco at the crossroads
- Le règne de Hassan II, une espérance brisée (The Reign of Hassan II: Shattered Hopes), Ignace Dalle, Paris and Casablanca: Maisonneuve & Larose and Tarik Editions, 2001. pp309;
- Le Maroc en transition (Morocco in Transition), Pierre Vermeren, Paris: La Découverte, 2001. pp 249
Introducing his history of Morocco since the country's independence from French rule in 1956, Ignace Dalle, a journalist with the French monthly Le Monde diplomatique and a former foreign correspondent in Rabat, writes that his aim has been to explain why "the great hopes that filled the Moroccan people during the years that followed independence have been not only dashed but also betrayed." Why, he asks, has Morocco, despite its natural resources and the energy and talent of its people, fallen so far behind countries in a comparable situation at independence, such as Tunisia?
According to Dalle, and as the title of his book, The Reign of Hassan II: Shattered Hopes, suggests, much of the blame is to be placed at the door of King Hassan II, who reigned over the country from 1961 until his death in 1999. "Hassan II not only botched the development of the kingdom," Dalle writes, "but he was also incapable of giving it solid institutions, apart, of course, from the monarchy itself. Today, the army and police are feared, the justice system inspires no confidence, the parliament is disparaged, and the country's political parties largely discredited." He quotes the Moroccan opposition figure Abdellatif Laabi: "my generation was convinced that following independence we were in as good a position as Spain or Portugal. Morocco was a country possessing a great civilisation, comparable to that of Syria or Iran, we had an elite that was resolutely engaged in modernising the country, and we thought that Morocco was going to become a modern country. But things have been wrecked at every level, and little by little we have seen the constitution of a mafia State, which has ruined the country."
How this state of affairs came about and, to a lesser extent, what is now being done about it, is the subject of Dalle's book. It is divided into three parts, exploring the current condition and recent history of Moroccan public services, the state of the country's economy and the character of its political institutions. Dalle quotes extensively from the actors involved, often, it seems, from interviews he has himself carried out, and this gives the book the directness of good journalism and avoids the fatal reeling off of lists of developmental and social indicators.
In his chapter on public education in Morocco, for example, Dalle has been able to interview teachers, administrators and current and ex-students, combining their comments with official figures, newspaper accounts and historical and comparative information. He does the same in his discussion of the public healthcare system and of Moroccan civil society. The result is that the "disastrous" character of the country's public education system is exposed in detail, fleshing out the reality behind the country's still very high illiteracy figures. According to comments collected by Dalle, post-independence efforts to build an effective public education system have long since been dissipated, the State having largely withdrawn from education leaving those who can pay to send their children to private, mostly foreign schools. Education in Morocco has thus been marked by the abandonment of the public system by those who can afford to do so and by high rates of unemployment among young graduates of public high schools and universities.
The same is true, Dalle writes, for the healthcare system in Morocco. The presentation of this included here shows that the trend has been towards fleeing an underfunded, over-worked public sector for an expanding, but for most of the population inaccessible, private sector. Healthcare needs in Morocco are enormous and growing, but in the absence of a working social security system or of a public healthcare system capable of delivering even quite basic care, people have been left with few choices. Either they must go without necessary healthcare, or they must make sometimes enormous financial sacrifices in order to get it. In both education and healthcare, public policy has been "not so much inadequate as non-existent," Dalle writes, and this, he says, is in danger of making a nonsense of the country's development efforts.
All this is very troubling, and Dalle thinks that Hassan II is largely to blame for it, since he encouraged the Moroccan makhzen system that grew up during his reign, a sort of political Establishment devoted to the preservation of existing privileges and aimed not so much at developing the country as at managing it. Hassan II's reign, Dalle concludes, was marked by the emasculation of the country's political parties, the weakening and non-development of civil society and the widespread loss of the hopes for social and economic development that had been a feature of the immediate post-independence years. His successor, King Mohamed VI, nicknamed "M6" apparently after a popular, youth-oriented French television channel or "the King of the Poor," has, then, a very heavy task ahead of him.
The nature of this task, and the possible role Mohamed VI could play within it, is the subject of French academic Pierre Vermeren's competent survey of the country Morocco in Transition. Vermeren and Dalle agree that Hassan II's final decade saw important political and social developments in Morocco. Not only was the heavy burden of past political repression during the so-called "Years of Lead" in the 1970s and 80s lightened by the release of prisoners held at the Tazmamart penal colony in 1991, but moves aiming to liberalise the political system and to encourage the growth of civil society from the early 1990s on led to an explosion in local associations and in political and social activism. In 1997, Abderrahmane Youssoufi, a socialist, member of the opposition and former political exile, became prime minister of a cabinet in which the most important portfolios -- Foreign Affairs, Defence, the Interior and Justice -- were still reserved for the so-called ministres de souveraineté, "sovereign ministers," appointed by Hassan II. Mohamed VI, in a series of thus far largely symbolic gestures, has pledged himself to continue this process of political and economic liberalisation, making social development and the easing of poverty a priority.
Assessing the larger agenda lying before M6, Vermeren writes that in addition to this necessary and urgent task, the young king, trained apparently in Brussels on the staff of the then President of the European Commission and former French Finance Minister Jacques Delors, is likely to be preoccupied by four main policy areas. These have to do with the reform of the legal status of women, up to now assimilated to that of minors by Morocco's moudawana, or personal status law, with the country's Berber minority, with its cultural development and with the role of its elites.
The first two of these, at least, are likely to be particularly controversial, involving notions of Moroccan identity and the country's future direction that cut very deep. In March 2000, following the publication of a "National Plan to integrate Moroccan Women in Development" that proposed the reform of the moudawana and was supported by both the Prime Minister and the King, a demonstration in Rabat in support of the Plan attracted tens of thousands of people. However, a simultaneous counter- demonstration in Casablanca led by the Islamist Justice and Development Party drew many times that number, its leaders arguing that the proposed revision was unwanted and alien to Moroccan and Islamic traditions.
Similarly, recent efforts at recognising Morocco's large Berber minority, the Imazighen, for example by allowing the teaching of the Berber language, tamazight, in schools, or the writing of the Berber contribution into official histories of the country, have courted controversy. Vermeren writes that the 1990s saw the development of Berber identity politics in Morocco, as they did elsewhere in North Africa, leading to demands that the "systematic marginalisation" of Berber culture be reversed and that tamazight be given equal footing in the Moroccan constitution with Arabic. He thinks that growing demands for recognition by Morocco's Berber population will lead to conflict with the country's Islamist movement, if they have not already done so, since this prefers to promote Morocco's Arab character.
Finally, both Vermeren and Dalle see Morocco as a country undergoing rapid and intriguing change. Though their terminology is different -- Dalle emphasising the growth of civil-society groups in the country over the past decade and Vermeren processes of decentralisation and pluralism -- both French authors believe that for the first time in decades Morocco is genuinely "in transition" to a more liberal future, in which, notably, developing ties with the European Union will be ever more important. Dalle thinks that the country has now regained something of the hope and dynamism that marked the period immediately following its independence, and he gives the final words to Aboubakr Jamai, editor of the respected Moroccan newspaper Le Journal, from a November 2000 editorial. "The new reign [of Mohamed VI] began by making strong gestures that instilled hope in the population. What is needed now is the reinforcement of this dynamic process that began one year ago."
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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