On the Backroads of MoroccoBRUCE MADDY-WEITZMAN
BRUCE MADDY-WEITZMANisa Principal Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and author of The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (University of Texas Press, 2011) and A Century of Arab Politics: From the Arab Revolt to the Arab Spring (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming, 2015).
In a country where the traditional “fear of the authorities” has weakened, the Amazigh identity movement could help shape the future.
Morocco’s troubled socio-economic profile is well known. It is ranked 129thon the latest UN Human Development Index, lower than all other North African states except for Mauritania. Fellow petroleum-poor monarchy Jordan ranks 77th. Among the especially problematic indicators that shape Morocco’s ranking are adult illiteracy—25 percent for males and about 40 percent for females, with the rate among rural adult women close to 90 percent; maternal mortality (70thin world rankings) and infant mortality (74th); and GDP per capita (156th). In the category of health expenditures as a percentage of GDP, as calculated in 2009, Morocco ranks 109th. One-fifth of Morocco’s population (6.3 million) live either in poverty or just above the poverty line. The differences between Morocco’s urban and peripheral rural regions are especially stark.
To be sure, the Moroccan state’s penetration into the country’s rural regions is considerably greater than it was in the past. This penetration includes expanded electrification of villages (96.5 percent in 2009 compared to just 18 percent in 1996), the building of schools and roads, and increased access to potable water (from 20 percent in 1990 to 87 percent in 2009, and presumably well over 90 percent today). In addition, migrant workers from rural areas, who spend part of the year in big cities or live for extended periods in Europe, provide crucial injections of cash into village economies.
Nonetheless, the deprivation in remote Atlas Mountain villages and valleys, which are populated primarily by Amazigh communities, remains high. The conditions there were highlighted anew in late November 2014 by devastating floods, which overwhelmed the poor infrastructure that is still the rule in much of the country’s interior. However, notwithstanding the periphery’s dire straits, it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of a Moroccan version of Tunisia’s Muhammad Bouazizi. No despairing young vendor’s self-immolation in protest against the heavy-handedness of local authorities, staged in some dusty provincial town far from the center of the country’s political and economic life, could ignite a nationwide movement, let alone result in the toppling of Morocco’s entrenched regime. Indeed, there hasn’t even been a significant rural rebellion since 1958–59, when northern Amazigh Riffian tribes rose up against the newly independent government dominated by Morocco’s urban Arab elites.
Of course at that time there was no Amazigh movementper se, nor was there any official reference to the Amazigh component of Moroccan national identity. This was despite the fact that Tamazight, in its three main Moroccan forms, was the native language of a majority of the country’s 12 million people, most of whom lived in the rural periphery. Some 55 years later, the percentage is considerably lower: Tamazight is now a minority language in Morocco, although the exact percentage of native speakers of its three main Moroccan dialects is hard to determine and understandably controversial.
On the other hand, the Moroccan state has taken a number of significant symbolic steps in recent years to recognize Amazigh language and culture as a core component of Moroccan national identity, enshrining it in the new constitution drawn up and ratified in July 2011, as part of the king’s response to the protests of the grassroots February 20thmovement earlier in the year.
Amazigh youth participated in these protests, articulating both particular ethno-cultural demands and broader Moroccan national ones. The new constitution’s recognition of Tamazight as an official language, along with Arabic, was an historic achievement by any measure for the Amazigh identity movement.And it points to a paradox: The movement, and its agenda of re-centering North African and Moroccan history and identity, is very much a part of the increasingly contested fabric of public life, in which the traditionalkhuf min al-makhzen(“fear of the authorities”) has weakened. Yet it is extremely difficult to speak of the Amazigh movement in Morocco as a mass movement, at least if one measures the number of persons who can be mobilized for public demonstrations, let alone sustained ones. By way of comparison, the Moroccan Amazigh current has never generated anything approaching the two now-iconic episodes of sustained mass protest and large-scale organizational capacity displayed by the Kabylian Amazigh in Algeria—the 1980 “Berber Spring”, and the 2001 “Black Spring.”
Given the neglected state of the largely Amazigh peripheral regions in Morocco, one would expect them to be a natural and fertile base for political recruitment and mobilization. However, the Moroccanmakhzenhas pursued a sophisticated and generally successful strategy combining co-option and repression that makes it difficult for would-be challengers to build a sustained base of support. Indeed, one of the country’s oldest and most durable political parties has been the staunchly pro-monarchyMouvement Populaire, whose ties to the Palace enable it to dispense patronage services among its Amazigh electoral base, primarily in the Middle Atlas region.
In addition, there has always been a certain disconnect between the socio-cultural demands emphasized by of the urban-based Amazigh associations, spearheaded by intellectuals and educated professionals, and the health, economic, infrastructural and environmental problems of the villages and towns of the mountains and valleys in the hinterland. This disparity acts as a brake on the movement’s mobilization capacities. This is not to say that the urban associations are unaware of or indifferent to these rural problems, only that the difficulties in mobilizing supporters in far-flung regions struggling for basic survival have been daunting. Nor can one rule out another impediment: the continued prevalence of local communal identities that come at the expense of a broader Amazigh identification.
At the same time, Morocco’s peripheral regions are becoming better linked, however haltingly and unevenly, into the wider environs. This is primarily thanks to state penetration and, more recently, access to social media. As a result, the possibilities for increased collective action by social movements, including the Amazigh, are increasing. Indeed, we know that political upheavals set in motion by marginal and deprived groups often occur after a certain level of progress has been achieved. It would be rash to say that the foundations are being laid for a large-scale mobilization to address their socio-economic grievances. Nonetheless, the situation is increasingly fluid.
With this general background in mind we can now examine how human insecurity issues in the mostly Amazigh periphery of Morocco are being addressed in specific cases. One of these cases concerns ongoing protests around the silver mine at Imider, in southeastern Morocco, to which we will return anon. Imider is not the only such case, and one cannot categorically rule out that various local protests will in time link up to change the texture of the Amazigh movement within Morocco.
Most of these cases touch on longstanding grievances related to land and resources, which in turn are linked to the Amazigh culture movement’s efforts to recover and remember rural and tribal history. For example, the Moroccan authorities’ confiscation of the lands belonging to the Zaiane tribes in the Khenifra region has evoked comparisons to similar actions taken by the French Protectorate regime, in which the confiscation of communal lands, and the granting of preference to particular local leaders at the expense of others, had important negative effects on economic, social, and cultural life. Since the Moroccan government does not recognize customary law and views tribal lands as belonging to the state, it uses Royaldahirs—edicts signed by the King that have the force of law—to expropriate the territories in question. Student activists from the region emphasize the rights of local populations to benefit from the natural resources of the area in which they live, through mining, the use of water and forests, and so forth. They are challenging the Moroccan state to make good on its official promotion of administrative decentralization and regionalization, demanding the inclusion of locals in decision-making processes that affect them. Their militant discourse also includes insistence on proper compensation for the remaining elderly combatants of battles against the French conquerors, and demands for the rehabilitation and restoration of local kasbahs and palaces, concrete symbols of Amazigh culture and history, most of which are in an advanced state of decay.
One particularly shocking episode occurred in the winter of 2007, when approximately thirty infants died within just a few days from an illness exacerbated by severe temperatures and the absence of basic medical services in the village of Anfgou in the Eastern High Atlas Mountains. The Moroccan national media sought to downplay the event, but Berber-speaking journalists and activists got the story out. The event went viral on social media, highlighting the village’s isolation and extreme poverty. The nearest hospital was seventy miles away, one could reach the village only via a rocky path alongside a riverbed that often flooded in the winter, and the village itself had no electricity, telephone network, or potable water.The shock reached the Royal Palace, generating a series of actions to ameliorate the situation, beginning with two visits by the King himself, and resulting in infrastructure projects that have substantially improved the life of the 1,700 villagers, although they remain deeply impoverished and dependent on others for their existence. For Amazigh militants such as Mouha Moukhlis, Anfgou and surrounding villages remain a symbol of what they view as the willful neglect of the periphery by the Arab-Islamic oriented authorities, including members of parliament who “read the Fatiha after the death of Saddam Husayn, but failed to do so after the Anfgou tragedies.” They cite as well as the neglect of the “city-dwelling” Amazigh who prefer to sit home and watch al-Jazeera and Arte TV.
But let us now go to Imider as promised, the site of the most sustained grassroots protest against the authorities. The protest centers around an extremely valuable and profitable silver mine in the vicinity of Imider, which is a collection of seven small villages, total population 7,000, in southeast Morocco about 130 km northeast of Ouarzazate. The mine is owned by a subsidiary of Managem, the mining branch of theSociété Nationale d’Investissement(SNI), a massive holding company whose largest shareholder is the Moroccan royal family. Established in 1969, the mine produces 240 tons of silver annually, and had a turnover in 2010 of €74 million, making it one of the most important silver mines in Africa. For villagers, the mine is a symbol of how the state authorities and allied elites extract enormous wealth from their traditional lands, literally the ground beneath their feet, while leaving them struggling to eke out an impoverished existence. Moreover, the mine’s operations require an enormous amount of water. And in the summer of 2011, it became clear that pumping ground water into the mine for silver extraction depleted the supply upon which local inhabitants depended.
Earlier that summer, university students returning home following the end of the academic year found that their traditional seasonal jobs working at the mine were no longer available, which only added to the general sense of embitterment and discrimination.
Then, as Ramadan approached, the faucets bringing drinking water to the village began to run dry, and the water that did occasionally emerge had an increasingly foul smell.
The young people of the villages decided to act. They hiked up the 1,400-meter Mont Alban, where stood a water tower serving the mine. There they established what has become a permanent encampment and took control of one of the water pumps serving the mine. First they shut it down, and then they redirected the water to the village. Four years later they are still at it, organized under the banner of what they call “Movement on Road 96 Imider.”
More than that, the organizers have succeeded in mobilizing sufficient numbers of local inhabitants to maintain the encampment and periodically conduct marches along the roads in the area. Tents have been replaced by stone structures decorated gaily with graffiti, and bear inspirational inscriptions from people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa. Among their global-oriented activities has been a special march by hundreds of women organized to mark International Women’s Day. They have also linked their struggle to global environmental concerns, pointing to the environmental degradation caused by the widespread use of poisonous substances such as mercury and cyanide in the mine’s operation. According to villagers, the damage to people’s health, crops, and livestock has been great. Ironically, perhaps, the villagers want both the jobs that the mine provides and an alteration of its basic operations so as to be protected from its harmful effects.
They have achieved a measure of attention, including alengthy articlein theNew York Timesin which the Amazigh flag was displayed on a hilltop. In examining the ways in which the protest is articulated, it is clear that the activists view theirAmazighitéas integral to their identity, and instrumental for mobilizing support.
The regime’s response has been moderate. The authorities crushed a similar, though smaller, protest back in 1996, with one fatality. The “new” Morocco uses more sophisticated methods to maintain order.
Themakhzen’s heavy hand is certainly present, but for the most part it is gloved.The security forces try to ensure that outsiders do not visit the site. Thirty protestors were imprisoned for a few months, and three of the activists, who had been subjected to a brutal arrest in March 2014, were convicted of disturbing public order and sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 60,000 dirhams each—sentences which were confirmed in July 2014 by a court of appeals. Their crimes included “establishment of a criminal gang”, “embezzlement”, “assembly without permit”, “disorderly conduct”, and ” premeditated aggression.” Freeing them has now become part of the movement’s agenda.
In the midst of the crackdown on activists and the strong security presence in the area, the mine’s operators conducted year-long negotiations with the elected representatives of the Imider rural commune and a number of associations, producing what the management said was an agreement to promote human development in the region. This included the opening of summer camps and academic support programs for 720 children, and the provision of 2,000 school kits to students. “For us”, said a company representative, “the page is turned.” According to a spokesman, the company spends $1 billion in development projects for the region; the activists claim that nothing much has changed. The company also spent heavily in trying to burnish its image in the Moroccan and European media, and even helped served as a sponsor of the second World Human Rights Forum held in Marrakesh in late November 2014.