All your life is a long chain of fears – fears which bruise your body and lacerate your soul. On those fears is based the authority of God, of the church, of parents, of capitalist and ruler.
Alexander Berkman
The "Arab Spring" (which was never fully Arab, and as far as the season was concerned, of spring there was little) has dissolved into a complex of political realities; testimony to the very superficiality with which the events that carried this name were treated. Morocco's passage through the season was peaceful, reformist reason having won out against the voices of rebellion, or so the reigning regime and subservient media would have one believe. But the mechanisms of control remain untouched and the underlying relations of domination continue unrestrained.
This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the systematic police violence against and criminal persecution of all dissidence and opposition. After the sanctioning of constitutional reforms proposed by the monarch by referendum on July 1st, 2011 (with a vote in favour the envy of any dictator: 99%), legislative elections on the 25 of November giving the moderate islamist party PJD a majority in parliament and dissensions within the protest "movement" February 20, the authorities have put into place a politics of harassement, intimidation, violence and arrest against those who persist in their protests. From the condemnation to prison sentences totalling 95 months for 17 protesters in the city of Taza, to the arrest and imprisonment of activists Mohammed Sokrate, Saïd Ziani, Younes Belkhdim and the rapper Mouad L7a9ed, followed by the more recent condemnation of six activists involved in protests in Casablanca, the reigning logic has become, as in fact it always was, that of fear.
The "democratic transition" awaits …
A video interview by Arte on Mouad Belghouate …
News from Demain On Line …
Les Six de Bernoussi, , etc., etc., etc …
Reflections of Morocco: "Arab Spring", Moroccan Winter …
Video, My Makhzen and Me …
