When Mohamed Erraji was detained by the Moroccan police in Agadir last Thursday, he was questioned for seven hours and let go. He told friends and family he was asked for the password to his email account. He undauntingly cooperated to show that he was not as dangerous as the government thought he was. But Mohamed Erraji was lethal. Against his lethality, the government had no recourse, but to ruthlessly suppress it. The expediency that characterized his trial was a botched attempt by the government to do damage control; officials recognized that Mohamed Erraji needed to immediately be removed from the general populace; what the sycophant judge so swiftly put behind bar is not Erraji, but the forward-thinking idea of change that he so altruistically advocated. Such is the mark of an undemocratic government, the fear of an idea that upgrades the system to international standards and shudders the established feudal-like tradition, especially if that idea germinates in the mind of a financially crushed, disenchanted youth (oueld esha’ab) between the age of fifteen and thirty-five (which constitutes seventy-five percent of the Moroccan society).
It is true that progressive ideas are expressed daily and weekly in nationally and internationally circulated autonomous media such as Tel Qel, Nishane, Maroc-Hebdo, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, Al Masae, and others. Individual Moroccans such as Nadia Yassine, the daughter of the founder of Al Adl Wal Ihsane, Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, often boisterously convey their reformist ideas. These are nothing more than props on a stage upon which the Moroccan government parades its illusionary democracy and stability before the international money dispensers. They are not read by, nor do they represent the majority in the Moroccan society. There are times when an independent media would deprecate the policies of the government and thus touch on a politically taboo subjects. The government’s new defense strategy to squash such nonconformity is to financially ruin the “perpetrator.” On 16 February 2006, when Le Journal published articles on religion and the Sahara issue, it was fined $350,000.00. Rachid Nini was fined $800,000.00 for an article his newspaper, Al Masae, published.
Mohamed Erraji was only fined $627.00 because, to him as a simple Moroccan oueld asha’ab, that is financially ruinous. The government estimated two years is enough time for that “subversive” idea to evaporate from his mind and for him to be the subdued, bowing subject he ought to be.
Ahmed T. B. Copyright © 2008
[...] Moroccan About the World Around Him ponders the cost of ideas, and attempts to explain why Mohammed Raji was given a hand of such swift [...]
Pingback by Global Voices Online » Morocco: The Cost of Ideas — September 10, 2008 @ 4:16 pm |