The Politics Of Silence

Even as Morocco’s Minister of Foreign affairs Taieb Fassi-Fihri, during his meetings in Marrakesh with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton within the framework of the Forum for the Future, continues to tout, in his usual saccharine tone, the country’s “soaring democracy,” his nepotistic government sustains its hypocritical and duplicitous campaign against freedom of political expression subjecting the independent media to convulsions capable, I fear, of decimating the country’s prospect to an unfeigned democracy. Its deliberate immolation of Akhbar Al Youm carried on this week when the Moroccan police, at the behest of the ministry of interior, extrajudicially seized the newspaper and prevented its dissemination. Last Friday, in a Casablanca circuit court, a judge sentenced the paper’s publishing director, Tawfik Bouachrine, and caricaturist Khalid Kadar to a suspended jail sentence of eight years, a combined forfeiture of $412,118.00, and ordered its offices sequestered indefinitely. Prior to the sentencing, the offices of Akhbar Al Youm had been summarily shut down for 36 days. Bouachrine and Kadar were sentenced in accordance with article 267 of the penal code and article 41 of the press law.

Khaled Naceri, during a press conference on Thursday 29th, 2009, delivered a sonorous encomium on Morocco’s continued efforts to foster a eudaemonia for Morocco’s palmy independent media. The unhampered circulation of 1200 foreign newspapers and magazines, Naceri stated, attests the country’s freedom of expression. In fact, in light of the recent publication of Femmes Du Maroc and Telquel, one would find it difficult to gainsay the government’s claim of freedom of expression. Personally, I encourage such publications; I am a proponent of a diverse erudition that expands one’s mind and furthers one’s horizon beyond religious panophobia and gratification as envisioned in hell and heaven. But I hardly consider those as a reflection of freedom of expression in Morocco. Neither should you.

A true measure of freedom of expression is when established ideas and institutions are intellectually and politically challenged by dissenting opinions that are afforded as much a platform as concordant ones. This has never been the case in Morocco where critics of the king, his entourage, and his government are often vilified and their ideas muted. The insidious ingenuity of our government has made it such that its contention there are no prisoners of opinion in its detention centers is actually true; there are only criminals who broke the law and were promptly judged and sentenced by a court of law. As Naceri is fond of averring, Morocco is a country of law and order.

There are laws that uphold democracy and protect the people. There are others specifically intended to protect the rulers and advance their agenda. The latter are what civil liberties lawyer and writer Harvey A. Silverglate describes as the “over-criminalization” laws. A fully loaded oppressive system creates its own panoptic laws and appoints obsequious judges to enforce them. Take the nebulous articles 41 and 42 of the press law. Both were implemented in 2002 and are designed to protect the royal family from calumny and criticism. They are invoked to impose penalties on a broad swath of journalistic activity. A journalist could be charged under article 42 if his article is deemed insulting to the royal family. If the journalist’s defense strategy is to demonstrate that the information published is indeed true and argues in favor of the people’s need to know, he/she could be prosecuted under article 41 – statement undermining the monarchic institution – which carries a stiffer sentence; whether the statement is true or false is irrelevant to the judge. For a case in point, consider Idriss Chahtane, Tawfik Bouachrine, Khalid Kadar, Noureddine Miftah, Meriem Moukrim, Ali Lmrabet, etc.

Clearly article 41 and 42 and other similar laws are deleterious to freedom of the press and the citizens’ right to political expression. Since the 2002 press law reform, the government has been straining information streamed to the public through a sieve. Increasingly more journalists and bloggers are being arrested and sentenced each year. Such practices by the authorities and the onerous laws they impose stand against the conscience of every Moroccan who believes in Justice and equality. A select few are put on a pedestal being unaccountable for their actions. Above the law. Deities. We all have heard stories of members of the Moroccan elite committing blatant transgressions and walk away with impunity and without as much as a whiff of an investigation being initiated by the authorities.

Historical and literary examples of established authorities unwilling to countenance challenges to their absolutism abound. Didn’t Quraysh have established laws protecting their idols? But we never think of the prophet Mohammed as a criminal for breaking them. If you were a Jerusalemite and you saw Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane, would you have called the Romans? If you were Antigone, would you have left your brother’s body to rot on the battlefield in obedience to the edict of Creon the king?

A true democracy rectifies the laws that belie the people’s conscience and undermine the underlying principles of equality and freedom. In the U. S., a bill to protect journalists who refuse to divulge the identities of their sources is currently being discussed in the Senate. In Morocco, there are no laws protecting journalists from gratuitous actions by the government. Journalists are walking lightning rods in an eonian thunderstorm. The situation is made even more tragic by unnerving unassertiveness of the population, the absence of a true national debate over the government’s overboard harassment, and the elusiveness of a reformative structure to remedy the problem. I suspect more journalists will be charged with invidiousness and hauled off to jail, except those the government succeeded in domesticating such as Rachid Nini of Al Masae.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009