25

Blank Generation

Mohammed VI came to the throne on 23 July 1999 to massive popular acclaim: the streets of cities, towns and villages throughout Morocco were packed with people from all backgrounds chanting, ‘Yahla el Malik!’ (‘Long live the king’). The hope was that Hassan’s reign would be consigned to history and the new king, young, compassionate and generous, would finally lead Morocco to its place among the nations. This would be the ‘génération M6’ (named after the trendy French TV channel M6) – a generation at home in Europe and Morocco, in touch with the past and the present, finally at ease in the world.1

The alternative nightmare scenario was already being played out in neighbouring Algeria, which had become a slaughterhouse as Islamists, the government and the military fought a three-way civil war which no one could win. A new cycle of violence had started in Morocco in August 1994, when, at the height of the tourist season, two Spanish tourists had been gunned down and killed in the foyer of the Hotel Asni in Marrakesh. This apparently random murder was the act of seven young men with French passports, Algerian and Moroccan backgrounds, who originally came from the banlieue of La Courneuve just outside Paris. They had equipped themselves with fake IDs that linked them with the FIS in Algeria, hoping to provoke an international incident between Algeria and Morocco, but in fact they were Maghrebi Parisians – the product of the dope-smoking culture of boredom and disaffection in the French suburbs. Their original plan had been even more grandiose – to shoot tourists on the beach in Tangier, to attack a synagogue in Casablanca and to mow down police in Fez; their aim was to convulse Morocco into a state of terror on the Algerian model. Even this small-scale attack nearly achieved this – the first instinct of the Moroccan government was to blame Algerians and tighten up the closed border.

It was the French and Moroccan secret services who revealed that the terrorist cell, operating out of Fez, was made up North African immigrants to France. The Moroccan authorities then insisted on treating the affair as a criminal case, while the French police pursued the line that a significant number of the would-be terrorists had been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. To follow this lead meant an investigation into the mosques of La Courneuve and Saint-Denis, where the ideology of jihad had been promulgated in response to the Gulf War, Palestine–Israel and Algeria. It was the French intifada in its purest form.

As a counterpoint to this violence, the king in Morocco was (and is still) held in very real affection. Mohammed styled himself ‘le roi des pauvres’ (the King of the Poor), and devoted much of his time to travelling around the country, often attending the humblest country fair or opening of a school. None the less, the challenges he faced were severe. The first was to reassure Moroccans and the outside world that Morocco was moving out of the darkness of Hassan II’s reign towards something that, on the surface at least, looked like a Western democracy. This had to be achieved without disturbing the delicate structures of government, which Mohammed had inherited from his father, and without provoking a backlash from the still dangerous figures who remained in the court.2

The second challenge was to position Morocco as a power which, although friendly to the West, had not turned its back on the Arab world to the east. Mohammed openly courted Saudi influence, mainly a political manoeuvre which helped to demonstrate Morocco’s fidelity to the Islamic sources of Arab culture. Unfortunately, friendship with the Saudis was not limited to the whoring and gambling in Morocco’s casinos and designer hotels; Saudi-influenced Wahhabism, the puritanical version of Islam at odds with the homely Moroccan variety, entered the shanty towns and poorer quarters of the big cities.

The influence of Wahhabism was most clearly felt in the town of Salé, which lies just across the river from the capital city, Rabat. Its muddy streets and gloomy market are a long way from the French-influenced chic of Rabat or the bustle of Casablanca. Few foreigners come here, and those who do so are quickly made aware that they are barely tolerated. Nowadays only faded pro-Palestinian graffiti and a mural of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem at the entrance of the Old Town indicate that this place was a hotbed of Islamist activity, but until recently it was not unusual to spot Saudis in the street or for a neighbouring youth football team to acquire a shiny new kit with money from a mystery source. Amid the grinding poverty, it was easy for Saudis or their supporters to make friends in the area.

In 2002 Salé became notorious as the headquarters of one of the most daring and uncompromising Islamist groups in North Africa. The Salafi Jihadi (Salafist Combat) share not just their name with their Algerian counterpart, the Salafist Brigade for Combat, but also their ideology. Salafi Jihadi was founded in the early 1990s by forty veterans of the Afghan wars. It was part of a network linked to sister organizations in Algeria and to al-Qaeda, and for years its leader, the smiling and suave Hassan Ben Ali Kettani, taught here at the Grande Mosqueé, attracting followers from all over North Africa.

Late in 2002 the Grand Mosque was raided by police, with the aid of military helicopters. The police had discovered that Salafi Jihadi was providing logistical support to an al-Qaeda cell of Saudi militants who were plotting to attack the Strait of Gibraltar from Casablanca. Moreover, the group, which by then consisted of some 400 activists, was found to have links with a shadowy death squad, Takfir wal-Hijra. These two groups are alleged to have been responsible for 300 killings across Morocco.

‘Franco-Moroccans’

During the 1990s the relationship with France was fundamental to securing Morocco’s international credibility. This issue became even more acute in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, when it transpired that the first conspirator to be arrested and charged was a French Moroccan called Zacaria Moussaoui, whose family originally came from Meknes.

Moussaoui was in many ways a classic candidate for radicalization. He had been brought up in the banlieue of Narbonne, a sleepy, civilized town in southern France. He was a clever, sensitive student, who was easily bruised by perceived racism. The French intelligence services had been tracking him since 1996, when he came into contact with Islamist networks first in Rabat and then in London. During and after his trial in 2006, his mother complained loudly to the press that he was a victim of the French state and that he had been found guilty because he had publicly cursed ‘America and the Jews’.

For all the press attention the Moussaoui case attracted in Morocco and France, the two countries had never been on friendlier terms. This was publicly marked in 2002 with the inauguration of the Place Mohammed V, just outside the Institut du Monde Arabe on the Left Bank in Paris. Mohammed VI, the grandson of the great leader who had brought Morocco independence, said that the square would be the symbol of ‘ever stronger and permanent relations’ between the two countries. This was followed up in the autumn of 2003 by a state visit to Morocco by President Jacques Chirac with six of his cabinet ministers.

There were, however, difficulties behind the scenes. The Moroccan government was wary of the bad press that it received in France. Liberalization after the death of Hassan II had given journalists in Morocco a free or at least a freer hand, to uncover the repression of his régime. There were regular articles in the serious French press and a plethora of investigative books about Morocco’s recent past. The Moroccan government responded cautiously, but most of its citizens just felt insulted by this criticism from their former colonial master.

Confusion and anger also defined the mood of the third generation of Moroccan immigrants in France, who had come of age in the era of 9/11 and global terror. These emotions were caught in the short but piercing novel Paris, Mon Bled (Paris, My Manor) by the Rabati writer Youssouf Amine Elalamy, which describes the experiences of a group of young people on the outskirts of Paris who struggle to identify themselves as either French or Moroccan. At one level, this is a fairly standard comedy – the young people agonize over sexual adventures, take drugs, try to orientate themselves in a French-speaking world which is also being eroded by Anglo-American pop culture. But there is a more sinister undercurrent: the split identities are never properly resolved and the characters take sides one way or another. This is how, the novel tells us, the dope-smoking rap fan becomes an Islamist killer or the polar opposite – a spy for the French secret services, complicit in trickery and torture.

I met Elalamy several times in Casablanca: sophisticated, smart and fluent in several different cultures, he firmly asserted himself as a Moroccan who understood all of the conflicted identities in his novel, assuring me that this was the real story of the génération M6. ‘You didn’t have to leave Morocco to see this at work,’ he said. ‘It was here in the shanty towns, where everybody watched French TV and dreamed of leaving, and, because they couldn’t, felt a mixture of desire, rage and humiliation.

*   *   *

The bombs all exploded around 10 p.m. on 16 May 2003. The explosions could be heard across Casablanca, like the sound of fireworks, and at first, on this mild, early-summer evening, nobody believed they could be anything else. But then the news footage came in of the carnage and it became clear that the first target was the Cercle de l’Alliance Israélite, where a nightwatchman and a policeman were killed. Near the Jewish cemetery alongside the Medina, another bomb killed three Moroccan passers-by.

Other targets were an Italian restaurant, the Positano, owned by Jews, and the al Farah hotel, owned by Kuwaitis. But the most savage attack was at the Casa de España on the rue Lafayette. This was a popular club where the dwindling and elderly Spanish population of Casablanca came on Friday nights for a drink, a chat and to play bingo. One of the bombers carried a scimitar, with which he sliced open the neck of a hapless security guard. He was trying to decapitate the man and, frustrated in his task, went on hacking away until finally – in front of an audience of appalled drinkers – he ripped off the guard’s severed head in a fit of exultant anger. The two suicide bombers marched into the club and set off their bombs. ‘You will lose you mind if you see what happened in here,’ a policeman later warned the Spanish consul general, who arrived a few hours later to see what had happened. By the end of the night, forty-five people lay dead.

In the immediate wake of the bombings, there were demonstrations against terrorism and declarations of outrage. But what alarmed most middle-class Moroccans was the fact that the bombers were not foreigners, but came from Tangier and Casablanca. The news that one of the men held French nationality was initially greeted with delight, on the grounds that no Moroccan could have conceived of such a crime. But as it became clear that the other bombers were Moroccan, many commentators began to talk of a campaign of Islamist insurrection on the model of Algeria.

Mohammed VI went into a cold fury. He declared that the ‘years of laxity’ were over and invoked Algeria as the biggest threat to Morocco’s hard-fought-for stability. The possibility of an Islamist insurgency in Morocco had first entered the public imagination a few years earlier, when reports from Nador, Rabat, Mohammedia, Tangier and Casablanca confirmed that disparate but organized Islamist factions, possibly under the influence of Algerian or Saudi-financed groups, were taking control of the slums and shanty towns. This was followed by regular stories that drinkers, prostitutes, drug dealers, policemen and others suspected of un-Islamic behaviour had been thrown into wells, stoned to death or had their throats cut. In the exclusive areas of Rabat and Casablanca, Moroccan women in Western clothes were assaulted at knife-point for not wearing the hijab.3

And now, in 2003, violence seemed to simmering all across Morocco. In Agadir, a cheap and popular holiday destination in the south of the country, a young man of twenty-three called Mohamed Agouirar, from the poor district of Dcheïra, walked into a seafront bar around 1 a.m. on 10 July and plunged a long knife into the bellies of the assembled. Those who had not been attacked were so stunned that they were unable to flee. Agouirar then stabbed himself to death on the beach. In Rabat two fourteen-year-old girls planned to firebomb a shopping mall and attack the royal family. In the north, magistrates and drug warlords were found to be arming Islamic extremists. There was no connection between these events, but it felt as if no place was immune from the violence.