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The Neuilly–Marrakesh Express

In the early 2000s, in a place like the Café Arabe in the Medina of Marrakesh, it was possible to drink vodka and lime on the roof terrace, motoring on ecstasy or coke, surveying the roofs of this ancient city, while below most people lived on less than a euro a day. Mohammed VI had opened Morocco to the outside world as a glitzy destination. Marrakesh was the main focus, but other cities like Tangier and Fez also cleaned up their Medinas, got rid of the hustlers, imported ‘tourist police’ to ensure ‘security’, offered the ‘Riad’ experience, and presented the image of an exotic but ultimately sanitized and safe holiday destination

Morocco, and especially Marrakesh, became particularly attractive to French visitors. Jacques Chirac was a frequent and much feted visitor to the city, and he was followed by pop stars and film idols. Many Moroccans were proud to see the likes of Gérard Depardieu or Sophie Marceau on holiday in the country. But they were also proud of home-grown ‘Franco-Moroccan’ celebrities such as the comedian Jamel Debouzze or the singer Sophie Saidi, who had won a reality-TV singing contest and went on to become an actress. Morocco’s status as a glamorous destination was confirmed when, in 2004, Paris Match published a thirteen-page cover story on ‘Mohammed VI en famille’: the royal couple wore Western clothes and complained of how cramped the king’s quarters were at Salé and how they needed to move to Dar Essalam, a huge estate of orchards and orange groves, to bring up their family. It could have been the profile of any Hollywood couple.

In 2007 President Nicolas Sarkozy came to Marrakesh, lavishing extravagant praise on the king. It seemed then that the links between the Moroccan royal family and the French élite had never been stronger. These were apparently good times for both countries; everybody was rich, or, at least, the French and Moroccan media pretended that was so. Sarkozy’s political headquarters in Paris was the affluent suburb of Neuilly, also the home of rock stars and the richest politicians. There were jokes in the Moroccan and French press about the Neuilly–Marrakesh Express – a connection which suddenly made Morocco sound as chic and exclusive as its Parisian mirror image. Few commentators in either country wanted to acknowledge, however, a parallel trajectory, from the French banlieues back to the bled, the poor heartlands of Morocco – journeys marked by poverty, necessity and exile. These were two worlds which could only meet in collision.1

Yet on the surface, during these years, Morocco did seem to be undergoing a kind of cultural revolution. The word nayda – with the meaning of ‘awakening’ – was used to describe what was happening: a blaze of movies, music, art and literature, all defined by their ‘modernity’. Those who promoted nayda compared it to the Spanish movida of the 1980s, the moment when Spain ceased to the austere and miserable state under Franco, a country adrift from the mainstream of political and cultural life, and rejoined the Western world in a new wave of nightclubs, rock bands and movies, proclaiming total liberty at all costs, as exemplified by the films of Pedro Almodóvar.

One of the key markers of the nayda in Morocco was a newly independent press, which wrote both in Arabic and French. Leading the way was the magazine Tel Quel, edited by Ahmed Benchemsi, a graduate of the Sorbonne and Sciences-Po, whose stated intention was to ‘show Moroccan realities behind public declarations of intentions and the mystifications’. Tel Quel’s agenda was to break down taboos around sex, religion and politics. The tone was generally satirical but never wholeheartedly polemical. Above all, Tel Quel sounded a young note: its writers read French magazines such as Marianne and Les Inrockuptibles, which blended hip sensibility with serious cultural and political reporting.

The Arabic equivalent of Tel Quel was Nichane, which means ‘direct’ or ‘the way it is’ in dialectal Arabic. Nichane had the same agenda as Tel Quel, but its more conservative Arabic-speaking readership meant it was inevitably headed for conflict. This first controversy came in 2006 when the magazine published an issue on noukates (jokes) about sex, politics and religion. This provoked anger not only from Islamist groups but also in the government; eventually fines and prison sentences were handed down to journalists. The magazine limped on until 2007. Both Nichane and Tel Quel, sharp and ambitious as they were, represented wishful thinking rather than a real movement of change. Benchemsi left Tel Quel in 2011 to move to the United States. The magazine still exists, but its circulation has fallen and its influence is much diminished.

The biggest cause célèbre of this period, however, was the film Marock, directed by Leila Marrakchi, a teenage of rite-of-passage movie set in Casablanca in 1997, featuring a group of rich Moroccan school kids, educated at the élite French-speaking Lycée Lyautey. The film caused a scandal in Morocco not only because of its references to drugs and sex, but because the main character, Rita, falls in love with Youri, a Jew. This romance is set against the increasing radicalization of her brother Mao, who is turning to political Islam. All of this makes the film sound better than it is; in fact, it is quite dismal fare. What films like Marock demonstrated was that, for the majority, the hoped-for nayda was not much more than an illusion. Nayda belonged to the metropolitan élite which moved easily between France and Morocco, French and Arabic, lubricated by money and access to power. None of this applied to ordinary Moroccans in France or Morocco.

One film, however, did hit home in a more convincing manner. This was Casanegra, directed by Nour-Eddine Lakhmari and released in 2008. The plot is a typical crime scenario in which two young men, Adil and Karim, are out of their depth as they try to make a living scamming and hustling in downtown Casablanca, which they hate and refer to as ‘Casanegra’. The film is fast, funny and violent – borrowing from Tarantino and Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Aside from its international success – it won prizes across the world – it played to packed houses in all of Morocco’s cities. Its depiction of the real life of Casablanca showed Moroccans for the first time how they actually lived.

In 2008, the year that Casanegra found its public, there were again stirrings of a mass protest movement, mostly directed against the increase in university fees, which in one fell swoop made higher education impossible for a generation. The students’ anger was fuelled by the insanely high levels of unemployment across the country. It was bad enough that the universities, underfunded and poorly resourced, should be used to mask the reality of unemployment, but it was even worse to see to this fiction torn to shreds. On 14 and 15 May over a thousand police and military poured into the university residences of Marrakesh to put a violent end to the student protests against the privatization of the university. The police used tear gas, rubber bullets and brutality – there were claims that students were thrown off rooftops. For their part, wearing hoodies and throwing Molotov cocktails, employing tactics they had seen used in the French banlieues, the students fought the security services hard. They all remembered an earlier battle almost a year earlier at the village of Harbil, twenty-five kilometres outside Marrakesh, where security services crushed a demonstration against the demolition of the village to make way for tourist housing; the battle cry, then and now, was ‘Who owns Marrakesh?’

The government was intent on ensuring that the answer to that question was not the native inhabitants of the city. By now Marrakesh had become known throughout the world as a kind of Arabia-lite, offering tourists a safe glimpse of the exotic Muslim world. But this hid harsher and deeper realities. French and other European visitors mingled in Djemaa el-Fna, the main square, with young people who would never earn a fraction of what the tourists had. Now the talk was of a new ‘intifada’ against the outsiders and the government that lured them here.

The heroine of the Marrakesh movement was a young woman, Zahra Boudkour, a twenty-year-old student who was arrested by police, stripped naked, and left for three days in a cell with other inmates, visibly menstruating. Other detainees in the police station claimed that they were tortured, treated as ‘terrorists’. Zahra went on hunger strike and almost died. When she was finally released in 2010, the whole region exploded in joy and anger. In Djemaa el-Fna square, the crowds brandished portraits of Che Guevara, Lenin and Mao – these demonstrators were not the Islamist demons which the government complained were a threat to Moroccan democracy, but far-left militants protesting against poverty and injustice. All of this was watched by police, maintaining a steady cordon between protesters and tourists.

A month or so later, the demonstrations were followed by more violent clashes in the southern town of Sidi Ifni. The Al Jazeera television channel claimed that police had killed several people, but this was denied by the Moroccan authorities, who later imposed a punishing fine on the Al Jazeera office in Rabat. In the first few months of 2009, there were widespread and often violent demonstrations against Mohammed VI, his perceived pro-Western stance and in favour of Hamas. As ever, the protests were fuelled by conspiracy theories. The Russians had started to make their presence felt in Moroccan political life, and were proposing to establish a private English-speaking university outside Rabat. There were wilder theories that the Algerian and the Syrian secret services, with Russian backing, were seeking to provoke an Islamist uprising that would give Iran a foothold in the far west of the Muslim world. Such theories were given substance by the often mysterious financial backing for projects such as the so-called ‘Syrian Mosque’ in Tangier, hotels and other joint capital ventures.

*   *   *

Towards midday on 28 April 2011, a remote-controlled bomb exploded on the balcony of the Café Argana on Djemaa el-Fna square. This is one of the most popular tourist sites in the city, where visitors can take panoramic photos; like thousands of others, I had been there and done that with my own father and wife on a holiday to Marrakesh a few years earlier. The bomb killed seventeen people, most of them of French nationality. President Nicolas Sarkozy was furious and promised publicly that the killers would not go unpunished.

At first the Moroccan authorities claimed that the bomb was no more than an unfortunate gas explosion. This was dismissed straight away by security experts and eyewitnesses, who testified that the flames which ripped through the tourist crowd could only have come from a planned explosion. The term ‘al-Qaeda’ was then tossed about in the Moroccan press, but nobody really believed this: these were not al-Qaeda’s methods, and the organization had no strategic interest in Marrakesh. Fingers were pointed at Islamists, recently released from prison, but again this did not really add up. The bomb had exploded only a few months after the revolution in Tunisia, but again the timing and execution of the massacre did not make sense in this context. Conspiracy theories – citing Syrian, Algerian or Iranian interests – abounded. The government had to react, and in October 2011 a certain Adil Al Atmani was condemned to death for the crime. Alleged accomplices were given light sentences. No one was convinced by this spectacle of justice, least of all the French families of those who had died, who accused the Moroccan judicial system of a cover-up. This was the darker side of the Neuilly–Marrakesh express, which no one in the French and Moroccan élite had wanted to see a few years earlier.

Of course there had always been a few dissenting voices, mainly on the Moroccan side. Chief among them was Ali Amar, an unrepentant controversialist who, with Aboubakr Jamai, founded Le Journal Hebdomadaire in 1997. As far the authorities were concerned, Amar’s biggest crime as editor was to argue for transparency and accountability in the murkiest quarters of government. The bombing of the Café Argana was precisely the kind of ‘mysterious event’ that led him to suspect political intrigue. He always seemed to be just within the boundaries of the law. This did not prevent the government spreading rumours, via the PJD (Justice and Development Party), that Ali was a pro-Western agent who had even published the forbidden Danish satirical cartoons of the Prophet in his magazine (in reality he had published a photograph of a European looking at these pictures).

The Journal Hebdomadaire finally shut down in 2010, plagued by debts, reviled by Islamists and government alike. Aboubakr Jamai went to New York while Amar made for Paris as a safe haven, though he claims he had underestimated Sarkozy’s close links to ‘M6’; he found himself almost immediately deported to Casablanca on the orders of the Moroccan authorities. There he was arrested at the apartment of Zineb el Rhazoui, a feminist and fellow journalist (el Rhazoui had made herself notorious in Morocco for organizing ‘picnics’ at the height of Ramadan: for this she, too, was harassed and eventually locked up). On his arrest, Amar was beaten up, but was finally released. He now lives in France and Slovenia, where he claims that he is still regularly intimidated by the security forces.

The Suicide Solution

The Arab Spring never quite arrived in Morocco. The frustration had the same emotional force as in Tunisia or Egypt, but the rage never quite caught fire.

None the less, the early months of 2011 in Morocco, like everywhere else in the Arab World, were marked by demonstrations and protests, often spontaneous and often quickly turning violent. In February in Tangier, there were riots and demonstrations against French business interests, which were growing across the city. Mohammed VI had to make difficult choices: on the one hand he had to recognize the anger of the masses and concede ground on the constitution, making government more open and less opaque; on the other hand he could not afford to have the government undermined and overturned by the Islamist factions. The police, the military and the secret services kept a tight hold on all groups and individuals they perceived as a threat. Morocco’s international reputation was not enhanced by rumours of collusion in torture and ‘extraordinary rendition’, while radical Islamists certainly saw the government of ‘M6’ not only as apostate but as an active collaborator with the hated forces of the West.

The hopes of ordinary Moroccans, which had been raised by events in Tunisia, quickly turned to despair. This found a new form of expression when demonstrators, realizing their impotence, began to make threats of collective suicide as a form of protest. These suicides started to happen in 2011 and 2012: there is disturbing YouTube footage of youths drinking and covering themselves in petrol in Casablanca and Rabat, before hurling themselves at police like human incendiary devices.

The main focus for the anger was Rabat, where regular demonstrations were held outside parliament. These were well choreographed but began to turn into an empty ritual. ‘The government has accepted that we are here and we can demonstrate more loudly than we used to, but still no one wants to hear us,’ I was told this by Driss, a twenty-six-year-old postgraduate student from Fez who had come to Rabat to demonstrate. His mates soon started to chip in, keen to let the outside world know their story. ‘Morocco is a prison,’ they said. ‘We are dying of boredom.’ The most frequently repeated demand was: ‘France must help us!’ They hated the French for not doing more, and, like the young Algerians I had met in Algiers, they resented most of all the money and power of their own French-speaking élites.

But if Moroccans still look north to France, they avert their eyes with dread and fear from Algeria, their nearest neighbour in the east. With its art deco palaces and 1930s French colonial architecture, there is no city in the world which looks more like Algiers than Casablanca. Most Moroccans hope that the resemblance will stop there.