Hassan II ruled Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. His era – now referred to as the ‘years of lead’ – was characterized by jingoism and social repression, which included the incarceration and murder of thousands of dissidents. The ascension of Hassan II’s eldest son Mohammed VI to the throne in 1999 marked the beginning of momentous social changes in the country, with steps being taken to rein in the monarchy’s powers and establish some basic rights. – Tr.
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Then the day arrived: 23 July 1999, that surreal day when I learned of the death of Hassan II. I was travelling in the South of France, and my oldest son Yacine called to tell me the news. When I think of how he described his own reaction, it still causes me to shudder. ‘You know, Dad,’ he said, ‘that day when they came and took you from our home to interrogate you and then throw you in jail, it felt like an iron bar entered my body and lodged itself between my shoulders. All this time, I’ve lived without daring to open up to you, as if that bar were preventing me from breathing. And today, suddenly, it has slid right back out of me. At last, it feels as if I can breathe again!’
That is how an adult, who was only seven years old when his father was taken from him, reacted to the announcement of Hassan II’s death. His account seems infinitely more powerful than anything that I could manage to say about my state of mind in that moment.
But let us not dwell on the past! May the dead rest in peace, even if some among them turned the lives of their fellow men into a bottomless hell.
Mohammed VI’s reign began on the eve of a new century which ushered in a new millennium. It was a fitting coincidence. Why didn’t we realise the clear sign that History was sending us, prompting us to contemplate previous rendezvous that we had missed time and time again? The most significant one of late was misleadingly called ‘reformist government’. 1 When Hassan II, weakened by a long illness, loosened his firm grip on the country’s politics, certain individuals, including men of integrity like Abderrahmane Youssoufi, stood for election at their own risk. They took on that responsibility in the belief perhaps that their political engagement would lay the groundwork for a true laboratory of democracy. What they seemed to have forgotten, despite their long experience and full knowledge of the Makhzen’s 2 capabilities, was its unchanging mentality, its truly self-serving machinations, and its unmatched ability to manipulate. The transition that those men of integrity tried to bring to fruition quickly foundered, as it lacked an appropriate strategy or the resolution to implement it.
Such shortcomings might have been understandable while they were dealing with their old, intransigent adversary, but what is less understandable is why they went ahead once the obstacle was removed and the transition period provided distinct and unparallelled room for action. At that point, it became possible to establish a new balance of power and new rules to the game. There even existed a genuine possibility for a formal agreement on democratic transition along with the constitutional changes necessary to put it in place.
I remain convinced that such a story truly had a chance of being written at the beginning of Mohammed VI’s reign. The political game had opened up considerably, and it seemed likely that its rules would be decided collectively and no longer, as they were in the past, by a single man.
In this respect, I can’t help but think of the exemplary success of the Spanish democratic transition in the wake of Franco’s death. It is true that the success there was, on the one hand, the labour of established opposition movements steeped in the relentless struggle against the dictatorship, and, on the other hand, that of exceptional men of state such as King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez. As has often been said before, these fortuitous rendezvous with History are often facilitated by key figures of exceptional political instinct. Such men are motivated by a vision that is both forward-looking and yet still in harmony with the reality of the moment in which great changes are required. Without meaning to offend, I do believe that such dispositions have been painfully lacking in our country, an absence that, sadly, continues even to this day.
Instead of insisting on a transition negotiated in the greatest possible transparency with the aim of establishing the rule of law and reforming the monarchy itself, the reformist government contented itself with studies of issues and preparation of reforms whose execution was supposedly within its jurisdiction but for which it rarely dared to assume full responsibility. When the tables turned, it still continued to interact with the Makhzen as it had under the preceding regime. The most instructive example of its lack of cunning, initiative, and political resolution is given to us by its handling of one of the period’s major issues: the reform of the Mudawana.3 Brought to the public’s attention thanks to feminists’ long struggle and then single-handedly drafted as a law by one courageous minister, the reform encountered the law of equivocation which marked that government’s action. The end result was that the man of conviction was disowned and the reform was taken from him by the Chief of State who, in promulgating the law, passed as its initiator, thus reaping all its moral and symbolic benefit.
In any event, disillusioned hopes are commonplace in our history. Transitions that take us nowhere. Supposedly ‘democratic’ processes which do nothing but stall, like broken-down engines that never should have left the factory floor. At the beginning of the new millennium, we were still at the crossroads, not knowing which path to take, or rather, not knowing which path our government had already taken unbeknownst to us. We were entitled to governance where the new and the old cacophonously coexisted, where rumour served as information, and where fortune-tellers were more sought after than experienced political organisers. Having not been consulted about the future they were crafting for us, we grasped at the slightest sign that might have provided a clue about their plans.
That’s why the symbolic, but non-negligible, measures that marked the young king’s reign seemed such good omens. There were several well-known measures that I was quick to note as they happened: the attention given to the population in the north of the country – especially in the Rif – with the goal of redressing the injustices suffered during Hassan II’s reign, the introduction of human rights cases in the Equality and Reconciliation Court, the Mudawana reform in the circumstances I described above, the decisions taken in favour of Amazigh language and culture, the authorisation of Abraham Serfaty’s return from exile,4 and the dismissal of Driss Basri, the infamous Minister of the Interior.5 Beyond those measures, we might add other ‘details’ that eluded many observers or somehow didn’t seem important enough to note and assess their full importance. There is no lack of examples, like the decision to close the royal harem and send its members back to their families or the order to the media to cease broadcasting supposedly patriotic songs glorifying the deceased king, thus discouraging flattering artists from reoffending by venerating his successor.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that the questions on everyone’s minds were the following: Deep down had the monarch recognised the sufferings we had endured during his predecessor’s reign? Had he decided to redress those injustices in transparency and justice? Would his sensitivity, peculiar to youth, push him to establish a break with the methods of the past? Would it then hopefully lead him to reject inherited institutional archaisms and to opt for a monarchical model more consistent with this modern era’s demands? Consequently, would he contemplate changing his own status to become a loyal partner to the nation’s dynamic forces implementing democracy?
In the midst of our self-questioning, I published a text entitled ‘Don’t Squander the Hope’ in an effort to share my thoughts on the ‘possibility of the impossible’ that I hoped to see come to pass. In that text I affirmed, in short, that our country was still at the crossroads and that a new page had opened in its history. The crucial question subsequently raised was: What story would we write? Two paths were possible. The first, a continuation of the path of the former regime, led assuredly to a dead-end, since its supporters had not given up their arms and they retained the ability to impede progress. The second was nothing other than pure imagination, a total renewal of mind and of political practices. It required courage and the mobilisation of the country’s men and women. Because only a break with the methods of the past would enable the country to exit out of the economic, social, and moral horror afflicting it. At that exact moment, I conjectured that the king himself had encountered this fork in the road and that he had come out in favour of the second path. For that choice, though, some prerequisites were necessary. In my opinion, the transition towards democracy would require a re-foundation of the Constitution. The new one would no longer be handed down to us like the preceding ones, rubber-stamped by a referendum whose result was known in advance. No, only a sovereign constitutional assembly, elected by universal, legitimate, and transparent suffrage, could take on this task whose primordial concern was to establish the separation of powers with a re-balancing benefiting the executive and the legislative branches.
In advancing that idea, I was aware that the ballot box ran the risk of turning its back on democracy, but I believed all would depend on the work to be accomplished in the interim: a task that was incumbent, above all, on democrats and which would not be accomplished without rallying grassroots movements, which, for decades, had fought for the establishment of rule of law and against oppression and the arbitrary exercise of force. Furthermore, I called for local councils of all the democratic forces in Morocco: an Estates General that would have allowed for the development of a Democratic Pact specifying the requirements for a true transition to democracy.
The page that opened at that moment in our history was not written as I would have liked. At the crossroads, we did nothing more than shuffle. And, as we well know, a failure to go forward is, in itself, a step backwards.
Translated by Christopher Schaefer
1 In 1998, after decades in opposition and in exile, the Socialist Abderrahmane Youssofi was named as Prime Minister in a power-sharing agreement that kept the king’s right-hand man Driss Basri as Minister of the Interior.
2 An Arabic word meaning ‘warehouse’ or ‘shop’, used in Morocco to signify the elite civil servants that directly represent the king and his power.
3 The Mudawana is the family code in Moroccan law, which was reformed in 2004. It regulates issues related to marriage such as minimum legal age, divorce, and polygamy. The only section of Moroccan law that relies primarily on Islamic sources rather than Spanish or French civil codes, it was meant to unify the country under a modern Islamic identity.
4 Abraham Serfaty was an anti-Zionist Moroccan Jew and prominent dissident who collaborated with Laâbi on Souffles and was imprisoned for seventeen years for his political activities. After being released from prison he went into exile in France.
5 In Morocco, the Ministry of the Interior is perhaps the most powerful as it controls the country’s internal security.