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February, 2000
In the interview published in La Riposte, Bachir Ben Barka, the son of Mehdi Ben Barka, the assassinated founder of the Moroccan Socialist Party (USFP), explains the long and largely fruitless struggle waged by his family to obtain access to the files of the French secret services. Towards the end of the interview, Bachir refers to the possibility that the files may at last be opening by the Jospin government. However, whereas certain files were in fact opened, the most important information about who killed Mehdi Ben Barka, on whose orders and in what circumstances, and how the body was disposed of, has been once again withheld from the family under the state secrecy laws.
This development shows the continued complicity between the left government in France and the Moroccan regime. Killers hired by the French State, or else by the Moroccan secret services are still being protected. It also demonstrates the reality of the so-called "democratisation" announced in Morocco by the regime itself. To this day, hundreds of Moroccan mothers are involved in a campaign to find out whether their sons and husbands, arrested in the past by the Hassan II regime, are still alive, or at least, if they are dead, where they were buried.
The launching of an international campaign for the opening of the files on the Ben Barka Affair and for the release of all information about those tortured and killed by the Hassan II regime is unfolding against a background of profound social, economic, and political crisis in Morocco.
King Hassan II died in July 1999, leaving a legacy of incalculable wealth in the hands of a small Mafia-like minority, with the national economy largely controlled by French and Spanish capitalism, with Germany and the USA rapidly gaining ground at their expense, while the vast majority of Moroccan society lives in extreme poverty. Foreign investments are pouring in, taking advantage of cheap labour and repressive laws. Last July, the Spanish company Telefonica paid 1.1 billion dollars for a second mobile telephone network licence. Fierce competition is developing between various international consortiums to buy up public companies being sold off by the government. These include the national airline, Royal Air Maroc, 40% of the national telephone company, as well as electricity and water distribution.
The population of Morocco is 27 million, of which over half live in the rural areas. In the main urban centres, side-by-side with the working class, is a growing mass of pauperised and desperate people, who have moved into the towns in order to flee the hunger and destitution of the rural areas, only to find themselves living in the ruins and filth of slum areas. Even according to the official figures, which no doubt understate the gravity of the situation, more than 4 million people live on less than $1 a day. Over 50% of the population is illiterate. This figure includes 68% of women. This is worse than the literacy rate in India. More women die in childbirth than in any other country in northern Africa. In the towns, the average period of schooling is between four and six years. Whilst schools are nominally open to all, education is not obligatory and many families, through ignorance or through poverty, send their small children out begging or else to work in conditions little removed from outright slavery.
"Liberalisation of the regime"
The new king, Mohamed VI, has repeatedly emphasised the need to break with the methods of his father, and has given himself the title of the "poor man's king". In fact, before he died, Hassan II also tried to "liberalise" the regime, having been forced to the conclusion that it had become impossible to rule in the old way. He was a psychopathic individual, who condemned innumerable young people, working-class militants and democratically-minded intellectuals to torture and death, usually without trial. He personally attended the torture of some of his most hated opponents. And yet, in the years preceding his death, this same individual, part of whose personal fortune was built on the drugs trade, founded a "Hassan II Human Rights Foundation", engineered the setting up of a "socialist" minority government, granted an amnesty for certain political prisoners and exiles, and began to speak of the need to struggle and corruption and social inequality.
Had the monarchy tried to maintain the naked dictatorship of the past, the result would have been a revolutionary explosion. This is why Hassan II in his time and now Mohamed VI are trying to shift their ground. However, in doing so, instead the controlled and calculated "transition" they hoped for, they have opened the floodgates released a massive tide of social discontent and revolt, with strikes, student demonstrations, occupations and hunger-strikes, with hundreds of associations springing up in order to struggle against the various aspects of oppression and degradation, whether it be the reactionary laws against women, child-abuse, child-labour, racketeering, corruption, or police brutality.
Following a speech in which the young king said that he would read letters send to him in which people complained of injustices, huge crowds gathered whenever he made a public appearance, bringing to mind the cahiers de doléances which foreshadowed the French Revolution or the humble petitions to the Russian Czar in 1905, with thousands of scribbled messages being passed from hand to hand over the heads of the crowd, pleading with him to intervene to prevent the death of a sick child, to release a relative from prison, to provide food and shelter, and countless other requests. Under popular pressure, the hated interior minister, Driss Basri, was sacked by the king last November. But repression continues. A series of strikes by public sector workers in December were suppressed by force.
But behind all the talk of reform, the condition of the mass of the people is worsening. In 1999, GDP actually fell by 1,75%. A specialist on Morocco speaking recently in Toulouse in France, warned that before the year 2010, 75% of holders of university diplomas in Morocco will be unemployed. Already, thousands of qualified teachers and professionals scrape a living driving taxis and through casual labour. In this situation, what hope is there for the uneducated majority?
Capitulation of the "socialist" leaders
The so-called "socialist" leaders have completely capitulated to the regime, accepting to serve as a hypocritical facade behind which the wheels of the old despotic machine are still turning. While pretending to carry out "reforms", or, at least, to be thinking about "priorities" for reform in the future, the main purpose of these ministerial lapdogs of His Majesty is to make excuses for the regime. The hopes invested in the new government have now been dashed. An attempt to return to open dictatorship would lead to an uprising in the present circumstances, and yet the promise of reform has turned out to be a complete sham. On 12th February, two simultaneous mass demonstrations took place, which show the explosive character the present situation. In Rabat, some 150 000 demonstrators marched through the streets insisting on concrete and immediate measures to create jobs, improve education and alleviate poverty. At the head of the demonstration were some very worried-looking socialist ministers, or "modernists" as they like to call themselves these days, conscious of the fact that they were sitting on a social volcano. But at the same time, in Casablanca, more than one million demonstrators rallied to the call of the Islamic fundamentalist leaders. This is a serious warning of the consequences of bankrupt leadership on the left, which, in blocking the road to a socialist solution, are driving the more desperate sections of society into the hands of the fundamentalists demagogues, who skilfully exploit religious doctrine to build support for their reactionary ends.
Whatever the immediate perspectives, it is quite clear that the present situation cannot continue. Morocco has reached breaking point. This raises the urgent need to develop clear socialist ideas and a fighting program to defend public services, introduce proper health and education facilities in both urban and rural areas, construct decent homes, provide welfare and jobs for the poor, end state repression end eliminate discrimination against the Berber peoples. These tasks will require a decisive blow against both the predatory foreign capitalists who are buying up the country, and also against the corrupt and parasitic Moroccan ruling class and it's crowned figurehead. Morocco is potentially a wealthy country. A socialist Morocco, on the basis of public ownership of the economy and a democratic plan of production, linking up with the international labour movement in a common struggle against capitalism internationally, could put an end to all this suffering and guarantee a decent life for the whole people.
La Riposte,
French Marxist magazine
February 2000