Morocco’s Crackdown Won’t Silence Dissent – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/moroccos-crackdown-wont-silence-dissent-maroc-hirak-amdh
A Moroccan draped in the Berber, or Amazigh, flag shouts slogans while marching during a protest against the jailing of Al-Hirak or “Popular Movement” activists in the capital Rabat on July 15, 2018.
(FADEL SENNA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
When she joined the National Union of Moroccan Students in 1978, Khadija Ryadi knew she’d face hardship. “At that time,” she recalled, “we were constantly followed by the police.” But today, she told me, life may be even harder. “Now not only are we followed but we are also listened to and photographed, and everywhere. The repression has remained, but the instruments have changed. I never feel at ease.”
Recently, Ryadi, who was the president of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (also known by its French acronym, AMDH) from 2007 to 2013 and won a United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 2013, has raised eyebrows. In interviews with me, she denounced “a return to the Years of Lead”—a reference to the decades of harsh oppression in the 1960s to 1990s under Morocco’s King Hassan II.
Today’s repression may be much less brutal, but just denouncing the recent crackdown could land critics in jail. Indeed, in recent months, human rights defenders have pointed to a major rise in harassment, arrests, and police violence against activists. One of them, Abdellah Lefnatsa, said that “achievements such as freedom of expression [and] the right to protest” have started to be rolled back. Over the last two years, over a thousand people have been jailed on politically related chargesOver the last two years, over a thousand people have been jailed on politically related charges, according to Youssef Raissouni, an executive director at AMDH and a member of the leftist party Annahj Addimocrati (The Democratic Way).
Beyond the big names, there are people like Nawal Benaissa, a 37-year-old mother of four who has been arrested four times for her involvement in protests denouncing corruption and demanding jobs, hospitals, and schools as part of the so-called #Hirak movement, which began in the country’s northern #Rif region after a fishmonger was crushed to death in a garbage truck in October 2016 while trying to reclaim fish that local authorities had taken from him.
The official charges against her were participating in an unregistered demonstration, insulting law enforcement officers, and inciting others to commit criminal offenses. Last February, she was given a suspended 10-month sentence and handed a fine of 500 dirhams (about $50).
