Interesting article from the Guardian paper:
MRF and gossips:
Morocco's royal family may be of little interest to the Beckhams as they nurse their grievances over the indiscretions of a treacherous nanny.
But King Mohammed VI has threatened dire consequences for a Rabat newspaper that portrayed his wife, Princess Lalla Salma, roaming barefoot in the palace, bossing the servants, enjoying carrot tagine and playing with the royal heir - whose circumcision ceremony was marked in traditional fashion with amnesties for 7,000 prisoners.
These Hello!-style revelations in al-Jarida al-Ukhra, also clearly relying on gossipy staff, were flattering enough (they doubled the weekly's circulation) but they have gone too far in denting the magic of Morocco's Alaoui monarchy, a dynasty older than the House of Windsor, a lot more sensitive and a good deal more powerful.
Like Jordan's King Abdullah, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Saif al-Islam al-Gadafy in Libya, Mohammed VI, bearer of the ancient Muslim title "commander of the faithful", was hailed as the bright hope of Arab modernisers when he succeeded his father, Hassan II, in 1999.
Mohammed has struck some important blows for reform - liberalising the Moroccan economy, encouraging multi-party democracy, launching anti-poverty campaigns, easing restrictions on Islamists and promoting women's rights. On the negative side, critics point to high unemployment, the persistent misery of the shanty towns and the crackdown on hardline Islamists after 9/11, the Madrid train bombings and the Casablanca attacks.
Morocco's media have seen some loosening of the official grip: publication of the king's salary and royal budget went unpunished a few months ago. But in April a leading journalist, Ali Lmrabet, was fined and banned from practising his trade; his mistake was to mock the official line that refugees who fled Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara in 1976 are being held prisoner by the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.
On the Sahara, Mohammed has shown that he is not prepared to break with his father's nationalist legacy, so UN plans for a referendum have run into the desert sand. Media exposure of corrupt officials, including some allegedly involved in sex tourism, has also brought retribution, according to the watchdog Reporters Without Borders.
Tetchiness about the press sits awkwardly with a remarkable experiment, unique in the Arab world, that is designed to allow Moroccans to come to terms with the bad times under Hassan II.
The truth and reconciliation commission (l'Instance Equité et Réconciliation, or IER) has been at work for more than a year investigating the secret prisons, disappearances and torture that were the fate of many of those - Marxists, dissident military men and Islamists - who challenged the regime, then, as now, a loyal ally of France and the US.
Some high-profile cases are already well documented, such as the fate of the family of General Mohammed Oufkir, the security chief who plotted against the king in the 1970s, and the abduction and murder of Mehdi Ben-Barka, the leftwing opposition leader. Now, though, after a series of emotional public meetings where some of the thousands of ordinary victims have told their tales, the silence is being broken.
The downside is that the work of the IER is limited to cataloguing crimes, compensating relatives and recommending how such abuses can be avoided in future. Guilty men are being named but not called to account. The IER's mandate has been extended for a few months, but expectations for tackling impunity are low.
This is a far bigger issue than how the palace responds to revelations about the private lives of the royals - which do not appear to involve the sort of problems Posh and Becks suffer from. Morocco has started to reveal some of the skeletons in its national cupboard. It needs to punish those who put them there and give the skeletons a decent burial before it can move on to a democratic future.
Ian Black Monday May 2, 2005
The Guardian
