Does this justify a year of detention without trial?
State against the state
Many are those who have said that
the biggest beneficiary of the Corona crisis in Morocco is the state, which has
regained the confidence of its citizens, and this had not happened for a long
period of time. Even the king's cousin, Prince Hicham, whose writings are
usually greeted with skeptical readings, wrote clearly without need to interpretation:
“Many Moroccans in the context of this crisis have cast aside their grumbling
and complaint, and have strengthened their confidence in the state.” There are
also those who went further than Prince Hicham, comparing the Corona moment to
historical periods in which Moroccans joined both horizontally and vertically,
as happened after the exile of the Moroccan Sultan and the escalation of
attacks on the nationalists, a period that would later be called the Revolution
of the King and the People. This is quite correct, because
“revolution is born from the womb of sorrows,” as Nizar Qabbani says. However,
if sorrows unite more than joys when their source is 'the other' or is coming
from outside, whether that other is a known occupier called France, or an
unknown epidemic called Corona, then they (sorrows) turn into a stormy
dispersal factor when they are coming from within, i.e. from the state, its
employees, and its constitutional institutions. When a citizen discovers that
the state has reduced itself to mere authority, or that the government, to which
he has entrusted the helm of his ship’s command in the heart of the Corona
storm, has given the ship to the winds of authoritarianism that are leading it
in a direction that affects his rights and his freedom, then the citizen may
turn into a negative being, rebuilding his relationship with the state and its
institutions and symbols into some kind of taqiyya, which can be reduced to the
image of that young man we see in the stadiums wrapping the national flag and
drawing it on his forehead, and repeating the national anthem - albeit with
upside down words - but as soon as he leaves the stadium, he turns its outside and
the streets adjacent to it into a battlefield, wreaking havoc, emptying great
violence which he had suppressed inside him, and which he had been hiding behind
nationalism and against citizenship. Those who taught him this nationalism in
schools and playgrounds thought that this would have become his fixed identity,
before he could collide with the fact that whoever repeats “root of the free” (the
national anthem) with strange words, will find himself repeating “In my country
they treated me with injustice” (popular protest song) with a clear voice.
We have seen the horrors of
the collapse of confidence between the components of the Revolution of the King
and the People, immediately after independence, through what happened between
the years 1958 and 1959 in the countryside, and of which Morocco is still undergoing
the effects of its repercussions, as these effects controlled part of the
recent Rif movement. And so it is important to warn that the collapse of confidence
in the state at the moment of Corona may occur. We say this while we know that
there are many differences, in time and characteristics, between the moment of
independence and the moment of Corona. But what most combines the two moments
is that the nature of confidence in them was and still is based on passion and
enthusiasm, and is not based on a rational contract, nor is it protected by the
mechanisms and institutions of supervision and accountability. And if we were
to provide two examples about this, we would mention the rational and
institutionalised withdrawal of confidence which the parliamentary opposition
parties said they were intending, if the current circumstance had not been
present, that is, to submit a request to withdraw confidence from the
government after the leakage of the draft Law 22-20. But an emotional
withdrawal of confidence will cause the people to disbelieve all parties,
including the opposition and the radical opposition parties, and the political
process will become for the people synonymous with opportunism and illicit
enrichment, and state institutions become centers of coercion and subjugation. There is another matter that was not discussed regarding the return of
Moroccans' confidence in the state and its institutions, namely that this confidence
was in one direction only; the state did not exchange the people's confidence
with its confidence, even when there was a growing number of varied petitions
and balanced demands, in terms of quantity and quality, for the release of the protest
movement's prisoners and journalists, in a way that would have contributed to a
détente and reconciliation during the Corona pandemic. And since things are
mentioned one by one, even when the Prison Delegate assumed a role that was
not his, and went out attacking Amnesty International on the topic of (Royal)
pardon, with which he has nothing to do, and accusing it (AI) of
discrimination, because it called for the release of the Rif Hirak detainees,
he forgot that the authority of which he assumed the role, i.e. the authority
concerned with the pardon (i.e. the King), was the first to exercise
discrimination, when it excluded all the Rif Hirak detainees, and released a
mixture of convicted criminals and Salafist prisoners. If the authority that
Saleh Tamek assumed to speak in its name had released one of the Rif detainees
among the released, it would have the right - it and not him - to accuse Amnesty
of discriminating between prisoners. As this authority actually practiced
discrimination, Tamek did not succeed in what he volunteered to do. An official
who defends discrimination while he believes he is criticizing it, or a
minister who offends the state while he thinks he is serving its institutions,
is indifferent to the "injustice" that comes out of a ministry named
"Justice" and that is embodied in Draft Law 20-22, or is indifferent
to the "injustice" of an interior minister who has thousands of
citizens arrested in conditions that will cause their infection with Corona, while
he believes that he protects them from Corona, or is indifferent to the "injustice"
of a prime minister who comes on
television to tell Moroccans that he does not have a clear vision for what
comes after May 20, while a small directorate, called the Directorate of
Epidemic Control, announces that it has all scenarios available for lifting the
quarantine, based on the development of the epidemiological situation in the
country, or is indifferent to the "injustice" of public media that hosts
the Prime Minister without asking him about the Draft Law that shook the
country and preoccupies the people. Officials like these are the
ones who destroy the fragile confidence, and stand against the state while they
believe they are serving it or satisfying institutions within it. In all
international experiences, these officials are the first to raise their hands
when the state enters into difficult junctures, repeating: We were just helpers
of the executive power.
The original Arabic version of this article can be found here:
https://www.maghress.com/alyaoum24/1413200
More translations will follow in the coming days.
Website: freeraissouni.com
Translated with help of Google Translate and edited by me. English is not my mother tongue.
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