Mohammed VI was at his villa near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where he had arrived a week earlier on a private visit, the first he had made to the French capital that year, when at eleven past eleven a disaster struck the High Atlas shocked morning. Night of the last day 8. A few hours after the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that devastated dozens of villages in the foothills of the mountains, in one of Morocco’s poorest areas south of the thriving tourist city of Marrakech, they had counted hundreds of deaths. Today there are around 3,000.
On the afternoon of the 9th, the monarch of the Alawite dynasty had already returned to Rabat to chair the meeting of a crisis cabinet at the royal palace, which was limited to disseminating a statement with a photo of the event. The sovereign did not address his people. Three days later, Mohamed VI visited. several people injured by the earthquake in a hospital in Marrakech. Pictures from state television channel SNRT showed him kissing, hugging and giving blood on a stretcher to some of them. But his silence continued. And 48 hours later, he returned to lead a work session in Rabat on rebuilding or repairing more than 50,000 homes affected by the earthquake, which the royal palace reported without recording the king.
The King visits one of those injured by the earthquake at the Mohamed VI University Hospital in Marrakech on September 12.Associated Press/LaPresse (Associated Press/LaPresse)
In contrast to his father Hasan II, who ruled between 1961 and 1999 and liked to speak in front of cameras, Mohamed VI speaks. only public four times a year. On the anniversary of his enthronement in July; on the day commemorating the exile of his grandfather Mohammed V in August; at the annual opening of Parliament in October and every November to commemorate the start of the Green March of hundreds of thousands of Moroccans in Western Sahara in 1975, then under Spanish colonial administration. Just in time for his 60th birthday on August 21, he suppressed the second of his traditional annual speeches this year. His last personal interview with a media company, namely EL PAÍS, dates back to 2005.
Mahi Bibendine, writer, painter, sculptor and social activist born 64 years ago in the Marrakesh medina, assures: “I am not exactly someone close to the state or the monarchy, but the reality is that the king managed it “Crisis”. His father was a jester in the court of Hassan II for more than three decades. His brother Aziz, a young army officer in 1971, took part in a coup and spent 18 years in the gloomy dungeons of Tazmamart in southern Morocco, without the light of day to see. The author of “The Horses of God,” a novel that recalls the jihadist attacks in Casablanca in 2003, also undertook a cultural exile in Paris and New York after years of leadership under the current monarch’s father.
“I had never experienced a solidarity movement of this magnitude in Morocco,” he explains in his house on the outskirts of Marrakech a week after the earthquake. “But it is clear that power is too concentrated in the figure of the king. Everything passes through their hands in a pyramid structure. That is the drama of this country. No one dared to visit those affected by the earthquake before the ruler. In this sense, Morocco has not changed.”
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
His opinion is largely shared by writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, 78, who described the ordeal of the Marrakesh writer and painter’s brother and other prisoners in Tazmamart prison in his work “They suffered for the light.” “Mohamed VI. is someone who works a lot but speaks little,” the author and 1987 Goncourt Prize winner told France Presse. “The king has full power over everything that happens in the country, over the army, over vital issues,” he clarifies, “but he also has to initiate something.”
Mahi Bindedine warns: “Like the farmers of the Atlas Mountains, there is a forgotten Morocco, which has sometimes rebelled, as happened in the Rif (north), which is sometimes hostile to the central power.” “There are many Moroccans who live outside the big cities live as many or even more than those who live in the cities.”
Mohamed Mohua, 57, an activist of the Rif nationalist left from the 1984 uprisings to the Hirak movement (2016-2017), recalls that in the 2004 Al Hoceima earthquake, the state also took more than four days to to mobilize in the rural area of the province. “The Moroccan state, as it finds itself halfway between an authoritarian regime and the transition to democracy, tends to paralyze waiting for decisions from the king,” he claims. Telephone from Al Hoceima.
Turn “towards an authoritarian model”
“The King is a highly valued figure in Moroccan society and is viewed with great respect. Nobody questions him,” says Mohua. “The reform of the Mudawana (Family Code) in favor of women and the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission in recent years were progress,” he admits, “but after the attacks in Casablanca and the earthquake in Al Hoceima” the state turned “The royal cabinet, the king’s confidants and former classmates, are the ones who now bear the burden of the royal palace’s decisions,” emphasizes this activist from the Riffian nationalist left.
Since his accession to the throne in July 1999, the king has been at the center of the state due to his extensive executive powers and retains direct control over defense, security and diplomacy. Also in Islamic affairs, in his capacity as commander of the believers, as a religious leader.
Mohamed VI leaves the Elysee Palace in Paris with his son Mulai Hassan in November 2018. ustafa Yalcin (Anadolu Agency / Getty)
Millions of euros, the country’s largest assets, were concentrated in sectors such as banking, construction, tourism or commercial distribution. His luxurious private villa in Paris cost him around 80 million euros three years ago.
In 2022, Mohammed VI spent. more than six months, four of them in Paris, outside Morocco, and at the beginning of 2023 almost three months in his residence in Gabon. This year the King enjoyed a long summer at home on the Rif Coast, which included his residence in Mdiq (Rincón, during the Spanish colonial period), about 30 kilometers south of the autonomous city of Ceuta, and in Al Hoceima, also on the Mediterranean coast. started. Now international media outlets such as The New York Times and Le Monde have highlighted the shortcomings of the monarch’s political response to the disaster.
Three fighters, regular companions of the king
The national press has now not reported, as in 2022, the presence in the real environment of some close friends, three German brothers of Moroccan origin, linked to martial arts. Abu Baker Azaitar, 35-year-old wrestler; His brother Ottman, also a wrestler and four years younger, and Omar, their coach, became friends with Mohamed VI in 2018. Since then they have been regular companions on his holidays.
In almost 25 years on the throne, Mohamed VI. He has consolidated diplomatic advances in his country’s favor, leading, for example, to the recognition of his sovereignty over Western Sahara by the United States in December 2020 and by Israel last month. July. It has also managed to get Spain, the former colonial power, to support the thesis of the autonomy of the territory, 80% under Moroccan administration, as “the most serious, credible and realistic basis for resolving this dispute” as the option to independence, defended by the Polisario Front, which is backed by Algeria and, according to the United Nations, controls the remaining 20%. Mohamed VI also pursued a strategy to reintegrate his country into the African Union in 2016, which his father Hassan II abandoned in 1984 after the accession of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic proclaimed by the Polisario Front.
The Maghreb country’s transformation since 1999 is reflected in the modernization of infrastructure such as the highway network, the Tangier-Casablanca high-speed train or the Tanger-Med superport in the strait, as well as the development of leading industries, such as automobile assembly and the expansion of Moroccan banking, Insurance or telecommunications companies in African countries.
Parallel to the emergence of a middle class in large cities, economic and social inequalities among the disadvantaged rural population and the urban peripheries are continually increasing. The New Model of Development report, commissioned by the king in 2019 after completing two decades of his rule, revealed a “worsening inequality” by showing that the richest 10% of the population accumulated 11 times more wealth than the poorer 10% . The illiteracy rate is 24%. According to the World Bank, 77.3% of Moroccans work in the informal economy.
Facing the storm of the Arab Spring, the Alawite ruler accepted the demands of the February 20 Movement 12 years ago, leading to the promulgation of the 2011 constitution. The coming to power in 2011 of the Justice and Development Party (Islamist), which led the government for a decade, led to setbacks in the reform of the family code, as exceptions to the rule in 2022, despite the legal ban, allowed marriage of more than 13,600 underage women.
The brothers Abu Bakr, Ottman and Omar Azaita with King Mohamed VI. of Morocco in April 2018.MAP
Freedom of the press has declined
Freedom of the press has also increased in Morocco following progress in the first years of Mohammed VI’s reign. declined. In Reporters Without Borders’ list of countries, it now occupies 144th place with regard to this fundamental right. In July 2022, the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch published a report documenting the “gag on the opposition” imposed by those in power.
“With Mohamed VI. “Morocco started to open up and I returned to the country,” says Binbedine. “Then the system was closed again, but it no longer has anything to do with the leaden years of Hasan II. “The constitutional reform of 2011 limited their powers, even though it was not actually implemented,” complains the writer and painter. “We may have to wait for Crown Prince Mulai Hassan to rule. Changes happen too slowly in Morocco,” concludes Binbedine, who is actively involved in the civil society movement to help those affected by the earthquake. “I saw the great resilience of Moroccans. Despite their sadness, they smile at those who help them.”
At the end of his winter vacation, Mohamed VI returned. This year he returned to Morocco from his residence in Pointe-Denis on the Libreville estuary at the end of March, coinciding with the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The ruler interrupted his rest to pay an official visit to the capital of Gabon on February 15, where he became noticeably thinner for the first time. Then, for health reasons, he had to cancel at the last minute his official trip to Senegal, which he had planned the following week, when his foreign minister, Naser Burita, was already waiting for his arrival in Dakar. The health of King Mohamed VI, who underwent heart surgery in 2018 and 2020, is not usually discussed in statements from the royal palace or in the Maghreb country’s media.
“The 2011 constitution is still too big for the political parties” that did not know how to encourage citizen participation in public life, says Mohamed Mouah from Al Hoceima, where he is working on delivering humanitarian aid in the devastated provinces The Atlas is involved in the earthquake. “With exceptions like the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, humanitarian NGOs are now also in the hands of power. In recent years, civil society has kept its mouth shut. Now he has expressed his solidarity,” he summarizes with a vision of five decades of rule after the earthquake in Morocco.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits