On the Moroccan regime, and why you should care

If you live in the US/EU and think this is not affecting your life and politics, start from the last paragraph.

Dear friends/colleagues, I apologise for declining requests for in-person events in Morocco, my home country, due to more than two years of death, torture and jail threats, in addition to various other tactics such as constant harassment and reception of spywares. These threats escalate in several occasions, such as 1) whenever I express support for various prisoners of opinion, including my mamfakinch colleague, jailed journalist Omar Radi, 2) after exposing the role of Moroccan officials and diplomats in online harassment campaigns that precede jailing of journalists and pro-peace voices, 3) after expressing my own concerns regarding the ongoing irresponsible warmongering of the Moroccan and the Algerian regimes, or 4) whenever I express my opinion or just lay out facts on the negative role the monarchy and its regime play in slowing down the development of the country. The past few years has shown, with other targets, that these threats almost always precede jail on fabricated charges. I also have messages suggesting what the fabricated charges could be in my case and have strong evidence suggesting these campaigns come from the political police of the regime and its diplomatic presence.

While they have a visible impact in terrorising our families and relatives, and sometimes negatively impact our professional life, these threats won’t silence the growing number of people like me in Morocco and in the Moroccan diaspora, but will only strengthen our belief that Morocco deserves, and is ready for better than a medieval monarchy, where prisoners are still sexually tortured, as acknowledged by oligarch and dictator Mohammed VI himself when confronted by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights after detailed investigations by local human right activists, confirmed by the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez. The threats I receive are also nowhere close to equal what other targets receive, e.g. the Irifyen diaspora and other long time republicans, whom the regime knows are becoming increasingly popular among a young audience that no longer believes the myths our parents grew up believing, chief among them is the myth that the monarchy guarantees stability, while the monarchy is today the most important threat to that stability, in addition to its already well-known role in economic corruption and suppression of justice.
On March 16th 2022, after more than a year and a half of personal investigations and archiving and after several initial discussions with the police since March 2021, I started a legal procedure in Switzerland to identify and take the authors of these threats to justice, as well as tech companies enabling them to freely operate and post criminal content despite being warned multiple times. I have no doubt my legal procedures will face several difficulties (e.g. not having enough legal budget, destruction of evidence by some authors or platforms, possible diplomatic immunity for some authors etc.), but I decided to start the procedure anyway, at least for the sake of documenting and keeping archives for better days to come.

If you want to support the cause of political prisoners in Morocco, and more importantly, the cause of justice and peace in North Africa, where an unprecedented warmongering is going under the radars and offering both the Moroccan and Algerian regimes an opportunity to divert attention from pro-democracy movements, you can start by sharing this statement and boycott events that you suspect to be PR campaigns of the Moroccan or Algerian regimes, e.g. in the Moroccan case, events involving a diplomat in your country or events in Morocco with the label “royal patronage” (but not student-run events or citizen-led initiatives that are not involving high profile officials such as ministers, and not receiving any royal patronage). You can also boycott and call to boycott products and businesses that you know come from the several family businesses of the King, his brothers and sisters, their cousins and various oligarchs owing their success only to their relationship with the palace. 

There is much more one can do, including if you don’t care about political prisoners in Morocco: the monarchy has strong presence in Europe & US and is plugged to spheres of corruption and populism that are destroying democracies from within and threatening world peace and stability. Inform yourself about it, then act, investigate/ask your representatives, wether they have ties with Morocco, wether they lobbied for the moroccan regime, supported it through a vote in US congress or EU parliament, made declarations lauding “reforms undertaken by his majesty” (US secretary of state Antony Blinken), took money from the regime (Hilary Clinton, 12 million $) or simply started visiting luxury hotels in Morocco for no apparent reason but invitations from the regime. You will be surprised how much the answer is “yes”, recent exemples include Matteo Salvini (Italian leader of the far right), Viktor Orban (supporting the Moroccan diplomacy when even its traditional supporters among European politicians had to distance themselves from it, or at least pretend to, after it threw 10.000 minor Moroccan kids on the Spanish border to blackmail Spain with migrants), Eric Dupond Moretti (current French minister of justice, ex personal lawyer of king Mohammed VI), Rachida Dati (former French minister of justice), Jared Kushner and many in the Trump administration who announced personal investments after Donald Trump’s last minute moves with Morocco (one week before leaving office), and several less prominent but not less dangerous figures for world democracies, such as Bernard Lugan (Action Française) and much more.