Amazigh Activists Protest Slow Implementation of Official Language Status in Morocco

The Head of Government, Saad Eddine El Othmani, chaired on April 20 the meeting of the permanent interministerial commission responsible for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the official status of the Amazigh language, reports Amadalamazigh, noting that this meeting, which coincides with the 41st anniversary of the Amazigh Spring, comes five months before the electoral deadlines.

This was an opportunity for Saâid Amzazi, Minister of National Education, to present the few achievements, with the promise of recruiting 400 teachers every year for a mobilization of 5,000 Amazigh-specialized teachers by 2030. A sufficient number of trainers for the first year of the primary cycle, which would take a dozen years. And to imagine the time it takes to have 100,000 teachers for 4.5 million schoolchildren, to train the rest of the primary years, the Assembly is concerned.

In its report of May 28, 2019 on contemporary forms of racism and racial discrimination, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and racial discrimination, Ms. Tendayi Achiume, had urged the Moroccan authorities to make efforts to respect the fundamental rights of the Amazighs, particularly with regard to education, access to justice, freedom of opinion and expression, of peaceful assembly and association...

Recommendations that the current government has not followed up on. As proof, the site indicates, the government so far refuses to recognize the Amazigh calendar. It has not taken into account either the Amazigh language or its Tifinagh script in the new law on the national identity card, just as it has excluded the teaching of the Amazigh language to the children of Moroccan citizens residing abroad.

And the media denounces the maintenance of the policy of linguistic genocide of the mother tongue of the daughters and sons of Morocco, in violation of Articles 7 and 8 of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1989, and the preamble to the Constitution and Article 5 which states that "Amazigh constitutes an official language of the State, as a common heritage of all Moroccans without exception".