Casablanca Residents Appeal to King as Historic Neighborhood Faces Demolition

While some residents have started to prepare to vacate their homes affected by the operation before the arrival of the bulldozers, others have decided to go to court in the hope of having the decision of the Casablanca authorities canceled and demanding that it be integrated into the public utility expropriation procedure, in order to benefit from financial compensation.

They deplore that the houses of some families of Moroccan resistance fighters, as well as those of several political figures, are being demolished by the authorities. This operation threatens to erase part of the memory of the popular resistance, like the family of Houcine El Manouzi. The latter has launched an appeal to King Mohammed VI to intervene and stop this decision.

The decisions to demolish the buildings located outside the wall of the old city "have no connection with the royal boulevard project" that the Wilaya of the Casablanca-Settat region has started to implement in recent months, specifies an official of the Coordination of Victims of Demolition Decisions in the old city. In a statement to al3omk, he denounces the "arbitrary" decisions, which "are not based on any legal framework". He was keen to specify that hundreds of families are still waiting to benefit from the rehousing program.

The population has not received legal notifications from the authorities within the deadlines set to carry out technical inspections on the houses threatened with demolition, he said, specifying that the buildings concerned were built in the 1980s. According to him, the population has carried out immediate inspections on the houses affected by the demolition decision, which have confirmed that the buildings do not present any damage compromising their solidity.

Also, he reported that a joint commission carried out a descriptive inspection of a set of real estate properties in the old city, and on the basis of these inspections, demolition decisions have been issued for the coming days. The residents are asking that this decision be included in the public utility expropriation procedure, in order to be compensated for the damage it will suffer as a result of the demolition of these buildings, he stressed.