Morocco’s Press Freedom Crackdown Sparks Concerns, Experts Warn

"We are observing both a permanence and an upsurge. A permanence since since 2009, the bulk of the independent press born out of the Moroccan transition of the 1990s had been dismantled. This does not prevent certain titles or pens from being reborn independently, but then very quickly the troubles begin: defamation, lawsuits, prison...," said the author of the book "Morocco in 100 Questions" in an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro. According to him, we are observing a resurgence of this hardening in these times of Covid-19.

Furthermore, "the challenge to power in a key region of the country -the Rif-, which is at the gates of Europe and Algeria, then the uprising against the corrupt twenty-year system of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and finally, the forced shutdown of the Maghreb economies in the spring of 2020, following the de facto severing of international relations, have been perceived by the authorities as so many systemic threats," noted Pierre Vermeren.

"In many poor or highly controlled countries like Morocco, the press has been a state affair for decades. Any media outlet that does not consent to convey the messages of power, to ensure that it benefits from the announcements of public or friendly companies that allow it to live, or that would have the impudence to criticize the famous ’red lines’ defined by the regime -that is to say, the mention of the king and the royal family, the sacredness of Islam and the political regime, financial corruption, the king’s entourage, territorial integrity- runs into insurmountable economic difficulties, aggravated by lawsuits and fines," he added.

According to the writer, the result is that the suppression of subsidies, mass unemployment, the near impossibility of emigrating, etc. make the situation potentially explosive. To support his argument, he talks about the looting of a market in Casablanca during the Eid al-Fitr celebration and the looting of two Coca-Cola delivery trucks in the same city. The social and economic tensions in the Maghreb lead the specialist to conclude that it "is becoming extremely urgent to become aware of a barely mentioned phenomenon and potentially high-risk".