Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  The commission also had no power to compel testimony from people in high places to answer questions. There was no penalty imposed on institutions or individuals who did not come forward with the truth. And there was also no incentive to cooperate, such as the amnesty granted by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

  The final report in 2006 complained about inadequate cooperation, “deplorable” records, and the failure of key officials to come forward.

  The government clearly had no interest in trying anyone for abuse or breaking the law, according to several former political prisoners I visited in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. As a result, many political prisoners opted to stay away.

  Among them was Ahmed Marzouki, one of fifty-eight junior officers charged with a minor role in the 1972 coup plot. He was sentenced to five years, but King Hassan ignored the judgment. Marzouki ended up in prison for almost nineteen years, all in solitary confinement. The king had had a secret desert prison especially constructed in Tazmamart for the perpetrators of the coup. It became the toughest prison in Morocco.

  In his book Tazmamart, Cell 10, Marzouki graphically describes the decay of unwashed bodies, the slide toward insanity, and the deterioration from untreated disease.

  For almost two decades, King Hassan denied that the Tazmamart prison existed. Under pressure from international human-rights groups, the government finally acknowledged the secret facility. When the military officers were released, less than one half of the men emerged alive.

  Marzouki opted not to testify on grounds that his account would have no impact.

  In the end, the reconciliation commission found out only part of the truth about Morocco’s past. No officials stepped forward to admit wrongdoing, name wrongdoers, or provide evidence of wrongdoing. The commission merely confirmed what most already knew: Morocco abused, horrifically. It was just no longer an official secret.

  In 2006, in front of an audience of victims and families of the disappeared, King Mohammed VI accepted the report. Moroccans, he said, “must all of us draw the necessary lessons from it in a way that will shield our country from a repetition of what happened and make up for what was lost.” He called for full implementation of the commission’s recommendations.

  But the king did not apologize. And many of Morocco’s human-rights activists claimed the outcome fell far short of its promise.

  In Rabat, a city of wide boulevards and whitewashed buildings, I called on Mohamed Sebbar, a short man with a bushy black mustache who chews gum with vigor to cut down on cigarettes. A lawyer, he heads the Forum for Justice and Truth, the group of former political prisoners founded by Benzekri before he left to head the reconciliation commission.

  Sebbar believes the commission failed. “We had to bargain to get this much truth,” he told me. “What we got is the truth decided and provided by the state.

  “The process failed to create a new climate for the future,” he said.

  “We wanted boundaries on the king’s powers. But, instead, we are still living with the same regime and the same state that the commission was investigating. In other countries that went through this process, in South Africa and Latin America, they have a different kind of government. We don’t.”

  “And,” he sighed, “there are still many secrets out there.”

  I asked if he felt that he was still under scrutiny from the Mukhabarat, or secret police.

  “Of course,” he said, laughing at the question. “The Mukhabarat is still listening to my phone.”

  Since assuming the throne, King Mohammed has made more promises of change and introduced more reforms than any of his predecessors and most other leaders in the region. In a 2004 address marking his fifth anniversary on the throne, he used the word “democracy” eighteen times to describe his hopes for Morocco’s future.5

  But even under a younger and more open-minded king, Morocco remains an absolute monarchy run by the oldest dynasty in the Arab world. Monarchy dates back 1,200 years in Morocco. The current Alouite dynasty dates back to the seventeenth century. Morocco’s king is arguably the most powerful Muslim leader in the Middle East because of his multiple sources of authority. He is head of state. He is commander-in-chief. He appoints the prime minister and his cabinet. Both foreign and domestic policy comes from the palace. Judges are appointed on the recommendation of the Supreme Council, which is presided over by the king. The rubber-stamp parliament debates, but it has little power and even less oversight of government performance. The king can legislate new laws without parliament. And he can dismiss it at will.6 He still has the powers of a despot.

  Morocco’s monarch has another whole separate set of powers, however. The royal family descends from the Prophet Mohammed and has for centuries invoked its religious position. King Mohammed, who is widely referred to as “His Majest-ski” for his love of jet-skiing, carries the title of Commander of the Faithful. It is Morocco’s top religious position, and he has supreme religious authority.

  To prepare his son for a religious role, King Hassan enrolled him in Koranic school at the age of four in 1967. Mohammed’s official biography says he memorized the entire Koran.

  No other Middle East leader holds total powers of state and mosque, even in Saudi Arabia. Only Iran’s supreme leader comes close. Iran popularly elects its president, however, and its parliament has oversight rights, which it has frequently used to reject cabinet appointments, question ministers in office, or dismiss them.

  Masmuh is the Arabic world for “allowed” or “permissible.” It reflects the central flaw in the commission—and Morocco’s broader attempt to open up.7 Change is only what is masmuh, or what the king permits.

  The king has acknowledged that he does not intend a political overhaul.

  “One should not think that a new generation will turn everything upside down or bring everything into question. Let us not forget that in our countries, tradition is very strong,” he told Time in 2000, in a rare interview the year after he assumed power.8

  “Trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb, the Middle East or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden or Spain. I have a lot of respect for countries where the practice of democracy is highly developed. I think, however, that each country has to have its own specific features of democracy…. There should be a Moroccan model specific to Morocco.”

  After the commission’s report was released, the seventeenth king of the Alouite dynasty did nothing significant to share power. The traditional power brokers, including the king’s court, the intelligence and security services, and an oligarch elite—continued to dominate Moroccan politics. The king did not significantly strengthen other branches of government, at least in ways that checked his own. And the electorate still had little leverage through independent institutions.

  Even as the king invited Benzekri to probe the past, the Moroccan regime was again secretly engaged in many of the same human-rights abuses used during the Years of Lead—this time to face a new threat.

  On May 16, 2003, twelve suicide bombers struck targets throughout Casablanca, Morocco’s bustling commercial and industrial center. It was the largest terrorist attack in the country’s history. Dozens were killed, more than 100 injured.

  The single deadliest bombing was at a Spanish restaurant, but the Islamist extremists also hit a five-star hotel, a Jewish community center, and a Jewish-owned restaurant. Most of the targets had Western or Jewish ties. The bombers allegedly belonged to an offshoot of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group and had links to al Qaeda. The bombings followed a broadcast from Osama bin Laden in which he branded Morocco an “apostate nation.” The bombers were all Moroccans, most in their early twenties, and all from a Casablanca shantytown.

  In the biggest sweep since the Years of Lead, the government arrested up to 5,000 Moroccans. The government later confirmed that more than 2,000 people—including more than 400 who were already in detention centers on other charges when the bombs went off—wer
e charged with trying to subvert the state. More than 900 were convicted. Seventeen were sentenced to death.9

  Moroccans again whispered tales of torture and additional mysterious deaths.

  “The May 16 bombings were the beginning of the period of regression on human rights,” said Sebbar, the gum-chewing lawyer and human-rights activist. “The government again started illegal detentions and torture. Many were arrested simply because they had beards.

  “We also had problems again with freedom of speech, as the government arrested journalists accused of giving false information on the events.”

  I later asked Benzekri about the criticism—and if he had any fears that he and the reconciliation commission had been used by the palace.

  “I am not a marionette, a puppet,” he replied, drawing on a cigarette. “The truth is that the violations committed while arresting the Islamists were not systematic or deliberate repression, as they were in our day.” He paused briefly, then added, “We are concerned about this issue, although we consider these two distinct eras.

  “Look,” he said, “what is passionate about our experience is that we have moved from a stage of nurturing ideals or dreaming about what it is to be a democratic state to a phase of concrete initiatives.”

  In a theme I heard on every stop, in every country, Benzekri anguished over how long change will take in the Middle East.

  “There is a new dynamic within society, but it is limited in its advocacy power. It doesn’t have a voice yet,” he explained, “There is a decision in Morocco to go ahead with democratization and reform, including separation of powers, but we are still debating a time frame and how to go about it.

  “Look at Spain,” he said, referring to the democratic transition after the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco ended a long dictatorship.

  “It took a decade to become a sustainable democracy, as it separated powers and established checks and balances. It’s the same with South Africa. It didn’t happen suddenly in 1993 with the end of apartheid. It took the rest of the decade, and South Africa is still struggling.”

  Yet in Morocco, progress also does not seem inevitable: Under King Mohammed, local and international human-rights groups again began to document charges that the secret police were engaging in arrests without warrants, and abductions. Held incommunicado, many suspects were put on a fast track to conviction after torture forced false confessions, human-rights groups complained.

  Morocco also reportedly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency in holding terrorist suspects that the United States had apprehended abroad. The monarchy allowed U.S. intelligence to use at least one Moroccan facility as part of a covert foreign prison system set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks.10 As the reconciliation commission released its report, Morocco was secretly detaining not only its own citizens but also suspects from other countries.

  “Morocco’s campaign against suspected Islamist militants,” Human Rights Watch concluded, “is undermining the significant human rights progress the country has made in recent years.”11

  The second compromise is removing restrictions on women. No government in the twenty-first century can claim legitimacy without giving its female population personal and political rights.

  On their own steam, women are already an imaginative force for change in the Middle East. Some of the transitions are quite stunning.

  Fatima Mernissi grew up in a harem.

  “I was born in 1940 into a traditional house, a harem, which was a luxury of the bourgeoisie,” she told me, when I visited her in Morocco. Mernissi talks and writes about her life with a storyteller’s delight, re-creating the innocence of her childhood and another way of life practiced not so long ago. She grew up in Fez, a city founded in the ninth century that is still the cultural heart and center of Islamic orthodoxy in Morocco. Many doors and walls in Fez’s fabled Old City are painted green, the color of Islam.

  Hers was not the exotic imperial harem of bygone dynasties, with eunuchs, slaves, and concubines reclining on pillows. She was raised in the traditional harem of an extended family; it was a place of seclusion for a patriarch, his adult sons, and all their wives and children residing together. Harem life was contained behind the hudud, or sacred frontier, protected by high walls and strong iron gates. Ahmed, the doorkeeper, was the enforcer. The layout reflected life’s hierarchy: Formal events, dining, and the men’s world played out in salons on the ground floor, around the courtyard with Arabesque pillars, tiled archways, and a fountain. The two sons’ family quarters were on the second floor. Widows and divorced women lived on the third.

  Mernissi’s early life was confined to the women’s quarters with her mother, aunts, cousins, and a grandmother who had been one of her grandfather’s nine wives—some, but not all, at the same time. The females rarely went out, usually just for religious festivals, only with permission, and always veiled and escorted by a male family member. They otherwise kept busy with beauty rituals, sewing, and creating little plays of what they imagined the outside world to be. They performed for each other.

  As a child, Mernissi was told by her father that the sexes, rightly, had been segregated by God. Harmony required that each gender respect the prescribed limits of the other. Trespassing, he warned her, would lead only to sorrow.

  “We live in difficult times, the country is occupied by foreign armies, our culture is threatened,” he told her, during the days Morocco was still ruled by France. “All we have left is these traditions.”12

  For the women, however, life’s obsession was escape. “Ahhh,” Mernissi recalled, “but we dreamed of trespass beyond the gates all the time.”

  In her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Mernissi recounted her mother’s yearning.

  “I would wake up at dawn,” mother would say now and then. “If I only could go for a walk in the early morning when the streets are deserted. The light must be blue then, or maybe pink, like at sunset. What is the color of the morning in the deserted, silent streets?”13

  The women’s view of the sky was confined to a patch visible by looking up from the courtyard. Most windows were shuttered or draped so the outside world could not peek inside.

  Their one connection to the outside world was a large radio. It was supposed to be for the men’s ears only; it was locked in a large cabinet when they were out. But the girls eventually found the key and, when the men were away, they turned it on—and danced to local music, sang along with a Lebanese chanteuse, or listened to the news on Radio Cairo.

  “The news became very important to me,” Mernissi recalled, as she sipped a cup of sweet mint tea. She still remembers hearing on the radio about World War II for the first time.

  “They were killing each other on such a big scale! This is why we were scared of the Europeans,” she told me.

  Her father eventually found out about the females’ secret pastime. He grumbled that they would next find a key to open the front gate.

  That’s exactly what Mernissi did—with her mother’s help.

  Mernissi’s mother was illiterate, but she was an independent spirit. She rejected restrictions on her life as an absurdity, and male superiority as anti-Islamic.

  “Allah made us all equal,” she would say, with indignation.

  “My mother didn’t know the alphabet, but that didn’t make her ignorant. She knew A Thousand and One Nights by heart,” Mernissi told me. “She was very clever.”

  Her mother ensured that Mernissi, from the age of three, was enrolled in Koranic school. It was the only form of education for females at the time. The family was devout. She shared her first name, Fatima, with one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters. Many revere Fatima as the greatest Muslim woman who ever lived.

  “I memorized many parts of the Koran as a child,” Mernissi told me. “I say to women to this day: Swallow history and use it. You have to sing the Koran. It gives you a good memory.”

  She rose off a little divan and, in full theatric voice,
recited from the forty-first chapter, or sura, of the Koran. “Respond to aggression with softness,” she said, “and you will see your worst enemy become your fervent partner.”14

  The key out of the front gate—and eventually the harem—was education. When the Moroccan government opened public education to girls in the 1950s, Mernissi’s mother pleaded with her husband to let their only daughter attend the new school. That meant learning arithmetic and foreign languages and even playing sports in shorts, none of which was allowed in religious school.

  It also meant crossing the hudud, the sacred frontier, after which there was no going back.

  Mernissi’s father called a family council of senior male members. Debate was heated, but the council eventually decreed that Mernissi—as well as her ten female cousins—could go to public school.

  “If I had been born two years earlier,” Mernissi told me, “I would not have obtained an education.”

  Modernization only went so far; tradition still restricted personal freedom. When the Mernissi women were allowed to attend their first movie, the men bought tickets for four rows, so all the seats both in front of and behind the females were empty. The women spent hours doing their makeup and hair for the outing—only to have to don veils, or hejab, to cover it all.

  Her mother once tried to change their hejab, replacing the heavy white cotton that impeded breathing with a lighter, sheer black chiffon. But her father resisted, Mernissi wrote.

  “It’s so transparent! You might as well go unveiled. It is like the French women trading their skirts for men’s pants. And if women dress like men, it is more than chaos, it is the end of the world.”15

  Mernissi’s mother was never able to break out of the harem prison. When she appealed for permission to attend literacy classes, the family council turned her down. So she turned around and advised her daughter to learn to “shout and protest” just as she had learned to walk and talk.