Laila Lalami

Thanks to all those who spread the word and signed the petition. YouTube is now available again on Maroc Telecom.

The big news over the weekend was that video-sharing site YouTube is no longer accessible through Maroc Telecom in Morocco. There has been no official statement, which means that no reason has been given, and no explanation provided. But since about Friday, Maroc Telecom users (of which I am one) cannot access the site, while customers who use rivals Wana or Meditel supposedly can.

I should point out that the vast majority of Internet users here go through Maroc Telecom, and that the bandwidth of the two rival ISPs is smaller. So in effect YouTube has been censored. It’s worth pointing out that Maroc Telecom is a subsidiary of Vivendi, so if there is censorship at the behest of the government, it is carried out by a multinational company.

The ban, of course, is completely useless. Bloggers have already begun sharing addresses of proxy servers, or suggesting the use of Dailymotion, which has many of the same material on Morocco as YouTube. And because the ban makes people curious, the offending material–whatever it is–will undoubtedly pop up on another web site.

Update: Please sign the petition asking Vivendi and Maroc Telecom to stop censoring YouTube.

Another update: YouTube is back on. Yay! Thanks to all those who spread the word out about this.

The United Nations has closed its HCR office in Rabat, due to what it claimed were violent protests by refugees.

The UNHCR says there are some 600 registered refugees in Morocco, along with some 10,000 illegal migrants. Some 30 people who are camped outside the UNHCR office denied using violence during Saturday’s demonstration.

They also want the right to work and say that those from Arab countries receive favourable treatment. UNHCR said they closed the building because they could not work under the threat of violence which was intolerable.

It also said it does not provide refugees with financial assistance anywhere in the world.

Paulin Kuanzambi, an Angolan refugee who is the president of the Collectif des Réfugiés in Morocco, pointed out in an open letter that this is not the first time UNHCR closes its doors in Rabat. He called on the Moroccan government to uphold the rights of refugees under the Geneva convention. Let’s just say there’s a long, long road to go before that becomes a reality.

Some sad news today: Driss Benzekri, the political dissident who was imprisoned and tortured under King Hassan, and who later became the head of Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission, has passed away. He was 57.

(via.)

We were having our second cup of coffee on Saturday morning when we heard a loud, whooshing sound, followed by police sirens. An hour later we found out that a suicide bomber had blown himself up in front of the American Language Center, which is about a mile from our apartment. The man had tried to gain access to the ALC (which, by the way, is privately owned and is not in any way affiliated with the U.S. government) and the security guard asked for an I.D. card. The bomber then walked away, and blew himself up, killing no one but himself. A few seconds later, another bomber detonated his explosives, a few meters away from the U.S. consulate. There were no other fatalities.

Police arrived on the crime scene and chased after suspected fugitives. The evening news anchor said that the police had arrested the gang leader, the man responsible for the foiled attack of March 11, and his second-in-command on Thursday night, along with other members of the group. It’s unclear why the police didn’t announce these arrests right away, but it’s possible that they were not sure they had caught all the members of the cell, and indeed the acts of Saturday would seem to confirm that theory.

The footage on TV showed plainclothes and uniformed cops with bulletproof vests, guns drawn. Morocco does not have a gun culture so the sight of the weapons on the streets of Casablanca certainly gave me pause. Sometimes I feel like I don’t recognize the country I grew up in (just as, in the wake of the Iraq war, I felt I no longer recognized the country I moved to.) Everyone is shaken, revolted, and worried, and already citizens have called cops on someone who was acting ‘suspicious’. (It turned out to be a false alarm.)

For other perspectives:
Lounsbury in Casablanca. Lounsbury on the aftermath. Najlae. BO18. Red@blog. And, via Red@blog, this clip from rap group Fnaire, a song written post-May 2003: Matqich Bladi.

We were walking in the Marrakech medina last week when we came across this old movie theater, just a stone’s throw away from the historic Jamaa El Fna square. Such cinema houses are now a rarity in Morocco–most of them closed down in the last twenty years, due to the relentless competition from pirated films. According to this recent article on Magharebia, the number of movie theaters in Morocco has gone from 280 in 1980 to just 85 by the end of 2006. In addition:

Director Saad Charaib explains that when the government worked out the details of its policy to support film production ($3.5 million annually), it failed to create a parallel policy to expand the broadcasting and cinema operation sector. He says that the total number of cinema-goers in 2000 was 13 million, whereas now the figure has dropped to 5 million. In his view there are several reasons, but chief among them is piracy, which draws many Moroccans away from cinemas. They would rather buy a film for ten dirhams than pay 30 dirhams to watch it at the cinema.

I was talking to one of my uncles about this–he used to be a movie nut when I was a child, so I wanted his opinion. He said he couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a theater. And of course he missed seeing a movie on the big screen, but he also missed the social aspect of going out to the movies, and interacting with friends and acquaintances rather than staying cooped up at home, watching a pirated film whose quality is so bad you can’t even suspend disbelief long enough to lose yourself in the story. I was also struck by the name of the theater in the Marrakech medina. Maybe if there were more Edens right here, young men would not be looking for Edens elsewhere.

Thirty days after the foiled March 11 attacks, Moroccan police have tracked and neutralized 3 members of the same terrorist cell, which they say numbers up to 12 people. In a pursuit that started at 5 am in the Hay Al Farah neighborhood and ended not far from there at 4 pm, three suicide bombers blew themselves up, one policeman died of his wounds, and another was slightly injured. The bombers were allegedly companions of the March 11 bomber, Abdelfettah Raydi, and had been under police surveillance for some time. This morning’s papers all lead with the story, except for the pro-government paper Le Matin, which placed the news below the fold. No one I’ve talked to is entirely surprised, but everyone is extremely upset and terribly worried. There is also a lot of public support for the family of the police inspector who died in the line of duty.Llah yehfed w yester.

I was in Marrakech for the weekend, so I did not hear the terrible news of Driss Chraïbi’s passing until yesterday. Although Chraïbi is probably not as known in the West as Tahar Ben Jelloun, he certainly remains one of Morocco’s best writers. In Le Passé Simple, he wrote of the clash between the old generation and the new, during the years of French occupation. In Les Boucs, he portrayed the hardships of Moroccan immigrants in France. In La Civilisation, Ma Mère, he drew a loving portrait of a Moroccan housewife who emancipates herself. For La Mère du Printemps, he drew a historical portrait of the (fictional) Aït Yafelman tribe. In short, he wrote about all the things that mattered to his countrymen. He was widely read, always interesting, and enormously influential (I am thinking, in particular, of Fouad Laroui). A part of me feels that, with his passing, a whole era of Moroccan literature is also dead.

Related: Driss Chraïbi Turns 80.

I was walking back home through a small street where kids from a nearby high school often gather to smoke, hang out, or chat each other up. It was six o’clock, and it was already getting dark. I was thinking about my novel and not paying too much attention, when I saw two cops drive their motorcycles, tires screeching, right up in front of a teenager standing by an electricity pole. He was tall and lanky, wore jeans and a jacket, and seemed entirely harmless. One of the cops got off his bike, and told the teenager to turn out his pockets. The boy refused; the cop slapped him.

Almost instantaneously, a handful of the teenager’s friends moved away to the other side of the street. I heard someone yell out loud–from a safe distance: “So this is democracy?”

When the pat-down didn’t reveal anything, the policemen told the teenager he could go. Just as he started walking away, they made him turn around and walk in the opposite direction–for the hell of it. And then they sat on their motorcycles and watched.

A suicide bomber blew himself up and injured three other people at an internet cafe in the neighborhood of Sidi Moumen, here in Casablanca. According to the BBC:

The blast happened after the man began a dispute with the cafe’s owner, who refused him access to jihadist sites. Another man, with the bomber at the time of the blast, fled after the explosion but has now been arrested by police, reports say.

“The man used to come to view jihadist websites and the dispute was prompted by the internet cafe owner’s decision to prevent him this time from viewing such propaganda material,” one official told Reuters. Police say it is unclear if the device was detonated by design or went off by accident during the argument between the two men.

The attack took place on the anniversary of the Madrid bombings. Several news sites have put forth the theory that the bomber was at the internet cafe in order to get instructions about his target as it seems inconceivable that he would aim at a place in the slum. The investigation is still ongoing. Last week, Moroccan police arrested a suspected terrorist by the name of Saad Houssaini, who is alleged to be the “chemist” of GCIM.