Morocco's Mohammed VI (M6 in cool company) likes to think he runs an enlightened kingdom. He likes to project an image of a Morocco more free, less authoritarian, than its Arab neighbors. Like most authoritarian monarchs with mirrors for advisers, Mohammed VI deludes himself, of course. He's an absentee monarch, fond of expensive and mysterious vacations far from home, where poverty thrives but the economy and democracy don't. When he is at home he is either invisible, or the ceremonial pomp of his self-importance--a specialty of this royal line that has invented itself a lineage going back to the Prophet Mohammed--drowns the country in one flood of presumption or another.
Press Freedom: The Case of Akbaer el Youn Newspaper
Press freedom is especially dismal in Morocco these days. Take the offices of Akbar el Youm, a daily newspaper that launched earlier this year and quickly became the third-biggest Arabic-language daily in the country.
On Sept. 28, 2009, the government ordered Akbar el Youm silenced, shuttered its offices in Casablanca, and posted policemen at its entrance to prevent any of the newspaper's 70 employees from reaching their desks.
The reason? a cartoon by Khalid Gueddar, published on Sept. 26, 2009, that portrayed "Moulay Ismail on his nuptial truss," according to a line in Arabic embedded in the cartoon.
Moulay Ismail is a cousin of Mohammed VI. He got married to a German woman in 2009. The faintly Hitlerean pose of the cartoon is gratuitous and vulgar. The Moroccan ministry of the interior didn't like the cartoon. It called it anti-Semitic for the way it portrayed the Moroccan star apparently as a Star of David. "We wanted to express our affection to the prince for his marriage in his cartoon. I do not know from where they get these Star of David and anti-Semitism things," Gueddar said.
The ministry then displayed its own anti-Semitism when it charged that the depiction of the national star as a Star of David was "an outrage to the flag." The cartoon, the ministry charged, also "lacked respect for the royal family"--which, in Morocco, must be respected more than humor, truth or justice, as the cartoon case proved: Khaled Gueddar and his editor, Toufik Bouachrine, now face three to five years in prison. Moulay Ismail, the nuptialized prince, is claiming $400,000 in damages.
A History of Tweaking the King
It was far from the first Gueddar drawing targeting the king or his family. Gueddar writes a running cartoon called "The King Who No Longer Wanted to Be King," a rather accurate description and excoriation of Mohammed VI's absenteeism. Imagine Gary Trudeau unleashed on Mohammed VI. (Watch a video, in French but showing many of Gueddar's drawings, featuring Gueddar talking about his case.)
The absurdity doesn't stop there. In its Occt. 22, 2009 editions, Le Monde, the French daily, published on its front page the biting cartoon by Plantu scoring Morocco for its repression. Morocco banned distribution of Le Monde that day and the next. Why the next? For two reasons: Khaled Gueddar's case went to court on Oct. 23 (his editor's case went to court five days earlier). And Le Monde carried an article about the case and Morocco's heavy-handed contempt for a free press in its Oct. 23 editions.
Censorship in Morocco: Recent History
Reporters Without Borders summed up the 2009 assault on press freedoms in Morocco:- On 26 October, a court in Rabat is due to issue a verdict in the trial of Ali Anouzla, the editor of the daily Al-Jarida Al-Oula, on a charge of publishing false information and “mendacious allegations and facts with the intention of causing harm.” The prosecution was prompted by a 27 August article that contradicted a bulletin about King Mohammed’s health and said he was treating his asthma with cortisone.
- As a result of a supreme court ruling on 30 September, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, one of Morocco’s few independent newspapers, was ordered to pay 250,000 euros in damages on 18 October in a libel suit dating back to 2006. If the weekly is forced to pay, its survival would be doubt.
- A Rabat court sentenced Idriss Chahtane of the newspaper Al-Michaal to a year in prison on 15 October, at the end of a trial without defence lawyers over another article about the king’s health. Two other journalists, Rachid Mahamid and Mustapha Hayrane, were given three-month jail terms in connection with the same article and all three were ordered to pay several thousand dirhams in damages. Chahtane was arrested and jailed that evening.