MEDIA-MOROCCO: Press Circumvents Censorship through Internet

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Dec 20 2000 (IPS) - The independent press in Morocco has had to turn to the Internet to get around closures by the government, carried out despite the democratisation process launched last year when King Mohamed VI was crowned after the death of his father, Hassan II.

The Moroccan weekly newspapers Le Journal, Demain and Asahifa were closed down by Prime Minister Abderrahman Yusufi, a socialist, for supposed attacks against the army. The directors of two of the publications, Le Journal’s Abubakr Jamai and Demain’s Alí Lmrabet explained the situation to the Spanish press in Madrid.

Jamai and Lmrabet were accompanied at the press conference by the president of the international organisation Reporters Without Borders, Fernando Castelló, and Alejandro Fernández Pombo, the head of the Spanish Federation of Press Associations.

Lmrabet said the closures were the result of the publication of a letter in which another socialist leader, Mohamed Basri, insinuated that prime minister Yusufi had prior knowledge of a bloody coup d’etat against the king that was aborted in 1972.

The authenticity of Basri’s letter, datelined 1974, was not called into question.

Another reason for the closures mentioned by the director of Demain was the publication of a list of military officers accused of committing human rights violations in 1970. The list, provided by the Moroccan Pro Human Rights Association, contained the names of the current heads of the gendarmerie and of the king’s secret intelligence services.

The Moroccan journalists are demanding that their newspapers be allowed to reopen.

The weeklies are still being produced, but are only posted over the worldwide web. Lmrabet pledged that he and his colleagues would continue their work unless they were thrown into jail.

A French non-governmental organisation, Samizdat, offered Demain its electronic server to post its webpage, while the French weekly Courrier International reserved a space on its website for Le Journal.

Nouredinne Mittah, director of Assahifa, meanwhile, has described himself as a refugee journalist, and Courrier International as his “land of asylum.”

Castelló and Alvarez Pombo expressed their solidarity with the newspapers and reporters censored in Morocco, and demanded that Prime Minister Yusufi be consistent with his past record of fighting dictatorship in Morocco, and that he allow the media to communicate freely.

The directors of the newspapers that were shut down are demanding that their cases be dealt with in the Moroccan courts, since Yusufi simply applied an administrative regulation. Lmrabet and Jamai also said they planned to create two new names for the newspapers, under which they would continue to be published.

Lmrabet said he was confident that Morocco’s democratisation process would continue moving forward. He added, however, that there were enclaves of power in the North African country that believed nothing had changed since the days of King Hassan, when all it took was a threat to silence dissidents and independent journalists.

Meanwhile, the Moroccan government once again banned the distribution of the Courrier International on Dec 14, bringing the total number of editions censored this year alone to 11.

The latest edition of the weekly contained a special report on Morocco, with four pages dedicated to articles written by the directors of the three publications that were closed down.

But the repression against independent reporters is not only administrative in nature. Reporters Without Borders pointed out that at an Oct 4 news briefing on the Western Sahara, Interior Minister Ahmed Midaui publicly threatened Le Journal’s Jamai.

At the meeting, Midaui, referring to a Le Journal interview with a leader of the Polisario Front – the movement that is demanding the independence of the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony currently under Moroccan control – told Jamai “if you print another interview like that with a member of the Polisario Front, I will ban the paper again.

“Fortunately, you are not my son. Because if you were, I would smash in your face,” the minister added.

This year, Moroccan authorities prohibited the circulation of seven newspapers, including two French publications. Three journalists with a French TV station, France 3, were put under home surveillance from Oct 8-10 for filming military bases.

Last month, the Ministry of Culture and Communications withdrew the accreditation of Claude Juvenal, the head of the AFP bureau in Rabat.

The ministry maintained that by printing statements by dissidents, Juvenal had “breached professional ethics by taking initiatives hostile to Morocco and its institutions.”