EDUCATION-MOROCCO: New War on Terror of Ignorance

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nizar Al-Aly

RABAT, Jun 3 2003 (IPS) - "The extremists have been taking advantage of my brother’s ignorance," says Karim Benkhayi, a 22-year-old student. "Had he gone to school, he would not have been so vulnerable to the religious fanatics."

Benkhayi’s brother is a follower of Salafya Jihadya, a radical fundamentalist group suspected in the terrorist attacks that killed 43 people, including six westerners on May 16 in Casablanca. As a member of the group, the brother is now under close watch and seen as a potential suicide bomber himself.

Benkhayi says poverty kept his brother out of school. "My parents are so poor that they couldn’t afford to send all of us to school," he says. "They wanted my younger brother to learn some trade and help feed the family."

Benkhayi, who does not want to name his brother, describes his transformation "from a kind and open-minded youngster to a bearded fellow who refuses even to shake hands with his own mother and sisters and to speak to his brothers, because he sees them as infidels."

Extremist groups are constantly looking for recruits among the illiterate and the ignorant, says Benkhayi. "It could have been me," he says. "We need the authorities to understand how dangerous illiteracy is. Every illiterate youth is vulnerable to some kind of deviation and drift."

The authorities have responded to the danger by launching a campaign this week to encourage people to attend free literacy courses across the country. The campaign named ‘March towards Enlightenment’, will target 570,000 persons in its first phase in literacy courses to be conducted in mosques and schools.

The campaign has been launched with a push from the King. "Eradication of illiteracy is a requisite for citizenship," King Mohammed VI said in a message at the launch of the campaign.

Prime Minister Driss Jettou said "illiteracy has deteriorated to alarming rates, marking Morocco’s social fabric with deep scars of exclusion and poverty." The Moroccan Prime Minister, a technocrat and renowned economist, said illiteracy "has a serious impact on Morocco’s social and economic life, because it retards growth, hampers the creation of wealth and jobs, affects incomes, foments poverty and fuels exclusion."

A ministerial department has been created to supervise the spread of literacy. Ms Najima Ghozali Tay, Secretary of State for Struggle against Illiteracy, told the press that her government wants to bring illiteracy down to 35 percent of the population by 2004, 20 percent by 2010, and eradicate it by 2015.

"The task is gigantic and requires the mobilisation of huge financial and logistic means," she said. Her department has allocated a budget of 7.3 million dollars to curb illiteracy in this year, she said.

Official figures show that 12 million of Morocco’s 30 million people are illiterate. The Centre de Conjuncture (CMC, an independent economic think tank,) puts the figure at more than 16 million.

The CMC says illiteracy rates are particularly high among women, with three out of five females illiterate, and in villages, where two out of three cannot read or write.

"Illiteracy makes a fertile ground for social deviation, including extremism," Hassan Najmi, president of the Union of Morocco’s Writers told IPS. "Morocco, which presents itself as an emerging modern nation, cannot pretend it can become really modern without upgrading its human capital."

Najmi says some good may come of the Casablanca attacks if they lead to greater awareness of development and social problems, and the will to deal with them. "But I fear that a mere campaign would be of little help in fighting the problem," he said. "Morocco needs genuine strategies to better the lot of people."