memorandum to him who is concerned-2-

First rescue operations

We content ourselves with fine words and attractive pictures to forget and make people forget the hideous image of a disgraceful past.

The new king's young advisers seemingly want to ward off Moroccan malaise with media incantation: why not put on a show and dispense smiles if we cannot afford food and jobs?
The young entourage thinks it can easily erase from people's minds the evil memory of the period in which Tazmamart torturers ruled supreme. It helplessly endeavours to adorn the time where Hassan's "demoncracy" swore that the elections had never been falsified, that the government of the country was done with devotion and loyalty and that "l'alternance consensuelle" (the alleged consensual changeover of political power) was and still is an appreciable asset highly advocated by democracy.

The young who acclaim Mohammed VI have turned away definitely from a political community conspiring willy-nilly with the old Makhzen, which betrayed the principles of paraded Islam. They have equally turned aside from Hassan's democracy, drained of its substance and fashioned in the style of a certain despotism fearing neither God nor man.

The young advisers are fully aware of the lack of points of reference and of the identity gap felt by the boat people generation, which flees from poverty-stricken Morocco to the lot that we all know.

They would combine outdated and modern slogans to make those who have lost confidence in everybody adopt an alternative credo. The national anthem and the red flag at school would implant the feeling of loyalty in tender hearts. Solidarity campaigns and the five-dirham badges would establish the new "culture of public charity". Engaging with one's hand on one's heart in morning greetings before the national flag, and singing at the top of one's voice the national anthem will, helped on by destitution, soon discredit the new fetishism.

Changing the ideological paraphernalia could never breathe into Moroccans a new spirit that will set them in motion and reassure them about their future. The annual periodic charity shows have become a tradition which is now putting down roots in the Makhzen's agenda with the view to normalise relations with beggary.

Who do you think are you deluding? Are you trying to take for a ride the young desperados who sell their scanty family possessions to be sent to kingdom come on Tangier's jury feluccas?
Those who lack sound principles and strong will search for second-hand points of reference in the ready-to-wear slogan market. Go on and satisfy the hunger of the famished people by endless fairy tales! Paint in glowing colours to the thirsty horde the mirage of a hospitable oasis in the desert of false promises! Disillusion will only be greater and the consequences more disastrous.

to him who is concerned - 1 -

"The King of the Poor"

The young monarch, Mohammad VI, is highly admired by Moroccan young people, who regard him as a friend, a symbol of liberation and a promise for a better future.

During the first weeks of his reign, and wherever his inaugural campaign took him, the young king is greeted with genuine and youthful enthusiasm.

The Makhzen machinery, which organised the funeral of the late Hassan II, plays a full role to present to the crowd overcome with cheers a young man having great presence, smiling and gesturing benevolently to the warm welcome of the public.

Extravaganza of antique coach and horses with golden hoofs! Euphoria of festivities surrounded by the modern motorcade! Spirited enthusiasm displayed by the crowds of people aligned all along avenues hastily painted anew for the occasion. And this makes at least a great impression on television screens!

A successful performance is the Moroccan-style state show made more attractive with pomp and ceremony! An old tradition which skilfully plays with symbols and attributes!

It is youthful and hopeful! The heavy darkness of a gloomy period seems to have cleared the way for the shining of a new dawn. It is the magic first light of a long-awaited spring!

How beautiful are the generously dispensed promises! However, beware of disillusionment if, after the honeymoon, the harsh realities remind the enchanted youth, lulled by romantic promises, of its unenviable lot. Once parades and cavalcades over, winged poetry will give way to the base prose of unemployment and destitution.

The public image and goodwill of the new symbolic authority could well be betrayed by socio-economic restraints. Let alone some influential vultures who wait for the right moment to defend their privileges and maintain political circumstances favouring stagnation. Lurking behind the scenes, the corrupted and corrupting agents, skilled in the art of disguising the truth and promoting falsehood, will attempt to counter Morocco's young great hopes.

We cannot expect to counterbalance sly old foxes with innocent goodwill. We cannot pretend to open a new page by ingenuously establishing public relations with a generation prostrate with despair. We can no longer impress world attention while Morocco is on a knife-edge. Has the countdown not already started?

by: Abdessalam Yassine

Al adl wal Ihsan leader

the king has 23 palaces and thousands of children are homless in casablanca alone

A child dangles on a rope strung to the top of a six-metre high bulwark of cement that keeps Casablanca port free of its poor. For Omar, a street-child aged ten, the rope is a lifeline. Over the ramparts, scores of tankers hold the promise of stowing away to Europe. Dozens of children climb the rope every night to flee the misery of street-life in Morocco. In a country where the king has 23 palaces, the child charity, Bayti, Arabic for home, estimates more than 10,000 children in Casablanca alone are now homeless. Until recently, all were male. Now girls stalk the street with the gangs - a motley crew of abandoned children, runaway child maids, and the rejects of broken homes. Children as young as six live a life on the run from police hunting for children to dump in borstals run by the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The lucky find refuge in the fishing harbour, a safe haven from police round-ups. Sleeping on the roofs of makeshift huts, or under the counters of the fish market, at night the foul smell of 'solution', or glue, competes with that of rotten sardine. Children stumble like drunks at the quayside, sniffing sobs laced in glue. Morocco - better known for its tourist-luring beaches and medieval sites - is hardly alone in facing the problem. It is estimated that in Africa as a whole, two in five children under 15 are working. And around the world the total is likely to be some 250 million. But in few Muslim countries has urbanisation reaped such a toll on traditional family values.
'Parents are raising their children for sale. They send them to work in the towns, and never see them except to collect their pay-packets'
Slave trade:
Slave Trade The neglect of Morocco's street-children is just the tip of the iceberg of Morocco's child crisis. Across the kingdom, I encountered dozens of children treated as commodities, just as the slave trade of old.'Parents are raising their children for sale,' says Bashir Nzaggi, news editor with the respected Moroccan newspaper, Liberation. 'They send them to work in the towns, and never see them except to collect their pay-packets.' According to a recent government survey, 2.5 million children aged under 15 drop out of school, and more than half a million work. Many pursue the tradition of toil in the fields. But in exchange of $30 a month, tens of thousands of parents are now contracting their children to urban families to work as domestic servants in conditions of near slavery. Dealers earn up to $200 per child. It's so institutionalized that kitchens are still designed with low counters for child-maids to wash and cut vegetables.
'Millions of Moroccans live in regions where state services fail to reach'
Social Services :
Social Services :
Social workers say most parents regret the loss of their children, but argue they had little choice. Millions of Moroccans live in regions where state services fail to reach. There are no accurate figures for the numbers of child maids, but social acceptance ensures the practice is widespread. Non-Governmental Organization's say the state must regulate the trade, ensure children and parents receive 'security guarantees' from their employers, and perform regular inspections. 'In Morocco, a home is considered a castle,' says Najjat Majid, the founder of Bayti. 'We have no right to enter homes, even when we know maids are being abused.' Sixty per cent of the children in her refuge, she says, are victims of sexual abuse. Under Morocco's strict Islamic family law, the state treats pregnant child-maids as the accused. Abortion is illegal, and single mothers giving birth in hospital are reported to the police.
Overseas Trade :
As the numbers of child slaves grow, so does the clandestine trade. A mere eight miles from Europe in Tangiers, brokers direct the cross-water traffic. Children are dispatched to climb onto the chassis of trucks loaded with hashish for southern Spain. Minors are preferable - if they're caught they're harder to prosecute than adults. Moroccan immigration officers say each year they uncover children frozen to death in refrigerated lorries.But the organisation is not just at ports. Across Morocco, cottage industries seek to cut costs by replacing adults with child workers. Shoe-shining seven year-olds hire their shoe-shine boxes from Fagin-types for seven dirhams [70 cents] a day. And prostitution is often a step-up from penury. The US State department report says there are tens of thousands of child prostitutes in Morocco, serving the cities and military barracks.Sex Trade Increasingly, Morocco's reputation for child sex is luring an international clientele. Sex tourists from the West tout the old slave markets of Marrakech to buy sex with children. But now an export market has also begun to emerge. Last year, police in a market town in the plains north of Marrakech, bust a network trafficking in 13-year old boys destined for brothels in Italy. Police arrested the dealer, who had - said reports - paid parents $3,000 per child. 'We are determined to pursue a course of progress and development for all Moroccans, in particular the poor,' King Mohammed VI promised his people in his first speech on the throne. Crowds hailed the young monarch as 'king of the poor'. But after a year on the throne, the problem has only got worse. His prime minister, the leftist leader Abderrahmane Youssifi, was elected on a ticket of social reform, but has failed to change the law where vagrancy is treated as a crime, not a social disease. And the credibility of both king and his prime minister are suffering, as they fail to protect the very communities they promised to save.
post from: bbc-world.

Slaves in the garden of the king

there is in some way a link between the lack of democracy, poverty, and the terrorism in Arab countries, the kind of regimes is one of the main problems, morocco as an example, the terrorist attack which took place in Casablanca was committed by young people coming from the poorest areas in the city, there is millions of Moroccans who lives under the poverty, even the country is reach in its resources, we have in one hand the high level of poverty and unemployment and in other hand the king enjoying in his palaces in each city, plus the huge fortune of royal family which can overcome the poverty in whole country, and the debt of morocco as well, we have to be honest, the absolute power of the king which we can see it in these articles from the constitution, can not give the minimum right for the population to express their view point or to choose the people who can represent them, and there is no need for elections with the existence of such articles:
-The King's person is inviolable and sacred.
- The King appoints the Prime Minister.
-The King can address the Chamber of Representatives and the Nation. The content of the addresses cannot be the object of any debate.
These things make the young people to be isolated without any hope of living, and they will be easy victims of terrorist groups.

It is not logical and also stupid to talk about democracy with the existence of such articles in the constitution,
As long as it exists moroccan citizens are Slaves in the garden of the king.

Hassan II - Morocco's defunct tyrant

1-When the future Hassan II put his finger on Morocco he said: 'This is my father's estate'. There's no difference in Morocco between the State budget and the budget of the Royal Household. Hassan II owns everything. He rules the country as if it were still the Middle Ages and even looks on his ministers as slaves.

2-King Hassan's personal wealth was estimated at $40 billion. The country's national debt stands at around $20 billion. Until about 10 years ago, King Hassan used to figure in the Fortune magazine's annual list of the world's wealthiest people. One third of Morocco's budget is used to service foreign debt. The Opposite, in exile, has been asking questions about the King's huge private fortune. Reports in Spanish papers after Hassan's death said that the King had 20 bank accounts. He owned around 20 opulent palaces in Morocco, besides a mansion in a 400-hectare estate near Paris. There is considerable speculation regarding the source of his wealth. Hassan' father, King Mohammed V, was not known to be very rich.

ressources:

Ahmed rami statements to Spanish magazine interview 1983

FRONTLINE, India's National Magazine, August, 1999

time of slavery is over

i am a human who love the freedom,justice, i dream to see one day my country, lives in a climat of real democracy, to be resident outside the country makes me to see the deffrence between freedom and slavery, justice and unjustic, dictatorchip and democracy.
the social situation in morocco is among the worst in the region, high rank of unemployment, illetracy, including corruption of the regime, in a free country you will not find such crisis, newspapers has published a little about the royal fortune and what is not known is worst, moroccans throw themselves in the sea in order to reach spanish coast, why? is it spain a paradise, how spain looks like that? actually morocco has enough human and natural ressources to be even better than spain, but the main diffrence here is freedom, the spanish king gave a real participation in decision- making to the people, and moroccans has to survive under an unjust constitution, which is imposed on moroccans for so called historical reasons, te natural political rights has been eliminated , the king s decisions can not be a subject of discussion.
time of slavery is over, time of absolute monarchy is over, now in the twenty first century we are in a time of freedom,equality, democracy.
it is time for moroccans to awake and demand for a new constitution where the prime minester who is elected by citizens is the number one of the state same as what s happend in spain.