Morocco

Statistics can be very revealing at times. If anyone had any doubts about the dictatorial nature of the political regime in Morocco the official “results” of the constitutional referendum surely must have removed them. The Ministry of Interior expects us to believe that nothing less than 98.94% voted Yes, while  amere 1.1 % voted No. Such figures would make even the North Korean regime blush with embarrassment!

We provide an eyewitness account by a recent German visitor to Morocco, who provides a taste of the mood that prevails in the country, describing some of the many protests that are taking place and the manoeuvres of the regime to avert an outright revolution. All to no avail of course!

Yesterday, a bomb killed 16 people at the historic centre of Marrakesh. Most of the people killed were sitting in a café overlooking Marrakesh's Jamaa el-Fnaa square, a place that is often packed with foreign tourists.

The Moroccan regime is treading very carefully, doing everything to avoid situations that could lead to confrontations between the revolutionary youth and the forces of state repression, but the movement keep getting stronger. It was in this situation that the Moroccan Marxists of the LAC gathered for their first Spring Marxist School.

A new momentum has been reached by the protest movement in Morocco. The call for a new Day of Action on March 20 was a test. Would the King’s shadowy reforms succeed in demobilising the masses or on the contrary push the movement forward? As we predicted the latter happened. Possibly twice as many people came out on the streets than a month earlier.

Three weeks after the first Day of Rage in Morocco, King Mohamed VI made a surprise speech on television. He delivered a message promising ‘constitutional reform’. Fear of protracted revolutionary turbulence and even of the risk of being toppled seems to have gripped the regime.

The Communist League of Action, the Moroccan section of the International Marxist Tendency, has issued the following statement about the February 20 demonstrations expressing its stance on the violence that followed the demonstrations and the wave of repression suffered by the Moroccan masses. One of their comrades was also arrested and brutally beaten by the police, suffering serious injury and ended up being hospitalized.

Further to the information we provided yesterday about Morocco, we received this report from comrades in Fez about the ongoing student protests.