I'll do it, Ol, but when the copyright poleese comes after me I'm gonna give em your name. :wink:
January 29, 2004 1:20 p.m. EST
Morocco's Fragile Democracy
Tests U.S. Prescription for World
Openness Can Serve Extremists
As Well as Thwart Them,
Freest Arab Nation Learns
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
CASABLANCA, Morocco -- A onetime Marxist who endured torture and 16 years in jail, Driss Benzekri was ushered into a lavish royal palace late last year to meet the son of his tormentor during Morocco's "years of lead," grim, gray decades of brutal oppression.
Mohammed VI, Morocco's monarch since the death of his autocratic father in 1999, wanted to talk about human rights, democracy and what he called "the thorny issue" of the past.
As a result of the unusual encounter, Morocco this month launched the Arab world's first "truth commission." Led by Mr. Benzekri, the former political prisoner, it already has a mountain of files to examine detailing 13,000 cases of abuse, from beatings to disappearances.
The initiative is part of a rare, though halting, experiment in Arab democracy. It's one that President Bush, in a speech the same day the king met with Mr. Benzekri, hailed as a sign that "governments across the Middle East and North Africa are beginning to see the need for change."
Political opening, Mr. Bush said, will cure the scourge of terrorism, because "in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace."
Is that logic quite so simple? The truth commission was supposed to start its work last summer, but it was stalled by a violent jolt to Morocco's faith in the healing powers of openness. A wave of suicide bombers hit a restaurant, a hotel and other targets in Casablanca, killing 33, besides themselves, and raising a prickly question: Why, in what may be the Arab world's freest country, had extremism found such fertile ground?
Democracy has had a good run in the past decade and a half. It put down roots, albeit often shallow, across much of the former Soviet Union. It swept apartheid from South Africa, communism from Eastern Europe, dictatorships from South America and political machines from Taiwan, Indonesia and South Korea. Yet democracy has sometimes empowered the intolerant. The big winner in a December election in Serbia, for instance, was an ultranationalist party allied with ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in The Hague for war crimes.
The perils are especially keen in Muslim lands, where fervent Islamists are often the only organized alternative to entrenched and frequently corrupt elites. In Iraq, the U.S. wrestles with the influence of clerics from the Shiite Muslim majority, including some radicals who want a rigid theocracy. Others don't push for this but insist on direct elections likely to be dominated by sectarian passions. And here in Morocco, after the suicide attacks, King Mohammed VI, in a somber television address, pinpointed the cause in those "who take advantage of democracy ... to sow seeds of ostracism, fanaticism and discord."
Reworking Woodrow Wilson's dictum after World War I, America under Mr. Bush says it wants to make Iraq and other Islamic countries safe for democracy. But is such a world safe for America?
This is the first in a series of articles exploring America's dominant place in the world and the limits to it. The way America interacts with other nations is more tangled, and crucial to ordinary Americans, than at perhaps any other time since the Cold War. A war on terrorism pits the U.S. against zealots with tentacles in the Mideast, Europe, Asia and Africa. The Bush administration is embroiled in difficult nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, and facing urgent issues of when to turn over power to Iraqis and how. Even spheres once thought largely domestic, such as the economy and jobs, are ever more international as business globalizes and big players such as China and India loom.
That America is now pre-eminent among nations is beyond doubt. It spends more on arms than Europe, China and Russia put together. Its economy is twice as big as that of Japan, its closest rival country. The U.S. no longer has reason to tremble before such threats as a menacing Soviet Union or a Japanese economic juggernaut. Little wonder the term "empire" is a frequently heard, though imprecise, shorthand for America's stature today.
Yet the U.S. is a much-frustrated giant. The Chinese balk at its trade prescriptions. Economically hapless North Korea thumbs its nose over nuclear weapons and goes about its business of selling missiles. Violent guerrillas resist the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq, while vast numbers of ordinary Muslims around the world doubt America's good will toward them. Even among traditional allies in Europe, U.S. policies often alienate rather than inspire.
This series explores how some of the very sources of America's great power also, in certain ways, constrain it. Consider the core American principles of democracy and free markets. These unquestionably strengthen U.S. society. And, confident in these values, the U.S. seeks to spread them. Yet at home and abroad, they also can create vulnerabilities.
America's open economic system creates a boundless thirst for imported goods, oil and capital from places such as China and Saudi Arabia -- habits that improve many Americans' lives in the short term but also pose a long-run threat. The rapid growth of China and India, eager participants in the U.S.-dominated global economy, could eventually yield new rivals to American economic might.
U.S. democracy, meanwhile, empowers individuals and interest groups -- from big corporations to ambitious Christian evangelists -- but sometimes in ways that impinge upon foreign policy.
America's self-image as a democratic republic resolutely opposed to imperialism makes it uneasy with the burdens of conquest, leaving private contractors to take on tasks the government prefers to keep at arm's length. This approach bedevils U.S. efforts to guard Iraq's infrastructure and rebuild Afghanistan's.
To counter terrorism from abroad, the U.S. now explicitly seeks to seed democracy in closed Mideast societies from which the threat springs. Yet incipient democracy, as Morocco shows, can empower fanatics as well as moderates. In all these ways and others, some threats to continued U.S. pre-eminence are self-generated, based in America's unusual status as a nation that is both a superpower and democratically governed.
Westernmost Arabia
Morocco, just seven miles from Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar, stands at the westernmost rim of the Arab world in both geography and outlook. With real elections and a robust media, it is a laboratory for the interplay between extremism and reform, and also for Washington's ambitions.
For André Azoulay, a Moroccan Jew who serves as a senior economics policy maker, the country's relative openness best explains why Islamist terrorists struck. "We are their anti-model," he said. As he spoke in an office down the hall from Morocco's monarch, a caller phoned with unpleasant news: al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab TV channel, was broadcasting a rant against Mr. Azoulay and his boss, the king. Mr. Azoulay turned on his TV set and watched as Hani Sebai, an Egyptian radical living in London, labeled Morocco a den of anti-Islamic vice run by Jews and bogus Muslims. "It's very depressing," Mr. Azoulay said.
Islamist radicals have long fulminated against Moroccan deviations such as bars, unveiled women and mixed-sex beaches. In recent years, greater tolerance made intolerance mainstream: The fury acquired new force and a far wider audience as Morocco loosened controls on media and politics.
At times, even the state has fallen under the radicals' thrall. Facing pressure from Islamists, Casablanca police last year busted an alleged anti-Islamic Satanic cult. The target: heavy metal musicians.
Saiid Bouidi, a 23-year-old bass-guitar player, says he was sitting at his parents' home on a Sunday afternoon when police rushed in, grabbing his compact discs, black T-shirts and a plastic skull ashtray. Fourteen musicians were jailed. In court, a judge asked them to chant their faith in Islam. They did but were still convicted of "acts against Islam." After a public outcry, all were finally released.
"Democracy opened the door to extremists," says Samira Sitail, director of news at 2M, a Casablanca-based television channel. Soon after the Casablanca attacks, a radical cleric in Tangier said the TV center deserved to get bombed. He was thrown in jail. Most Islamist politicians meanwhile have been thrown off the air. "I'm not going to serve up their soup," says Ms. Sitail, who gives those who do appear "30 seconds at the end instead of three minutes at the start."
Opening Up
The first country to recognize the fledgling American republic in 1777, Morocco began to open up a tightly sealed political system in the 1990s, in the last years of King Hassan II. This accelerated under his son Mohammed VI, who on taking over sold off some of his late father's limousines, drove his own car and, courtiers boasted, even stopped at red lights. He also allowed photographs of his unveiled wife, a computer engineer.
More important, he lifted a house-arrest order on a prominent Islamist leader, fired his father's feared security overlord and embarked on what Secretary of State Colin Powell, during a visit last month, called "bold reforms" to make elections, the press and society more open. A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ranked Morocco as the most pluralistic of 13 Arab countries.
Old reflexes still twitch. A journalist drew a four-year jail sentence last May for insulting the king. (He was freed this month after a royal pardon.) Suspected Islamist radicals, meanwhile, have been rounded up en masse since the suicide attacks, with 50 jailed for life and 16 given death sentences.
Still, a once routinely vicious security apparatus has curbed its abuses. Boisterous media assail officials, though not the king, who traces his lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Mr. Benzekri says the country has "made a fundamental rupture with the past." He contrasts it with what he says were often cosmetic changes in the early 1990s. Then, newly freed from prison, Mr. Benzekri says he attended an antitorture meeting in Switzerland and found that Morocco's official delegation included an interior ministry official who, years earlier, had personally supervised his own torture.
Picking up a Moroccan weekly newspaper on his desk, Mr. Benzekri points to its front page as evidence of tangible, if uncomfortable, liberties: It features his picture and a headline mocking him as a sellout for working within the system.
As Morocco has retreated, fitfully but unmistakably, from autocracy, the U.S. has offered little concrete support. The U.S. Agency for International Development, in an internal report shortly before the May bombings, called Morocco "a bulwark against anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism." Yet while giving Egypt nearly $2 billion in annual aid, the U.S. trimmed already-tiny economic help for Morocco to just $10.9 million last year. Frederick Vreeland, U.S. ambassador to Morocco in the early 1990s, calls the low level of aid "calamitous" in light of Morocco's efforts to "actually practice some of the democracy we preach."
The Bush administration recently pledged to halt the slide and now says it will lift economic aid to Morocco to $40 million this year. The U.S. has also pushed for a free-trade agreement that Moroccan farmers complain will swamp their market with cheap imports from America.
Some of America's modest aid helps fund courses to teach political campaigning and other skills needed for democratic politics. The keenest students in such courses are often Islamists, says Maryam Montague, director in Rabat for the U.S. Democratic Party's National Democratic Institute. They study hard and make copies of training tapes and handouts to give to colleagues.
When Morocco held parliamentary elections in September 2002, an Islamist group tripled its number of seats, becoming the main opposition force. The Party for Justice and Development, as it's called, deplores violence, but some of its media outlets and more-radical followers have denounced foes as un-Islamic. The accusation carries the threat of excommunication, or takfir, a concept at the heart of extremist ideology. Among their targets: the organizers of a now-suspended Miss Morocco contest.
Under heavy pressure from authorities, the party has now sidelined some of its more hot-headed members. It also dropped its previously strident opposition to legislation that strengthens the rights of women and effectively bans polygamy, which Islamic law permits. Some Islamists complain of a witch hunt. "We're being turned into the Devil," says Mustapha Ramid, a legislator and an instigator of the hunt for heavy-metal Satanists.
Giving ordinary Moroccans a voice has also given Washington a shock. In a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, Moroccans expressed overwhelming support for Western-style democracy. However, they also voiced deep anger at the U.S. More than 90% of those polled said they were disappointed Iraq had put up little resistance to U.S. forces. Asked which world figures could be expected "to do the right thing," Moroccans chose French President Jacques Chirac, Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat.
The debate over whether freedom ultimately tames or emboldens freedom's foes resonates far beyond Morocco. When the suicide attackers struck in Casablanca, America's then ambassador, Margaret Tutwiler, was on the other side of the Arab world in Iraq, on assignment with U.S. officials struggling to calm the disorder unleashed by the end of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. She rushed back to Morocco, first hitching a lift on a military plane carrying a dead U.S. soldier.
Now back in Washington overseeing State Department efforts to improve America's image abroad, Ms. Tutwiler told a Senate hearing last fall that, during her time in Morocco, "in too many cases, what I heard I found troubling and disturbing." America, she added, has "not placed enough effort and focus" on ordinary people who "today have a much stronger voice within their countries than they did in the past."
When Morocco's neighbor Algeria held an election more than a decade ago, Islamists won. The military then annulled the result. Years of savage violence followed, and a dozen years later, the Algerian government still lurches between repression and conciliation.
In Pakistan, the U.S., alarmed by the influence of Islamists, anchors its hopes in a president who overthrew an elected government in a 1999 coup. When Pakistan held elections in late 2002, religious parties won power in two provinces, vowing Taliban-style "reform." Conservative religious candidates in Kuwait trounced liberals in a legislative vote last year.
The debate is especially urgent as some radical Islamists return to their native countries, deprived of sanctuary in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Finding it harder to hit the "far enemy" -- the U.S. -- scattered militants have focused instead on the "near enemy," their insufficiently religious homeland governments. Muslim nations where terrorists have launched lethal attacks in recent months include Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. A bin Laden tape played by al Jazeera early last year listed Morocco among the "most qualified regions for liberation" from "renegade ruling regimes enslaved to the U.S."
The suicide bombers who struck Morocco in May grew up just a few miles from their targets, in contrast to the multinational team behind Sept. 11. Unlike Mohammed Atta and his college-trained allies, the 14 Casablanca kamikazes, two of whom survived, had little schooling and low horizons. They included parking attendants, street vendors, a failed barber and a welder.
Most lived in Sidi Moumen, a fetid slum where drug dealers and Islamists have long competed for loyalties with their rival promises of salvation. It stands on the opposite side of the city from -- and seethes with resentment against -- a new luxury district of walled villas called California.
One by one over the past two years, say neighbors, the future bombers grew long beards, a rarity in Morocco, started praying five times a day and began attending Quran study sessions. Instead of the shantytown's main mosque, where a state-appointed imam preaches on instructions from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, they went to makeshift prayer halls run by radical preachers.
An open letter published in several Moroccan newspapers before the bombings gives an insight into this slum radicalism. It was written in prison by Youssef Fikri, 25, a self-proclaimed Islamic guide who, before his arrest for murder and armed robbery, recruited in Sidi Moumen. His letter praised Mr. bin Laden but showed scant interest in jihad against America, focusing on local obsessions: Morocco's "infidel" rulers, Jews, bars and "immoral" television shows.
Describing himself as God's vigilante, Mr. Fikri, who was sentenced to death in July, railed against "imposters and pseudo-Muslims" and called on "true" Muslims to act. "It is easy to kill hundreds or thousands of people," he wrote. His own victims, all Moroccan, had ranged from a neighbor he believed to be a homosexual to a notary he spotted talking in a parked car with two women.
Morocco's information minister, Nabil Benabdellah, says the letter was an incitement to murder and should not have been published. Editors who printed it reply that they mirror, rather than create, Morocco's tensions. "We can refuse to publish and pretend the cancer does not exist, but the disease will still kill in the end," says Noureddine Meftah, director of a weekly called Al Ayyam.
'Paradise and Hell'
From behind bullet-proof glass in a Casablanca court house, Mohammed el Omari, one of the bombers who survived, described his own descent into Morocco's radical underworld, a turbulent subculture of extremist preachers, veterans of Afghanistan and angry drifters. He moved between various groups before settling with a gang of zealots dedicated to prayer, physical fitness, anti-Semitism and bomb-making. They experimented with gas canisters, fertilizer and other explosives for months.
The night before the attacks, said Mr. Omari, aged 23, the bombers met at his house, and, on a borrowed video cassette player, watched a film called "Paradise and Hell," a celebration of martyrdom imported from Egypt. The next day, each was given a knife, a bomb, a backpack and a watch.
Pleading innocent of murder charges, Mr. Omari said he had aborted his mission after seeing Muslims in the hotel he'd been told to blow up. Witnesses give a different version: He was knocked over by the blast from a comrade's bomb and, struggling to ignite his device, was grabbed by hotel staff.
Mr. Omari and the other surviving kamikaze were found guilty and sentenced to death. "God is great," they shouted as the verdict was announced in late August.
Mr. Benzekri, the truth commission's 53-year-old chief, says the fervor of Islamic radicals recalls the Marxist zeal of his own youth. The Islamists, though, outlasted all their rivals: "All other utopian ideas have failed," he says. "Islamists are the only ones left."
The remains of Mr. Omari's dead comrades are stored in a refrigerated room in the basement of Casablanca's National Institute of Forensic Medicine. The bombs obliterated their torsos but left their heads intact. All but one had shaved his beard before the attack, says Saiid Louhalia, the institute's director.
Dr. Louhalia says he kept the heads to give the bombers' families a chance to reclaim them. Eight months later, no one has come forward. For his own records, meanwhile, he's taken photographs of the heads in the basement and stored them on his office computer upstairs. "These are the real Satanists," he says, pointing at the gruesome images on his screen. "We have been too tolerant."
Write to Andrew Higgins at
[email protected]
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