by Abderrahim Chalfaouat
In Morocco last year, youth-led nationwide street demonstrations started on February 20 — the name of the movement — led to a package of constitutional reforms voted in a national referendum on July 1, culminating in general elections on November 25. In line with the rise of Islamists in different countries of the Middle East and North Africa in the heated atmosphere of the Arab Spring, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), a moderate Islamist party that favours participation in state institutions, won 107 seats in the chamber of representatives. This overwhelming victory allowed PJD general secretary Abdelilah Benkirane to be nominated for head of the government and form a coalition cabinet.
During the electoral campaign, an army of young Internet surfers used different media skills to express their yearning for change in Morocco. Some supported the PJD, using electronic circulars and online newspapers to share videos, write articles and discuss hot issues and controversial standpoints in comment zones, to create a PJD-friendly media sphere. This helped pave the way for an unprecedented Islamist landslide in Moroccan polls.
Before Morocco, Tunisian, Egyptian and other regional youth protests had flooded the streets to topple authoritarian, totalitarian regimes; they too used the constant, mobile connectivity that new media allow, in tandem with international TV coverage, especially that of Al-Jazeera. To retaliate, shaky regimes cut Internet connection or imposing media restrictions, a key strategy to push the demonstrations to abate. Facebook and Youtube also helped Moroccan activists to uncover and upload evidence of fraud or intervention, for instance by the traffic police. They filmed them getting bribery in Tarjist or Ceuta, or took videos of security squads assaulting demonstrators — or protesters throwing stones at the police. Live testimonies were taken in places like Sidi Ifni, Sefrou and Gdem Izik camp in Laayoune, which very often backed PJD opposition MPs. They greatly helped ensure the launching of fact-finding committees, or at the very least counterbalanced official propaganda.
The role of online newspapers is crucial, and they have mushroomed in less than two years. The onlinenewspapers.com page dedicated to Morocco features a list that is in no way exclusive: you can find an electronic newspaper for every city or social group, in Arabic, English or French. Their volume, still small, is soaring and helps a citizen-to-citizen flow of information. It’s not just new media, but a new culture to express counter-hegemony, the struggle for fair representation and public attention in a nascent unregulated sphere. Some of the electronic newspapers are not updated regularly, and they don’t all show enough professionalism; they duplicate news from unknown resources, and even sometimes accuse one another of plagiarism. But they do trigger curiosity, and respond to the strong desire to learn more about anything that escapes official censorship.
Recently in the northwestern city of Taza, especially the Elkousha neighbourhood, Moroccans have been protesting about austere conditions, aggravated by high electricity and water bills. The public media, TV newscasts in particular, behaved in the traditional way: shallow one-sided coverage denied police intrusion into people’s homes. It was as if Moroccans still lived in the age, from 1985 to 1995, when the ministry for interior and communication formed one obscure entity, a time when the evening news was the sole window on national events, and leaks were scarcely allowed.
With online media, times have changed. Now there has been nothing to curb the videos, photos, raw testimonies and electronic commentaries by Taza residents that have further fuelled the uprising. The government declined to reveal who pushed youngsters to stir up trouble or who ordered security squads to strike hard and threaten rape, as a number of clips show. Keeping it vague may mark a last-ditch false start by the government, for transparency, accountability and a faster responsive would, on the contrary, guarantee support for the government. Silence and top-down censorship are no longer effective when personal and international media deliver information and investigative analysis. The upheaval in Taza might have been pre-empted through direct dialogue thanks to the electronic media.
Morocco’s new government needs to remember that holding a phone camera to record whatever happens is the Zeitgeist of the whole region post Bouazizi (the street vendor who triggered the Tunisian revolution by setting fire to himself). Morocco is no exception. In 2005 the country signed on the Millennium Development Goals, due in 2015, which commit all participating countries to build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society (1) by connecting villages, health centers, educational institutions, libraries, government agencies and social facilities to the Net — a huge step ahead of which little has been realized so far. At the same time Morocco was among the first countries to attend meetings of the notorious ACTA agreement that can restrict information flow and access.
Bridging the gap between two contradictory aims could help close the digital divide in access and usage. Furthermore, (de)regulating the unregulated electronic newspapers’ sphere is a must in order to hold all parties accountable to national mandates and gear efforts towards more democratization of Moroccan politics. A third option is to keep the public informed via the official media, especially TV.
There is a reason for insisting on TV. After ‘liberalising’ the media sphere in 1998 and creating the High Authority of Audiovisual Communication (HACA), a state body that regulates the practices of TV and radio channels within the scope of media freedom, no less than fourteen private radio channels have been approved so far, while two initially-private TV channels, 2M and Medi 1 Sat, have been nationalized — a clear indicator of how strategically TV as an official mouthpiece is perceived. Democratization at this point is paramount, for keeping this media chaos could give a bad name to Morocco’s version of the Arab Spring.
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