[Jul 1 2:41pm EST]

A Moroccan court has just ordered three leading Arabic newspapers to pay one million Moroccan dirham       ($124,100) each in response to criticisms they’ve made against Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi. The charges were brought by the Libyan Embassy in Rabat and also included additional fines against the journalists who wrote the articles. Rachid Niny, editor of Morocco’s most widely read (and very critical) daily—Al Massae—lashed out that “this is a lawsuit by the Moroccan government rather than by Gaddafi.” Reporters Without Borders told Al Jazeera that the size of the fines could mean closure of the publications. This is just one more step backwards in Morocco’s receding press freedom.

[Jun 26 2:53pm EST]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) just reported on the sentencing of outspoken Moroccan human rights activist, Chekib el-Khayari, to three years in prison after publically implicating state officials in drug trafficking common in the North of Morocco. El-Khayari, who leads the Association for Human Rights in the Rif, was charged with “gravely insulting state institutions” and sentenced with a $90,000 fine. According to Sarah Whitson, the MENA director at HRW, “Morocco is opening up in some respects, but its treatment of Chekib el-Khayari shows that when someone speaks out in ways that truly bother officials, they come down on him like a ton of bricks.”

[Jun 23 3:01pm EST]

Since the municipal elections June 12, parties have been jockeying to form alliances strong enough to secure control of the most coveted mayoral posts. As if forgetting that they ever had “ideologies” or “electoral programs” in the first place, parties will go to any length to imrpove their position within a given municipality. In Rabat, for example, the Islamist PJD even joined a coalition led by the Socialist party (USFP) in order to unseat unpopular mayor, Omar El Bahraoui. As one editorial pointed out, the entire closed-door post-election negotiations are a low point in Morocco’s democracy as “division and confrontation” win out over “efficiency and transparency.”

Despite all alliance possibilities being open, the PJD did complain that the PAM was pressuring other parties behind the scenes not to uphold agreements with the party. This was supposedly the case in Casablanca where the Constitutional Union (UC) bailed out of an agreement with the Islamists over the weekend. Morocco’s economic capital stayed with the UC, even though the PJD won the most seats. Fes was another big city which didn’t change hands, re-electing Hamid Chabat of Istiqlal. The PAM was able to take control of two of Morocco’s most important urban centers—Marrakech and Tangier—as well as pick up Meknes, formerly a PJD stronghold.

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James Liddell, Morocco editor
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