Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (32 page)

In 2004, President George W. Bush upgraded Morocco’s status to that of a major non-NATO ally, alongside Israel, South Korea and Japan. In 2012, relations between Washington and Rabat were strengthened even further by what’s called the Strategic Dialogue.

Our relationship today is partly built on a foundation of past friendship, partly on the fact that Washington and Rabat share the same strategic vision for the region and the world and, to a lesser extent, on shared values.

Youssef Amrani, Morocco’s minister-delegate for foreign affairs, put it to me this way: “We have the same values. We have economic and cultural ties. The United States recognizes the commitment of Morocco to human rights and the rule of law. With all the changes in the region, we need to send the message that an Arab country can work with the United States on the basis of shared values.”

He overstates things a bit. Moroccan values are not the same as American values. The two nations don’t have nearly as much in common as Britain and the United States do. But aligning with Morocco doesn’t offend American sensibilities the way buddying up with Pakistan does. Morocco is an island of stability, but it’s not calcified like Saudi Arabia or frozen and stagnant like Egypt under Mubarak. The relationship between Washington and Rabat isn’t repulsive like America’s tactical alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

American policymakers would have to be out of their minds to suggest a different approach to Morocco. But an alliance with any kind of autocrat, even a benevolent one with limited power, can feel at least a bit awkward for both liberals and conservatives. Speaking for myself, I feel uneasy writing anything about a monarch that isn’t disparaging. It doesn’t come naturally. It feels wrong on some level. A decade ago, I wouldn’t have done it. But if the Middle East has taught me anything, it’s that moderation and stability are hard-won and precious.

Human-rights activists have a particularly difficult time praising a monarch, especially one who governs a country that Freedom House still ranks as just “partly free,” with a press that’s ranked “not free.” And that’s fine. Human-rights activists are supposed to be critical of Mohammad VI. It’s their job.

It’s still only fair to point out that Morocco is a lot freer than it used to be. Egypt and Syria certainly aren’t. Tunisia and Libya are, but they’re also unstable. Freedoms gained can be easily lost.

And let’s not forget that human rights depend on stability. One of the most searing things I learned as a foreign correspondent in Baghdad is that human rights mean nothing in war zones. What good is freedom of speech if you’ll get killed just for stepping outside your house? What good is freedom of assembly if your city is loaded with car bombs? What good are women’s rights on paper if militias can assault women with impunity?

And let’s not confuse elections and political liberalism. Mature political liberalism requires elections, but elections held in illiberal countries are often just referendums on who will be the next tyrant. That’s exactly what happened in Egypt. Elections are liberal democracy’s roof, not its floor.

Morocco has free and fair elections, but not for its head of state. That has to change sooner or later. The Moroccan monarchy will eventually have to sideline itself or face being sidelined by others. Smart Arab kings know this of the institution in general. As Jordan’s King Abdullah said to Jeffrey Goldberg of the
Atlantic,
“where are monarchies in 50 years?” In the meantime, Morocco provides a safe space for peaceable coexistence between liberals and Islamists, Muslims and Jews (including Israelis on holiday), Arabs and Berbers, modernists and traditionalists.

The Western press has wasted a lot of words describing the Muslim Brotherhood as moderate. But Mohammad VI is a real moderate. He’s a conservative in the sense that he belongs to a very old tradition and order, and he’s a liberal insofar as he advances pluralism and women’s rights and has willingly abdicated some of his power. He’s a Muslim ruler who not only protects Jews but also declares Jewishness a part of Moroccan identity. He pushes for careful and deliberate change without overwhelming the country with too much at once, thus avoiding a hostile and potentially violent reaction from traditionalists.

Morocco is a little like Costa Rica during the Cold War—a calm, friendly, stable, sane, peaceable and essentially civilized oasis in a region that has known precious little of those things.

Morocco remains a conservative Muslim society, but the traditions it is conserving aren’t the same as they are everywhere else in the region. The country has a strong moderate Sufi current, and the religion as practiced and understood there has long been influenced by ideas from sub-Saharan Africa and from Europe, which is only 11 miles away. Plenty of uncovered women are out and about in the streets. I didn’t see a single woman with her face covered the entire time I was there. Female genital mutilation, with an incidence rate somewhere between 78 percent and 97 percent in Egypt, doesn’t even exist in Morocco.

The city of Marrakech elected its first female mayor in 2009. Fatima Zahra Mansouri from the Authenticity and Modernity Party is the first female mayor in the country’s history. She speaks perfect French and wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the mayor’s office in Paris.

She does not wear a headscarf. Every time she meets with local Islamists, they tell her she should cover herself, but she refuses. She has a standard—and I’m sorry to say, unprintable—response to that demand.

I asked her what’s the hardest thing about her job, and she knew the answer immediately. “The most difficult thing is making unpopular decisions that are necessary for the city’s future. Like making people pay for parking. People hate that, but it’s important! And I don’t like taxes, but the city needs money.”

That’s the kind of answer the mayor of a city in a peaceable and fully developed nation might have. The mayors of Benghazi and Baghdad have far bigger problems on their plate at the moment than parking meters. When public anger over such things becomes the biggest source of stress for the mayor of Baghdad, we’ll know Iraq has truly and finally changed.

Mansouri and I talked urban issues for a while—I can be a bit of a geek about urban affairs and can talk about cities all day—but she really came to life when I asked my final question.

“What do you wish Americans knew about Morocco that they might not already know?” Most Americans know Morocco is a nice place for tourists, but that’s about it. Most who know a little bit more know that Morocco is a Muslim country with a king, but—again—that’s about it.

“It may be hard for you to understand Morocco politically,” she said. “I often read analyses that are totally wrong, but I can’t blame people for not understanding, because this is a hard place to understand.”

She leaned forward and spoke in English rather than French to make sure I understood.

“The Moroccan soul is not one of revolution,” she said, “but of evolution. It is our specialty. Transitions are easier here than they are in other places. We don’t have what they have in Egypt and Syria and Libya today. We have a special system, one with a strong king but one who does not have all the power.

“We had the French protectorate period,” she continued, “but after independence we built our own institutions. And now we are building democracy. Democracy isn’t something that’s just declared. It has to be built. We have the separation of powers. And we will never tolerate radical Islam because our traditions here have been moderate for 10 centuries. Look, Morocco is stable. We have a secular system. We have strong institutions and a growing economy. We are known as the door to Africa. We have so much cultural diversity here, and I think we can turn into a model of human development. You have to live here to fully appreciate it. We can’t adopt a Western style of government yet, but we can strike a balance between who and what we are and what we will have to become.”

Nadia Bernoussi, the law professor who helped draft the new constitution, grumbled a bit about how some foreigners see Morocco’s democratic reforms as a sham.

“Well,” I said. “The king wasn’t elected.”

She was taken aback by my bluntness, and I felt slightly rude saying it, but it’s true, and every Westerner in the world who looks at Morocco’s political system notices that and takes it into account. It is the most salient feature of her country’s government from our point of view.

“It’s true that the king isn’t elected,” she said, “but he has a different kind of legitimacy. He has national, historic and Islamic legitimacy.”

That’s for damn sure. Morocco’s cities are places where the modern and traditional exist side by side, but the hinterlands are all about God, King and Country.

This isn’t the sort of political sentiment Americans like me can relate to, but I did hear something I could understand and appreciate easily. When I asked uncovered Moroccan women if they feared the Islamists, all said they did not. (In Tunisia and Egypt, the uncovered women I know absolutely fear the Islamists.) Even the feminists in Morocco aren’t afraid of the Islamists.

When I asked why, all of them said, “Because of the king.”

Chapter Fourteen

On the Desert’s Edge

Western Sahara, 2014

On the West Coast of Africa, directly across the Atlantic Ocean from Cuba, is the region known as the Western Sahara, one of the few remaining on earth that isn’t recognized as part of a nation-state.

It is administered by Morocco yet claimed by the Polisario, a guerrilla army hatched by Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi that fought to take over from colonial Spain in 1975 and transform it into a communist state. The Polisario lost the shooting part of its war to Morocco, but the fat lady hasn’t even made her way to the dressing room yet.

Western Sahara is often (erroneously) compared to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but you wouldn’t know that by walking around, nor would you see any evidence that the cities, such as they are, were once slums ruled by a police state.

You certainly wouldn’t guess, if you didn’t already know, that Western Sahara is still darkened by the long shadow of the Cold War or that the place still quietly bleeds from the unhealed wounds cut by Qaddafi and Castro, but foreign correspondents almost never go down there, and governments outside North Africa rarely give the problem more than a single passing thought every couple of years.

Western Sahara’s citizens don’t know how to suffer in ways that stir activists or make headlines, but they are suffering. Tens of thousands are to this day held in refugee camps—which are really more like concentration camps—across the border in Algeria. They’ve been living in squalor as hostages in one of the planet’s most inhospitable places almost as long as I’ve been alive.

Hardly anyone on earth has ever heard of them.

*  *  *

I flew down there from the Moroccan capital in early 2014 and could see from the air that I was about to land in a place no closer to anywhere else of significance on land than if I were on Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic.

The city of Dakhla, my destination, is a bubble of sorts. It’s a seaside town on the edge of the Sahara Desert that is closer to Africa’s tropical forests than to the Mediterranean on the continent’s north coast, yet the climate is near perfect. The average high temperature in January is room temperature, and even in August it’s just 82 degrees Fahrenheit—the same summer high as in the mild Pacific Northwest. The cool waters of the Atlantic create a razor-thin coastal microclimate that spares Dakhla’s people from the infernal heat of the desert that broils anyone alive who dares to venture far from the beach.

Few live out in the wasteland. Western Sahara is one of the world’s least densely populated areas. It’s two-thirds the size of California, but only 800,000 people live in the whole of it, fewer than in metropolitan Omaha.

The area has virtually no resources to speak of. When Spain pulled out in 1975, there was less than 50 miles of paved road and one schoolhouse. Dakhla was little more than an army base with a couple of stores outside the gates surrounded by ocean and sand.

It was a ghastly place until the late 2000s, filled with shantytowns typical of the poorest regions of Africa. People lived in cinder-block houses with no running water or electricity. And it was repressed.

“I went down there in 1998,” a retired diplomat said to me in Rabat, “and I counted 35 policemen in four blocks. I couldn’t go anywhere without being followed. It wasn’t possible to have even a peaceful demonstration without getting beaten up by the police.”

The Moroccan government has eased up dramatically in the meantime just as it has up north, and most of Dakhla is brand-new. A huge percentage of Sahrawis—the Berbers, Tuaregs and Arabs of the Northwestern Sahara—were nomads well past the midpoint of the 20th century, but nearly all of them are now urban.

Dakhla during my lifetime has mushroomed from a remote Spanish outpost into a proper city of more than 85,000 people. Most have lived there for only one or two generations. Few are wealthy, but I saw none of the squalor typical of rapid urban migration in so many developing countries. Morocco has invested an enormous amount of money in the Sahara to make Dakhla livable, not just by building infrastructure and housing but also by investing in parks and a new promenade on the waterfront lined with palm trees.

I’d get bored after a while if I lived there—Dakhla is provincial, small and conservative—but I doubt I’d have many other complaints. The city is clean, friendly and aesthetically adequate. Buildings and houses tend to be rectangular and consist of only the simplest ornamentation, but they’re painted in various desert hues and that’s enough. Everything seems to work. European tourists love the place for its outstanding kitesurfing, desert adventure tourism and film and music festivals, and they bring a hint of cosmopolitan sensibility to the place that it would otherwise lack.

“Why did nomadism disappear now,” I asked a local man, “instead of decades earlier or decades in the future?”