Bombing and Protest Stalking

Last Thursday I was stunned to get a text message from a friend saying there was a terrorist attack in Marrakech. I immediately jumped out of bed from the nap I was taking to grab my laptop and search Google News. At first I couldn’t find anything but then I searched Twitter for tweets on Morocco. That’s when the links started appearing. The word used to describe the event was “blast”. I found that 10 had died and even more were injured in a blast caused by a gas explosion and that the Moroccan Minister of Interior labeled this as a criminal act. In the next few hours, the story developed and I learned from one of my Moroccan professors who lives in Marrakech that the blast was from a suicide bomber. No one has come forward yet to claim responsibility but the North Africa wing of Al Qaeda is the top suspect. (See Reuters for good up-to-date coverage on the situation)

***CORRECTION: the bomb was remotely detonated and was not a suicide bombing

This news was extremely disturbing to me and it gave me one of those, fleeting anxiety waves. I’m not nervous to leave the house by any means, but this has given me an increased awareness of my setting/surroundings. I wouldn’t say that I’m never going to Marrakech again but I am wary of where I take my coffee and where I got out. Some Moroccan friends said to avoid a specific cafe that I myself and a lot of people love going to because it’s so touristy, serves alcohol, and is downtown–not that anything is going to happen in Rabat, but just in case.

King Mohammed VI visited Cafe Argana in Jamaa el-Fnaa square this weekend and I can tell that he is as mad as ever that this has happened during his reign. Justice and Charity, the banned Islamist party has condemned the act as well and says that we should not let the bombing kill the perpetual protests.

Well, about the protests: May 1 is the Moroccan version of Labor Day and one of the bigger protests was scheduled that day. Apparently the protest got pretty big in Rabat, but unfortunately I was traveling on Sunday and didn’t get to check it out.

However, this brings me to my latest column in The Dickinsonian, on recent protests in Rabat. Coincidentally, in my anecdote I was also waking up from a nap. Studying abroad can be very tiring:

In my last column, I hit upon Moroccan sports culture, concluding that football is the center of the universe here and we are more likely in Morocco to see riots erupt from the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry than from revolutionary forces. Last week was a case in point. After a game between the two football giants the victorious Madrid fans took to the streets, swarming, yelling and arguing with their Barca counterparts. There was even a fight in my street that involved knives and rocks, but fortunately it was broken up before anything too serious could happen. Needless to say, my host family made sure the door was bolted.

The other day, after recovering from the football excitement, I woke up from a nap to screaming, yelling, whistling and chanting. Racing out the door with only a camera and my keys in hand I found my street filled with approximately 400 protestors making their way towards Parliament. Though my Arabic has certainly gotten better since August when I was at ground zero with the language, I had a hard time understanding what the march was about. Thinking I could just take pictures of their signs and translate them later, I followed the protestors snapping photos, only to be asked by one of the marchers if I was a journalist (I set him straight, identifying myself as a student).

From this I was able to break into discussion, firing away all sorts of questions I had at him and a few other marchers. Immediately I knew I was seeing something different than the status quo in these other “Arab revolutions,” because the man identified the protestors as members of a state organization. The organization was not even a new one, instead he told me that it is approximately two-decades-old. The organization works with many social, political and economic issues ranging from unemployment, particularly among higher education degree-holders, prices, subsidies and transparency. Corruption was the main issue of the march.

Going out on a limb, I asked the man if the organization had a position on the monarchy and whether it was pushing for any “political” change (meaning leadership change). It was at this point that I sensed unease as he dodged my question, almost acting as if he did not understand. When I tried to bring it up again with another marcher essentially the same thing happened. So I backed off with that question. However, there was no real hesitation for the marchers to tell me the failings of Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi: how he just stole and lied to the Moroccan people and how it is a good thing that the reforms of King Mohammed VI include making prime minister an elected position, rather than a political appointee.

When the march arrived downtown to the Parliament building, there were already a few other protest groups set up. They were smaller than the march I had been following, but they were protesting similar issues. Protests are no novelty in Morocco, especially in Rabat. Lately, I feel weird if I go through a day without seeing one. It is really the scale and non-violence of them that make Moroccan protests a different animal from their Syrian and other Arab nation neighbors. There had been hype about a larger protest scheduled for Sunday, April 24. Thinking that something could come of this my friends and I went downtown to check out the scene. We arrived at the train station around 1 p.m. to find no more than a couple hundred gathering and chanting. Disappointed, we left the scene, like probably most of the protestors had, to go eat lunch.

Though protests have kept up here in Rabat, they are nothing like the ones televised in Syria. The intensity of the crisis in Syria has had many of us worried over here, but to some degree, the nonstop, 24/7 Al Jazeera coverage has desensitized us to the gruesomeness and reality of it all. Unlike CNN and Fox in the States, Al Jazeera does not hold back on its footage. When protestors get hit with fire, you actually see the cameraman struggling to capture it all on film with survival also on his mind. Bloody corpses and wounded protestors are all over the news cycle.

While this is so informative and I think it is important to see what is happening on the ground in Syria, such intense coverage is almost trivializing it for the Arab audience because they see so much of it. These reports are played in homes all over, at least in Morocco—meaning people of all ages, including children are watching the revolutions in the region. I see this as a gift and a curse.