Write Comment     |     E-Mail To a Friend     |     Facebook     |     Twitter     |     Print

Moroccan websites are abuzz about planned protests on Sunday against a government they consider corrupt, elitist and out of touch. And a banned Islamist movement is using the moment to call for democratic change.

Moroccan authorities, though, are giving it all an official shrug, despite a wave of popular uprisings that have swept other Arab nations and unseated dictators in Egypt and Tunisia.

Morocco — like Tunisia and Egypt, a magnet for tourists and a strong Western ally — is considered one of the least likely Arab nations to see street protests bring down the regime. For all the frustration at rising prices and corruption, the country enjoys relative economic openness and political choice. And importantly, the population remains as a whole deeply loyal to the man in charge of it all, King Mohammed VI.

“We have no claims against the monarchy itself,” Montasser Drissi, one of organizers of the February 20 Movement, told The Associated Press on Friday. “We want a government that represents the people, and not the elite.”

The 19-year-old Driss is among a smattering of young people who have used a Facebook campaign and YouTube videos to try to tap the kind of energy that drove young protesters in nearby Tunisia. That energy, the Moroccan activists hope, will bring crowds to the street in marches in several towns and cities Sunday.

The movement’s posters, which have been handed out around the country, say they want the government and parliament disbanded and an interim government put in place, and trials for those accused of corruption and “pillaging of the riches of the fatherland.” They also want the release of all political prisoners, the Berber language Amazigh to be formally recognized as an official language, the end of “direct and indirect censorship,” guaranteed public jobs for anyone with a diploma, a rise in the minimum wage and better social services.

The organizers could not give estimates of how many people may show up, but the Facebook sites have drawn thousands of followers and provide links to other websites which have called people to protest.

The country’s leading Islamist movement, Adl wal Ihsan, said in a statement posted on its website on Wednesday that it will join the Feb. 20 protests.

“The time of oppression and despotism has lasted too long in our beloved Morocco, corruption has propagated to reach all political, social and economic sectors,” it said, lamenting soaring prices and unemployment. The movement also warned against any effort to paint Morocco as an exception to the “awakening of the Arab people and their effort to emancipate themselves from the yoke of injustice.”

Led by Sufi sheik Abdessalam Yassine, the Adl wal Ihsan, or Justice and Spirituality movement and its hundreds of thousands of members are highly critical of Morocco’s monarchy. The government accuses it of trying to engineer the rise of an Islamic state, and the movement is banned from politics.

Mansouria Mokhefi, director of North Africa and Middle East studies at the French Institute for International Relations, said there is “no risk” of Islamists using the Moroccan youth movement to seize power and that overall the protest movement is unlikely to lead to upheaval seen elsewhere.

“I think there is little chance of regime change in Morocco” prompted by popular uprising, she said. “I cannot say that Moroccans don’t know misery, they do, but people see that things are more or less working,” she said.

While poverty and illiteracy remain widespread in rural areas, Morocco’s economy is among the most diversified and open in the region, with a solid banking system and tourism and services industry.

Most of Morocco’s main political parties have not come out for or against the planned protests. The leading official Islamist party, the PJD or Justice and Development Party, said it supports the right to march against corruption but that it is “not concerned by the call to march.”

The government pledged this week to create jobs for unemployed university graduates. But the youth have seen such pledges go unfulfilled in the past.

Communications Minister Khalid Naciri said he sees the call to march “with great serenity, and as something that is totally natural given the atmosphere of democracy and freedom that prevails in the kingdom.”

Mohammed El-Katiri of the Eurasia Group calls the Sunday’s protests “the first real test for Morocco’s political stability.” Still, he wrote in a research note, “Morocco is expected to remain politically stable over the medium term.”