The Far End of the Maghreb

A boarded up movie theatre in Marrakech’s Gueliz neighborhood tellingly demonstrates the city’s struggle with both poverty and modernity. It sits abandoned, barbed wire preventing access to windows and doors, a block from a bustling street filled with European-style bars and restaurants, many beckoning visitors with 1950s-era neon signs. Scattered among the aging, once high-end hotels are the signs of what’s likely to become of them. Multi-story empty buildings, closed off on the ground floor, their window openings, devoid of glass, allow the weather to seep in. The Gueliz, once the French enclave of the city, is no longer new, as its other moniker, Ville Nouvelle, implies. Instead, it has become a dying hub of Marrakech’s struggling middle-class. Few of the buildings suggest that they have been repurposed, their lifespans seemingly limited to the businesses that once thrived within their walls.

Were it not for the mix of low-end fashion, galleries offering affordable contemporary art, and beat up late-model cars, the Gueliz would seem frozen in time. It moves along, but at a pace that has been left behind by the Europeans who built it.

As pundits fill television screens, offering predictions about which Middle Eastern states will fall next to waves of protest, Morocco does, from the inside, seem relatively safe. From the Gueliz to the traditional Medina, newspaper stands dominate major intersections and offer Arabic, French, German and English papers and magazines. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, 53.2 percent of the total population can read at least some of those papers. Of these, 65.7 percent are men and 39.6 percent are women. There is a range of information about the rest of the world on offer to them, and for those lucky enough to have internet-capable devices. There's an outdoor garden, a literal cyber-park, that offers access to the online world. For the rest, the satellite dishes that spring up from nearly every rooftop in the city channel information from around the world.

An air of oppression certainly exists, but it isn’t crushing. Marrakech may also be unique, in that so much of its economy is dependent upon outsiders. Evidence of a tourist-based economy are everywhere, from the luxury hotels that line the road from the Medina to the Guilez, to the tour groups wandering through narrow, high-walled streets peppered with impoverished idle youth, to street signs that point only to sightseeing destinations and roads leading to other cities.

Nearly all of those sightseeing spots are stunning if dilapidated examples of Islamic architecture. Outside them, local boys offer hash for sale in a handful of Western languages while school-age children bat sad eyes in efforts to exchange packets of tissues for a few dirham. The history that hides behind the high walls is inaccessible to the very people to whom it belongs - part of an unspoken, subtle antagonism between  Moroccans and outsiders. Too much struggle on offer and the tourists won’t come, making that struggle even worse. 

Unemployment in Morocco already sits at approximately 9.8 percent, only slightly higher than the United States’ estimated 9.6 percent or Egypt’s 9.7 percent. Government is largely invisible, with private security guards most prominent at the city’s train station and a mixture of private and public uniformed police forces in the Medina’s main square. The protests that took place across the country last Sunday are unsurprising but not fraught with the urgency found in similar ones across the continent. Rather than calling for an overthrow of the ruling powers, Moroccans demanded the king introduce constitutional reforms that would limit his power. Easier said than done: he's part of a ruling line that claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad and took power in 1631 -- a power declared in the constitution to be sacred. The reforms that protesters called for limit the king's power to dissolve the government or to have the final say in government appointments, giving that power back to voters.

The protests in Morocco are less likely to be broadcast around the world than others taking place in North Africa. This isn't because they're less important. They're just less dramatic. Rather than a people trying to topple a longstanding government, Moroccans are trying to compromise with the system that already exists. Reform might not play out well on television but it certainly is just as extraordinary.

Reshape the constitution to make life better for the people of Morocco and perhaps that beautiful old cinema can have another life too.