New clashes rock north Morocco city
Dutch slam extradition row
RABAT, June 27, (Agencies): Moroccan security forces clashed Monday with demonstrators in Al-Hoceima, activists and witnesses said, a day after King Mohammed VI criticised delays in development in the restive northern city.
The clashes erupted after hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Al-Hoceima in the late afternoon despite police roadblocks, activists said.
They said they had planned to hold a major rally but the police “completely locked down” the city, cutting off routes and using force to disperse protesters.
“Residents could not move about freely... the police systematically intervened to stop people from gathering,” a journalist in the city told AFP. Protesters who had come from the neighbouring towns of Imzouren and Tammassin were pushed back by the security forces, he said.
The demonstrators were “brutally repressed by the security forces”, the journalist said.
Clashes also broke out in the town of Ajdir between demonstrators and security forces, the journalist said, adding that some people were injured and a dozen arrested.
Al-Hoceima, a key port in the neglected northern Rif region, has been hit by unrest since October.
It came after a fishmonger was crushed to death in a rubbish truck as he tried to retrieve swordfish that authorities had thrown away because it was caught out of season.
Calls for justice snowballed into a wider social movement dubbed Al-Hirak al-Shaabi, or the “Popular Movement”, demanding jobs, development, and an end to corruption in the mainly Berber region.
Authorities have arrested more than 100 people including Hirak leader Nasser Zefzafi, and clashes between police and demonstrators have continued for weeks.
Sunday’s demonstrators called for the release of Hirak activists.
The government has responded to the unrest by relaunching a 2015 programme to improve the region’s infrastructure, health facilities and education services by 2019.
Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit said in early June that the projects “respond to 90 percent of the demands of the population”.
But on Sunday the Moroccan king rebuked ministers over delays to the development programme.
He told a cabinet meeting of his “disappointment, dissatisfaction and concern” that the $670 million (600 million euro) programme in the Rif was behind schedule, according to a government statement.
The king also cancelled the annual leave of ministers involved in programme so they can “monitor” its progress, it said.
The Rif has long had a tense relationship with central authorities in Rabat, and it was at the heart of the Arab Spring-inspired protests in Morocco in February 2011.
King Mohamed VI relinquished some of his nearabsolute control through constitutional reforms following the 2011 protests.
Meanwhile, Morocco has recalled its ambassador in the Hague after accusing Dutch authorities of failing to take action against a Moroccan it says is funding civil unrest and who is residing in the Netherlands, the Moroccan foreign ministry said on Sunday.
Morocco’s foreign minister named the man as Said Chaaou, a 50-year-old former parliamentarian from Morocco’s northern Rif region, who has been the subject of two arrest warrants accusing him of criminal association and international drug trafficking, issued by a Moroccan court in 2010 and 2015.
The Moroccan statement did not accuse Chaaou directly of organising recent protests in the north of the country but suggested he was involved in supporting unrest in Rif region, long a hotbed of anti-government sentiment. A movement called Hirak al Chaabi in Arabic has led months of protests, accusing officials of corruption.
“Specific information has been provided to the Dutch authorities for several months regarding the involvement of this trafficker in financing and providing logistical support to certain sectors in northern Morocco,” the ministry said in a statement.
“It was made clear to the Dutch authorities that it is imperative that concrete and urgent measures be taken.”
The statement did not name the man, but Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita told Reuters it referred to Chaaou. Chaaou did not answer calls to his telephone in the Netherlands and his lawyer could not be contacted immediately.
One of the more than 300 lawyers defending Hirak activists who have been detained and imprisoned said that Chaaou had no ties with Hirak.
“The Hirak movement has to do with demands of the people who live in the Rif,” said Abdessadak Elbouchattaoui, dismissing as “rumours” reports that Chaaou provided funding and logistical support to Hirak.
In a joint statement on their websites, the Netherlands Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Security and Justice dismissed Morocco’s decision to recall its ambassador as “incomprehensible and unnecessary”.
A day before Morocco recalled its ambassador in the Netherlands, Chaaou streamed a nearly two-hour live video on his Facebook page in which he criticised government officials for their treatment of his native Rif region. The video was viewed more than 120,000 times.
Since October, demonstrators have repeatedly taken to the streets in Rif around the northern city of AlHoceima to vent their frustration over the economic, social and political problems of a North African kingdom that presents itself as a beacon of stability in a turbulent region.
“The people of Rif went to the streets with just and legitimate demands,” said Chaaou in the video, in which he also asserted his support for “self-determination” for the region.
One senior Moroccan official said Moroccan authorities had in the past arrested and sentenced a Moroccan national on the request of the Netherlands for a crime committed there.
“We treat the demands of other countries seriously, and we expect the same from other countries,” the official said. “Chaaou is free and feels protected. That’s why he’s trying to become a political leader.”
Rif once declared itself independent briefly in 1920s to resist colonial rule. Some government supporters have accused the Hirak protesters of being separatists, an idea rejected by those involved in the Al-Hoceima protests.
King Mohammed