RABAT, Morocco - A vibrant press has been creeping onto the Moroccan scene since the mid-1990s. Colorful publications in Arabic and French flood the newsstands. At least a half-dozen have won the reputation of being independent, and many devote extensive coverage to past human rights abuses, corruption and other hot political topics.
Despite all this, Moroccan authorities have used criminal prosecutions, censorship and harassment to try to restrict the press. Authorities also have the legal power to confiscate, suspend or revoke the licenses of publications considered threatening to the public order.
Five years ago, the government permanently closed the country’s three most audacious independent publications — weeklies Le Journal, Al-Sahifa and Demain — for printing a letter accusing Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi of being involved in a 1972 leftist plot to assassinate King Hassan II.
The three publications — which had printed daring stories about corruption, the disputed Western Sahara region and unsavory aspects of Morocco’s political history — resumed publishing in 2001 under new but similar mastheads.
The same year, a Casablanca court convicted Abou Bakr Jamai and Ali Ammar, directors of the weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire (formerly Le Journal) of defaming Foreign Minister Muhammad Benaissa in an article that said he had profited from the purchase of an official residence while serving as Morocco’s ambassador to the United States. The two journalists were sentenced to jail terms of three and two months respectively and ordered to pay fines and damages.
Mustapha Alaoui, of the weekly Al-Ousbou, was detained under Morocco’s counterterrorism law for publishing a communique issued by an Islamist group that took responsibility for the multiple suicide bombings in Casablanca on May 16, 2003. He was freed after a royal pardon.
The former French-ruled territory has more than 600 publications: 430 in Arabic, 199 in French, eight in the Berber language and one in Spanish, according to the Web site of the Ministry of Communications, which is in charge of the press.
The ministry says the number of journalists increased from 400 in 1987 to 1,200 in 1997. The motto of Maghreb Arab Press agency (MAP), Morocco’s state-run wire service, founded in 1958, is “News is sacred, comment is free.”
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