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Ed Webb

So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles? | by Hisham Aidi | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...o-why-did-i-defend-paul-bowles

Morocco literature colonialism race racism music heritage culture US USA history Berbers Amazigh authoritarianism religion politics

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.
  • in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.
  • His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.
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  • Bowles did not create the “myth of Tangier,” but he gave it a literary respectability and an American cast.
  • In the early 1950s, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Bryon Gysin, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Susan Sontag all gravitated to this “portal to the unknown,” as one author christened Tangier. So did European writers like Genet, Juan Goytisolo, and Joe Orton, but Bowles’s influence was not limited to the literary community. In later decades, his recordings and promotion of Moroccan music would draw producers and recording artists from Patti Smith to the Rolling Stones.
  • Through the 1960s and 1970s, he focused instead on recording and translating from darija (Moroccan Arabic dialect) the oral histories of men he met in Tangier’s cafés. By the time of his death, in 1999, the idea of Tangier as a place for self-discovery had become received wisdom in the West and the Arab world, and Bowles was established as a giant of American letters despite decades of silence.
  • I gave him a copy of my thesis. He looked up from the title page: “‘Orientalism’?—that’s a bad word, isn’t it?” Faux-naïveté, I would learn, was part of his manner. He told me to come back the following day.
  • I was, he said, the first Moroccan researcher—a Tangier native, to boot—to defend him. He added his signature beneath my printed name. (A few weeks ago, I got goosebumps when I found the same copy that I gave him, albeit coffee-stained, in the archives at the University of Delaware’s Paul Bowles Collection.) Later, the thesis was included in a collection titled Writing Tangier (2004). I still see citations occasionally in student dissertations on Bowles noting that one Tanjawi, at least, did not regard him as an Orientalist.
  • Tangier’s collective memory is steeped in nostalgia and centered around the medina, the old city. The medina, the elders told us, was once the epicenter of the Islamic world: it was from the port where the medina meets the sea that Tariq ibn Ziyad had set sail and conquered Spain in 711. After the fall of Granada in 1492, it was to Tangier’s medina that the Jews and Moriscos fled, settling in its alleyways, preserving the mosaic of Islamic Spain
  • The economic misery and political repression of the 1980s and 1990s made it hard to believe that the medina was ever a free space. Most locals had never heard of these famous writers. I only heard of Bowles when, in 1988, a film crew began working in front of our family restaurant at the entrance to the Kasbah as Bernardo Bertolucci began filming The Sheltering Sky. As teenagers, we came to wonder what truths the books from the Interzone contained, and if Tangier had indeed been better-off under Western rule, as the nostalgists, local and foreign, seemed to imply
  • The narrative we learned at school was that the monarchy had liberated the north from colonial oppression. But what liberation did the regime (makhzen) bring? After independence, as a local intelligentsia began forming in Tangier, many came to see the American corpus of writings about 1950s Tangier as an invaluable record of a lost golden age.
  • I made a point of reading the American authors who had written about Tangier’s Interzone. Besides Bowles, I was intrigued by the Beats, especially the Columbia University alums—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr—students of Lionel Trilling and fans of Arthur Rimbaud who had somehow mapped Greenwich Village onto Tangier, turning the Boulevard Pasteur into a “North African Bleecker Street.” But even as a college sophomore, I realized that their writings were more about the straitjacket of McCarthyite America that they were running from, rather than about Morocco as such.
  • It was even gratifying to see that Tangier, like Berlin, had played a significant role in launching a gay literary movement—in some ways ahead of the West, in having its finger on the “prognostic pulse of the world,” as Burroughs called it. But what was startling was that, while these writers basked in the city’s pleasures, they—with the exception of the Bowleses—didn’t really like Tangier. The Beats had a casual disdain for the natives, invariably describing Moroccans as “rakish” or “raffish.” Capote found Tangier too alien, describing the men as “noisy heathens” and the women as “anonymous bundles of laundry.” He warned friends in New York about the “smell of the arabe.” Burroughs referred to the locals as a “bunch of Ay-rabs,” and in 1958 he pronounced: “Tanger [sic] is finished. The Arab dogs are among us.”
  • Paul Bowles traced the history of the medina from the early 1930s to independence. He chronicled how the sultan’s crackdown on Sufi practices (“the great puritanical purging”) in central Morocco inched northward.
  • Bowles’s defense of the Amazigh, or Berber, population was daringly transgressive. Morocco’s culture “is not predominantly Arabic, but Berber,” he insisted—in the face of Arab nationalists who acted as though they believed “Berbers have no culture at all,” as they tried to drag the country into the Arab League. “The general opinion is that the autochthonous population must at all costs be Arabized if it is to share in the benefits of independence,” he observed acidly. “No one seems to have conceived of the possibility of an independent Berber Morocco. In fact, to mention the Berbers at all qualifies one as a pro-French reactionary. At present, to become modern means to become Egyptian.”
  • Reading these words in my dorm room in wintry Pennsylvania in 1992 was both thrilling and frightening. We as Moroccans—especially those of us from the northern Berber region—grew up in a climate of fear, and I had never heard or read anyone publicly criticize Arab nationalism, or speak so openly of the Moroccan hinterland’s animus toward Fez, the city of the interior regarded as the seat of the regime. To hear this American writer openly excoriate the Moroccan ruling elite for its cruelty and skullduggery was exhilarating
  • Bowles prompted me to think beyond the binary of “Western” versus “Arab.”
  • The Moroccan reaction against Bowles began to take form in the early 1970s. His earliest critics were the philosopher Abdallah Laroui and Ben Jelloun, who both chided the American writer for promoting an image of the country as a land of primitivism, drugs, and unlimited sex. Laroui also lambasted the Moroccan bourgeoisie for buying into and reproducing Bowles’s “folkloric” portrayal of their country. Ben Jelloun, writing in 1972, accused the American of belittling the nation’s literary patrimony.
  • Bowles, in the mid-1960s, had begun translating the memoirs and stories of down-and-out illiterate youth in Tangier. (While he could not read Arabic, Bowles did understand darija, the spoken dialect.) The most prominent of these were Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes (1966), about a petty thief and male prostitute and his experiences dodging police and servicing tourists (the book was made into a BBC film); Look and Move On (1967), the tales of Mohammed Mrabet, a hustler and golf caddie who worked for an American couple; and the best-known, Mohammed Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1972), an account of his migration from the Rif to Tangier, his life as a street kid in the International Zone, and his becoming a schoolteacher, which he recounted to Bowles in Spanish. These books were marketed in the West as “Moroccan literature,” and for many in the Anglophone world, this was their introduction to it.
  • in effect erased an earlier literary tradition that had seen Moroccan writers published in French and Spanish since the 1930s, let alone the preceding centuries of poetry and other writing in Arabic
  • Laroui acted as an adviser to the king and was a strong proponent of Arabization. Tangierians saw his attack on Bowles as another attempt by the Arab nationalist elite to subdue the “sin city.” Ben Jelloun also had a complicated relationship to Tangier. The son of a merchant, a Fassi (a person from Fez) who settled in Tangier in the early 1960s, he had attended the French lycée and was seen as part of the new Francophone Fassi upper class—comprising the Alaoui, Alami, Ben Jelloun, Berrada, Omrani, and Tazi families—that had fanned out across the country as the French departed, assuming top government positions. Like Laroui, Ben Jelloun spoke neither of the two common local tongues of the north, Spanish and Tarifit (the Berber language). A paradox of Ben Jelloun’s work, in particular, was that it often featured the very tropes of mysticism, violence, and sexual deviancy he denounced in Bowles’s work. For his part, the American writer dismissed his Moroccan critics as “confirmed Marxists.”
  • I myself was part of this trend—defending Bowles against the Arab nationalists who were trying to tear him down and impose their political preferences on us. In his final interviews, when asked if he was an “Orientalist,” Bowles would often cite me, noting that a Tangier-born scholar now in America had judged him not to be.
  • as long as America was seen as a political friend, Bowles was viewed favorably. Not surprisingly, after the Gulf war of 1990 and the release of Bertolucci’s film of The Sheltering Sky that same year, more articles started to appear across the Middle East critiquing Bowles’s representations of Morocco, accusing him of racism and Orientalism
  • “Paul Bowles loves Morocco, but does not really like Moroccans.” Choukri had some powerful evidence on his side. Over the decades, Bowles had made countless derogatory remarks, speaking of Moroccans as “childlike,” “purely predatory,” and “essentially barbarous.” He claimed also that Muslims aimed for world domination through “the sword and the bomb.”
  • He was sympathetic to the Amazigh, whom he saw as the original inhabitants of North Africa, a fiercely independent people only “partially Islamicized.” This affection nevertheless rested on some unsettling ideas about racial hierarchy. Bowles was profoundly influenced by the “Hamitic hypothesis,” a late nineteenth-century anthropological theory that saw almost everything of value in Africa as imported by the Hamites, a branch of the Caucasian race, who were held as superior to the Negroid peoples. Berbers, whatever their actual skin tone—even the typically dark-skinned Tuareg—were for Bowles essentially a white “Mediterranean race.”
  • In Bowles’s idiosyncratic hierarchy, it was Berber music that encapsulated Morocco’s true African identity—and this cultural essence was threatened by the Arabs and their music. The recently released Music of Morocco collection reflects this bias, giving credence to Choukri’s claim that Bowles deliberately misrepresented local culture to reflect his personal vision of Morocco.
  • I began to realize that Bowles’s fondness for the Berbers and his animus toward Arabs was, in many ways, a reflection of French colonial policy. Although he was well aware of the violence of French imperialism, he enjoyed its amenities—“the old, easygoing, openly colonial life of Morocco”—and as early as the 1950s, Bowles began to lament the loss of “colonial Tangier.” Above all, he believed in the International Zone, seeing its “anarchy” and “freedom from bureaucratic intervention” as an extraordinary political experiment. But these liberties, which is what drew many of the Beats, were the privileges of Europeans and Americans—ones generally not enjoyed by the city’s Muslim and Jewish natives.
  • In 1972, Tahar Ben Jelloun publicly accused Bowles (and the Beats) of exploiting illiterate, vulnerable youths in Tangier not just artistically but sexually. Choukri in 1997 would echo this charge, claiming Bowles suffered from a sexual illness. These allegations became more commonly heard once Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Bowles’s correspondence in 1994, although he expressed some reluctance about its release. The volume included letters in which he described the boys he slept with, in one letter even bragging about how cheap sex was in Algeria. “Where in this country [America] can I have thirty-five or forty people, and never risk seeing any of them again? Yet, in Algeria, it actually was the mean rate.” (In the correspondence, he reminisced about how he “never had sexual relationships without paying,” and viewed paying for sex as a form of “ownership.”)
  • Although the letters simply lent credence to rumors long circulating in Tangier, Choukri and other Tanjawi writers were still shocked by them. The literary reaction in Morocco fed into a larger effort there by human rights activists campaigning against sex tourism and child prostitution. Whereas Bowles had always seemed more judicious and reputable than the Beats—in contrast, say, to Burroughs’s open bragging about buying “pre-pubescent gooks” and Ginsberg’s boasting about “paying young boys” for sex—it became increasingly difficult to defend him. For a man who had called Moroccans “purely predatory,” his own behavior now appeared in rather grotesque relief.
  • The more time I spent at the Schomburg Library uptown, the more I discovered an alternative American literature about Tangier. I stumbled upon Claude McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home about his time in Tangier in the late 1920s, where he completed his novel Banjo; the actress Anita Reynold’s diary about life in the Interzone in the 1930s; Josephine Baker’s papers, where she talks about filming Princess Tam Tam (1935) in the International Zone, and jazz recordings produced by African-American musicians living in Tangier. Although they had their own dreams about a “Mother Africa,” the African-American writers did not see Tangier as a brothel, or its residents as primitives who needed to be contained or civilized. Most wrote and produced art in solidarity with the disenfranchised local population, connecting the civil rights struggle to North Africa’s anticolonial movements.
  • In 1998, armed with this newfound knowledge, and as a conscious revision of my earlier guiding, I began giving walking tours of “Black Tangier.” We would would meet at Cinema Mauritania, the theater where Josephine Baker had performed many times, up until her last show there in 1970. She had lived in the International Zone, then joined the French Liberation forces during the war, and later had an affair with the vice-caliph of Spanish Morocco. On the first floor of the Mauritania, pianist Randy Weston had once operated African Rhythms, a music spot that drew the likes of Max Roach and Ahmed Jamal. Then we’d walk down to the Fat Black Pussycat café where the poet Ted Joans, one of few black writers in the Beat movement, played trumpet and “blew” jazz poems.
  • Next, we’d hit Galerie Delacroix, where Joans once hosted a four-hour tribute to his mentor Langston Hughes, and had the late poet’s verse read in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. (In 1927, Hughes had visited Tangier and written a lovely poem about travel and unrequited longing, “I Thought It was Tangiers I Wanted.”) Then we’d walk to the majestic Teatro Cervantes built in 1913, where Weston had organized the first pan-African jazz festival in Morocco in June 1972 (revived in 2002), which brought Dexter Gordon, Odetta, Billy Harper, and Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers to the city. Our last stop was the Hotel Chellah, where, as local legend had it, the Martinican anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon stayed overnight on July 3, 1959, following a car crash on the Morocco–Algeria border rumored to be the handiwork of La Main Rouge, the paramilitary group run by French intelligence to assassinate leading supporters of Algerian independence. Fanon was flown to Rome the following day on a Moroccan passport.
  • Paul Bowles and King Hassan II died in 1999, a few months apart. The novelist and the tyrant who had towered over Tangier for generations had more in common than either would have admitted—and that in part explains the reverence Bowles still enjoys in official Morocco
  • both shared a disdain for leftist, Third-Worldist politics. Both hated pan-Arabism, and loved Berber culture as long as it was “folkloric” and apolitical. They each thought Moroccans were congenitally ill-suited for democracy.
  • both Bowles and the monarch celebrated a “primitive,” mystical, unlettered, unfree Morocco, sharing a special appetite for the intoxicating rhythms of the Berbers. No wonder King Hassan II, who expelled numerous critics—from Arab intellectuals to French journalists and American professors—never bothered Bowles.
  • The Ministry of Culture, which almost blocked his recording project in 1959, published a remarkable essay in 2009 on the tenth anniversary of his death defending Bowles against criticism from Moroccan nationalist intellectuals, underscoring how he presciently warned of the threats that modernization posed to Morocco’s cultural and physical landscape. Government mouthpieces such as Hespress run flattering pieces about “the American who loved Morocco.”
  • The Morocco that Bowles dubbed a “land of magic” is one the Ministry of Tourism sells to the West
  • his emphasis on Morocco’s “African” essence suits the country’s recent geopolitical turn and reentry into the Africa Union
  • for all his misgivings about Western modernity, he thought Morocco as an African country would be better off attaching itself to the West. This is now the position of a significant segment of Morocco’s ruling elite.
  • That the regime celebrates Berber folklore and the oeuvre of a novelist who wanted an “independent Berber republic” even as it imprisons Berber activists across the country is evidence for many of the regime’s fraudulence and bad faith. In this respect, Bowles’s continuing eminence suggests how little has changed in the kingdom since the colonial era, with an authoritarian regime and repressive social order remaining largely intact.
  • As for Bowles’s work, I had come to realize that it reflected poorly on Morocco and America. Yes, he had brought attention to the suppression of Berber history and made invaluable musical recordings, but decolonization was supposed to dismantle colonial representations, and instead, the Moroccan regime was validating and institutionalizing Bowles’s depictions of Morocco
  • today, a new generation of Moroccan writers—among them secularists, Berber activists, music critics, and pan-Africanists—are claiming Bowles as an ally. And that is why I found myself writing about Bowles once more.
Ed Webb

Gay man in Morocco dies by suicide after being outed by trans influencer - 0 views

www.pinknews.co.uk/...-sofia-talouni-grindr-facebook

Morocco LGBT LGBTQ homophobia pandemics socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Gay men in Morocco have been living in terror for the past fortnight, after beauty influencer Naofal Moussa, also known as Sofia Talouni, instructed her hundreds of thousands of followers to use gay dating apps to identify them.
  • Moussa, whose verified Instagram account had 627,000 followers before it was deleted, used a series of Instagram Live videos to encourage straight women in Morocco to create fake accounts on Grindr and Planet Romeo.
  • gay dating apps were flooded with fake accounts and images of gay men’s profiles began circulating online. Homosexuality is illegal in Morocco and any form of same-sex intimacy – including kissing – is punishable by up to three years in prison. Violent homophobia is also rife.
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  • uman Rights Watch told LGBTQ Nation that it was looking into the situation. “The law inherently discriminates against LGBT+ people, so it can only be an incubator for this type of abuse,” said Ahmed Benchemsi of HRW. “Homophobic people feel empowered because the law is on their side.”
  • multiple gay men in Morocco told PinkNews that they were living in a state of absolute terror: watching as other gay men were outed on social media, beaten up by their families, kicked out of their homes, disappearing and, in several, unverified, cases, killing themselves as a result of being publicly outed. Now, tragically, reports of gay men dying by suicide in the Muslim-majority country have been confirmed.
  • “We took immediate action by sending a security message to all our 41,000 users in Morocco, we blocked all profiles created from the time this person addressed her users and contacted Facebook to have the group page taken offline.”
  • Images of gay men in Morocco are being shared in closed Facebook groups by women following Moussa’s instructions.
Ed Webb

The Ouarzazate Solar Plant in Morocco: Triumphal 'Green' Capitalism and the Privatizati... - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...-plant-in-morocco_triumphal-gr

Morocco energy environment neoliberalism globalization land water EU economy

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”
  • This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco.
  • What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.
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  • the acquisition of 3000 hectares of communally owned land to produce energy
  • "green grabbing"
  • the transfer of ownership, use rights and control over resources that were once publicly or privately owned –or not even the subject of ownership– from the poor (or everyone including the poor) into the hands of the powerful
  • This productivist creation of marginality and degradation has a long history that goes back to French colonial times. It was then that degradation narratives were constructed to justify both outright expropriation of land and the establishment of institutional arrangements based on the premise that extensive pastoralism was unproductive at best, and destructive at worst.
  • the discursive framework rendered it "marginal" and open to new "green" market uses: the production of solar power in this case at the expense of an alternative land use - pastoralism - that is deemed unproductive by the decision-makers. This is evident in the land sale that was carried out at a very low price.
  • various deceptive laws with colonial origins that have functioned to concentrate collective land ownership within the hands of an individual land representative, who tends to be under the influence of powerful regional nobles
  • meetings masquerading as a "consultation with the people" were only designed to inform the local communities about a fait accompli rather than seeking their approval
  • The land, sold at a cheap one Moroccan dirham per square meter was clearly worth a lot more. As if things were not bad enough, the duped local population were surprised to find out that the money from the sale was not going to be handed to them, but that it would be deposited into the tribe's account at the Ministry of Interior. Additionally, the money would be used to finance development projects for the whole area. They discovered that their land sale was not a sale at all: it was simply a transfer of funds from one government agency to another.
  • privatizations in the renewable energy sector are not new as of 2005, when a royal holding company called Nareva was created specifically to monopolize markets in the energy and environment sectors and ended up taking the lion's share in wind energy production in the country
  • he government had effectively privatized and confiscated historical popular sovereignty over land and transformed the people into mere recipients of development; development they are literally paying for, provided it would one day materialize, of course
  • There is no surprise regarding the international financial institutions' (IFIs) strong support for this high-cost and capital-intensive project, as Morocco boasts one of the most neoliberal(ized) economies in the region. It is extremely open to foreign capital at the expense of labor rights, and very advanced in its ambition to be fully integrated into the global marketplace (in a subordinate position, that is).
  • The World Bank’s disbursement levels to Morocco reached record levels in 2011 and 2012, with a major emphasis of these loans placed on promoting the use of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) within key sectors
  • It seems that production of energy from the sun will not be different and will be controlled by multinationals only interested in making huge profits at the expense of sovereignty and a decent life for Moroccans.
  • The idea that Morocco is taking out billions of dollars in loans to produce energy, some of which will be exported to Europe when the economic viability of the initiative is hardly assured, raises questions about externalizing the risk of Europe's renewable energy strategy to Morocco and other struggling economies around the region. It ignores entirely what has come to be called "climate debt" or "ecological debt" that is owed by the industrialised North to countries of the Global South, given the historical responsibility of the West in causing climate change
  • The biggest issue with this technology is the extensive use of water that comes with the wet cooling stage. Unlike photovoltaic (PV) technology, CSP needs cooling. This is done either by air cooled condensers (dry cooling) or high water-consumption (wet cooling). Phase I of the project will be using the wet cooling option and is estimated to consume from two to three million cubed meters of water annually (Kouz 2011). Water consumption will be much less in the case of a dry cooling (planned for phase II): between 0.73 and 0.88 million cubed meters. PV technologies require water only for cleaning solar panels. They consume about 200 times less water than CSP technology with wet cooling and forty times less water than CSP with dry cooling.
  • Even if the solar plant is only using one percent of the average dam capacity, the water consumption is still significant and can become a thorny problem at times of extreme drought when the dam contains only fifty-four million cubed meter. At such times, the dam waters will not be sufficient to cover the needs of irrigation and drinking water,  making the water usage for the solar plant deeply problematic and contentious.
  • in an arid region like Ouarzazate, this appropriation of water for a supposedly green agenda constitutes another green grab, which will play into and intensify ongoing agrarian dynamics and livelihood struggles in the region.
  • If the Moroccan state was really serious about its green credentials, why is it then building a coal-fired power plant at the same time, which represents an ecocide in-waiting for the already-polluted town of Safi? Why is it also ignoring the devastating environmental and social effects of the mining industry in the country? One notable example is the long-standing community struggle in Imider (140 kilometres east of Ouarzazate) against the royal holding silver mine (Africa's most productive silver mine), which is polluting their environment, grabbing their water, and pillaging their wealth.
Ed Webb

Seven in 10 young Moroccans want to migrate, NGO report - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...occans-want-migrate-ngo-report

economy Morocco migration

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Seven out of ten young Moroccans say they would be happier if they moved abroad, according to a study published by the National Human Development Observatory, a Moroccan organisation, in partnership with the UN's Development Programme (UNDP). 
  • Morocco the Arab country with the highest percentage of youth seeking to emigrate.
  • seven in ten Moroccans were reluctant to marry and start families
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  • Morocco is at the crossroads of one of the most circulated migration routes to Europe, and its coast guards regularly rescue migrants at sea.  Most of those risking this sea route are migrants from sub-Saharan Africa seeking to reach the European Union through Spain, which is only 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Morocco.
  • Moroccan authorities have repeatedly pledged to improve the conditions of young people in the country, but struggle to tackle high unemployment rates.
Ed Webb

The king's dilemma in Morocco | Politics | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...a-morocco-171101114729290.html

Morocco monarchy authoritarianism opinion institutions parties politics

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • On October 24, Morocco's King Mohammed VI sacked four ministers and barred five former ministers from ever taking official duties. The king's "wrath" comes as a rebuke for the government's poor performance and for "serious dysfunctions" in a five-year development plan launched by the king in 2015 to promote socio-economic development in the northern al-Hoceima region.
  • the sacking of government ministers is merely the latest example of the increasing royal emasculation of the political class, and an astute deflection from the palace's own responsibility in the current socio-political malaise in Morocco.
  • The monarchy's constant manipulation of the political party scene and civil society has removed the buffer between the royal institution and the people, and has exposed the palace to direct scrutiny
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  • the monarchy is not a passive actor in the Moroccan state edifice. It is well-entrenched in the system, and has for decades fostered a patronage system inimical to transparency and accountability, and conducive to venal practices, rampant in the Moroccan state and its institutions
  • The royal decision aims to deflect away from the palace's own shadow cabinet, which in fact holds most political and administrative power, and whose members are the architects of the Makhzen state and Morocco's neo-liberal policies. The kingdom may be, in the words of the sovereign, "enjoying economic dynamism which creates wealth," but that wealth has largely been concentrated in the orbit of the palace and its cronies. 
  • No government has had the effective political mandate to govern. This has weakened the political parties in Morocco, which for the most part suffer from a lack of mobilisation capacity. Elite consensus on the supremacy of the regime prevents political parties from directly challenging the king's power. The regime's ability to co-opt new bases of political appeal clutters the public sphere, making it less open to alternatives from opposition forces.   
  • the monarchy's constant control over the political sphere is ill-devised in the post-Arab uprisings, where the protests of February 20 and the current Hirak movement in Hoceima have somewhat demystified the monarchy
  • Street demands would have been absorbed by civil society and channelled through institutional mechanisms if the Makhzen, at the behest of the palace, hadn't impoverished the political scene and emasculated its most promising actors.
Ed Webb

Black Lives Matter skirts North Africa despite everyday racism - France 24 - 0 views

www.france24.com/...africa-despite-everyday-racism

race racism Africa Maghreb Algeria Tunisia Morocco minorities Libya xenophobia

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, most observers agree, has not triggered a major debate on racism or police violence against black Africans within the Maghreb region itself.Only Tunis saw a small demonstration in early June of around 200 locals and foreigners, at the call of the association Mnemty.The protest was "a message for African Americans from Mother Africa to say 'We are with you'," said its leader, Saadia Mosbah, a dark-skinned Tunisian.
  • a long-standing culture of silence about race.
  • In Morocco, a coalition of associations in 2014 launched an anti-racism campaign in support of sub-Saharan migrants with the message "Massmiytich Azzi!", literally, "Don't call me a black man".After a string of attacks in Tunisia, including a violent assault against an Ivorian woman, Mnemty successfully lobbied parliament into adopting a law against hate speech in October 2018.
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  • "We have to wage a permanent struggle against these verbal abuses," said Algerian sociologist Mohamed Saib Musette."Some Algerians forget that they themselves are Africans." Interracial marriages are rare in North Africa, he said, and "very few TV stars, civil servants or political leaders are dark-skinned".
  • And the Algerian parliament followed suit in April 2020, reflecting, according to Musette, the fact that the reality of racism "is there and must be fought".
  • Slavery was first formally abolished in the region by Tunisia in 1846. French-colonised Algeria partially followed suit two years later, while Morocco under French mandate only did so in 1922.
  • modern-day slave markets have been reported in war-torn Libya, where desperate migrants suffer horrific abuse at the hands of human traffickers
  • In the absence of official data, non-government groups estimate there are more than 200,000 African foreigners in Algeria, and tens of thousands in both Morocco and Tunisia.
  • Algeria and Tunisia bar foreign Africans from obtaining residency papers unless they are students.Only Morocco has exceptionally granted residency rights to some 50,000 people, mostly from West Africa, since 2014.
Ed Webb

Jadaliyya - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...ate-Violence-New-Texts-Out-Now

history memory Morocco Amazigh book

shared by Ed Webb on 28 May 23 - Cached
  • demands by civil society to establish the truth about state violence during the “Years of Lead,” which refer to the period between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the passing of King Hassan II in 1999. In the absence of accountability, history and historiography became a space where survivors of the Years of Lead found a sense of justice. 
  • I examine how “mnemonic literature,” which is the literature produced by younger generations of Muslim authors who did not live with the Jews when they were still in Morocco, has drawn on memory to reimagine Morocco with its Jews
  • issues related to Amazigh identity, Jewish emigration, and political imprisonment were simply censored
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  • the lack of archival sources compounded with self-censorship pushed many historians to focus on pre-colonial history
  • I define other-archives as texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited memories where stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the forgotten live in a ghostly state, ready to articulate historical loss even as they are situated outside the margins of what is considered canonical
  • I look at how other-archives are created through the work of the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM). MACM has not only advocated for the recognition of Imazighen’s cultural rights, but it also unearthed a different history of Tamazgha by resorting to memory and invented traditions, which have now transformed the public sphere in Morocco. When we see Tifinagh in public signage in Moroccan cities, what we see is an other-archive that evokes other possible histories.
  • Up until 2011, when Les Archives du Maroc was put in place to implement the ERC’s recommendations, Moroccan authorities showed no interest in creating an official archive. For sixty years, colonial and post-colonial documents of archival significance were either destroyed or left to decay. In some cases, civil servants did not know the importance of the archive and just destroyed it out of ignorance. The nationalist streak of the post-independence period must have also led some to destroy archives left by France out of this independence spirit.
  • how Tazmamart moved from being a taboo topic to becoming a transnational other-archive
  • research on cultural production and history in Morocco and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa)
  • the need to engage in interdisciplinary and multilingual scholarship by conversing with the fields of anthropology, literary studies, memory studies, archive studies, and historiography, among others, and using sources in Arabic, Tamazight, French, and English
  • The second book, which is provisionally entitled Saharan Imaginations: Saharanism and its Discontent, is a monograph about the ways deserts have been (mis)represented in a variety of media, specifically in literature, film, and political discourse. I look at issues of emptiness, death, fear, and impunity associated with deserts across cultures and I develop the concept of Saharanism to conceptualize why deserts are viewed in the way they are.
  • Moroccan historians dedicated a significant amount of time to the concept of tarikh al-zaman al-rahin (history of the present) to both open up their discipline to new methodologies and engage in unprecedented discussions about Morocco’s post-colonial history
Ed Webb

Debt is No Way For Non-Oil Arab States to Grow - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...or-non-oil-arab-states-to-grow

Egypt Jordan Tunisia Morocco economy investment FDI debt remittances integration regionalism analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 19 - Cached
  • many of the non-oil exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa are undergoing a process of redefinition of how they are linked with the global economy. It is not going well.
  • Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan are becoming more dependent on external borrowing than on foreign direct investments compared to the pre-2008 period. This is visible with declining ratios of FDIs to GDP, in contrast with increasing ratios of foreign debt to GDP and total exports
  • The relative political stabilization in all four countries as of 2014/2015 did not allow them much room for full-fledged recovery due to the global economic slowdown. This made it harder for all of them to achieve export-led growth and attract FDI, leaving them with foreign borrowing as the only viable option. Foreign debt accounts for much of the apparent recovery, as expressed in growth rates.
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  • The ratio of external debt to total exports of goods, services and primary incomes was even more dramatic for all four countries. This is a proxy of the capacity of these economies to service their growing external obligations. Between 2010 and 2017, the ratio increased from 75%, 99.6%, 97.6% and 125% for Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan re2spectively, to 190%, 178%, 125% and 198% in 2017. All the figures exceed the 77% limit that, in the World Bank’s reckoning, foreign debt has a negative impact on growth.
  • In Egypt, the ratio of external debt to GNI more than doubled from 17% in 2010 to 36% in 2017. The change was as pronounced in Tunisia, were the ratio jumped from 54% to 83%. In Morocco and Jordan, the ratios changed as well from 65% and 29.6%, to 47% and 75%.
  • International capital markets are unstable and global trade is contracting. Governments should instead target local investment in brick-and-mortar sectors that can deliver real growth, create jobs and possibly reduce the dependency on some imports
  • better use of the net inflows of capital they have received for years in the form of remittances. Instead of channeling them into non-tradable sectors like real-estate, as has been often the case, they should be used to finance investment in more productive sectors
  • trade-oriented regional integration, opening markets in oil-rich countries. There might be room also for adding a regional dimension to plans for industrial diversification by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, by coordinating flows of investment and technology and skill transfers in sectors like petrochemicals and hi-tech services.  Such measures would generate growth and employment for poorer allies and cement regional geopolitical arrangements
Ed Webb

Coronavirus: Pandemic unites Maghreb leaders in crackdown on dissent | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...avirus-algeria-morocco-tunisia

Algeria Morocco Tunisia expression freedom repression pandemics press media

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 20 - Cached
  • Before the pandemic spread, a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa had been experiencing a wave of public protests for more democratic and accountable rule akin to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. "The crackdown started several months before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the emergency laws and extrajudicial tools regimes are employing under the guise of the pandemic," Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Middle East Program. 
  • "Regimes across North Africa are exploiting the pandemic to crackdown on activists, journalists, and anyone critical of the regime, particularly those using social media."
  • In Algeria, with the popular anti-government protest movement known as the Hirak put on hold for safety reasons since March, the repressive climate, arguably the worst in North Africa, has worsened with the continued arrests of journalists and activists, which has been a maintained pattern since President Abdelmadjid Tebboune took office in December.
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  • The increased repression, coupled with persistent concerns over the government's incapacity to handle the pandemic, and plummeting oil prices that spell disaster for Algeria's economy, are all contributing factors to a tension threatening to boil over onto the streets, pandemic or not. 
  • "We work in fear," an Algerian filmmaker who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity said. "People aren't only afraid for their safety, but also for their families' safety, as you never know how things can escalate with this Kafkaesque judicial system.
  • "Algeria is the country where, more than any other in the Middle East, authorities have exploited the pandemic to neutralise active opposition to its rule," Eric Goldstein, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, told MEE.
  • "President Tebboune took office saying he had heard the Hirak's calls for reform and promised a new constitution. "Instead, he exploited the Covid-19 lockdown to try to put the Hirak genie back in the bottle, while proposing a draft constitution that does little to advance political and civil rights."
  • Reporters without Borders has ranked Algeria 146 out of 180 countries and territories in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index - five places lower than in 2019. 
  • Many journalists and activists face campaigns of disparate accusations and slander, and anyone using the internet to voice dissent against the monarchy and ruling elite faces possible prison time. 
  • Some 16 Moroccans have been arrested on similar charges as Radi since October, including famous rapper Gnawi, YouTubers, as well as several high school students.
  • Last month, a Tunisian woman was sentenced to six months in jail after sharing a Facebook post about the coronavirus written as a Quranic verse. The post mimicked the style of the Quran in reference to Covid-19, encouraging people to wash their hands and observe social distancing.
  • Moroccans continue to advocate under the #FreeKoulchi ("Free everything") campaign for the release of all those imprisoned.
  • Despite adopting some reforms since 2011, citizens are offered little political power under King Mohammed VI, who this year has entered his third decade heading the kingdom. Like much of North Africa as a whole, unemployment levels are high, political corruption and abuses of police power are widespread, and social services are lacking. 
  • According to the Arab Barometer,  a central resource for quantitative research on the Middle East, 70 percent of Moroccans aged 18-29 have thought about emigrating, a strongly held sentiment shared by both Algerians and Tunisians, whose migration to Europe has increased significantly this year. 
  • Since Morocco's Hirak protest movement erupted in 2016, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights has documented more than 1,000 cases of political detention.
  • he consolidation of the prime minister's power in Tunisia, high levels of corruption, security and economic challenges along with political stagnation, are all factors that have helped to scupper Tunisia's democratic consolidation.
  • Though the best performing out of the Maghreb countries, Tunisia still has much room for improvement when it comes to freedom of expression. Despite the steps taken, journalists still face pressure and intimidation from government officials, and reporters covering the operations of security forces often face harassment or arrest.
  • In terms of the pandemic, unlike in Morocco and neighbouring Algeria in particular, the majority of Tunisians have expressed trust in their government - with 71.2 percent trusting the government to control the virus, and 84.5 percent trusting it to communicate effectively with the public, according to the Sigma Conseil. 
  • "The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stress test for authoritarian and democratic governments alike,"
  • The social, economic, and security effects of the pandemic are likely to divert attention away from needed long-term reforms, the political agency of civil society, and risk the permanence of authoritarianism that mirrors Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after the worst of the pandemic has gone.  
Sherry Lowrance

Dissipating Dissent: Morocco's Stabilizing Spatial Tactics - 1 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...moroccos-stabilizing-spatial-t

Morocco protest authoritarianism

shared by Sherry Lowrance on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The inquiry at hand focuses on larger narratives that have managed to discourage uprisings from happening in the first place. It focuses on aspects of the country's spatiality that are usually accorded little attention - large, pervasive, and enveloping initiatives that are seen to improve the old and bring about the new - aspects which are often overlooked either because they are thought of in positive terms, even by local Moroccans, or because they are so gargantuan in scale, literally spanning the entire country in some instances, that academic analysis often finds it difficult to relate them to more localized and isolated events. It is the ambition here to at least shed some light on these larger, perhaps banal, aspects of Morocco’s physical environment, where, upon examination, the state's spatial tactics are found to be most evident and most effective
  • The inquiry at hand focuses on larger narratives that have managed to discourage uprisings from happening in the first place. It focuses on aspects of the country's spatiality that are usually accorded little attention - large, pervasive, and enveloping initiatives that are seen to improve the old and bring about the new - aspects which are often overlooked either because they are thought of in positive terms, even by local Moroccans, or because they are so gargantuan in scale, literally spanning the entire country in some instances, that academic analysis often finds it difficult to relate them to more localized and isolated events. It is the ambition here to at least shed some light on these larger, perhaps banal, aspects of Morocco’s physical environment, where, upon examination, the state's spatial tactics are found to be most evident and most effective
  • This perceived link is capitalized upon by the Moroccan monarchy; it employs, in sync with the country’s landscape of indigenous architecture, an elaborate system of state rituals and ceremonies, traditional fashion choices, titles and honors, among other strategies, all in order to preserve a constructed image in which the monarchy is not only inseparable from the nation’s Islamic heritage, but also from the very historical foundations of Morocco
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  • The monarchy’s role as both the custodian and ultimate arbiter of tradition in Morocco lends it not only renewed legitimacy, but it also bestows it with the impression of permanence, much like the architecture it rigorously preserves.
Ed Webb

Morocco's protesters show no sign of letting up. Will their movement spread? - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-up-will-their-movement-spread

Morocco Amazigh protests politics corruption secession

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • The protests started on October 2016 after a 31-year-old Moroccan fisherman was killed trying to stop local policemen from confiscating his goods. The gruesome death of the young man, who was crushed in the back of a garbage truck as he was trying to stop the destruction of his merchandise, resonated strongly with the inhabitants of the Rif region, a mountainous and traditionally neglected part of northern Morocco. Centered in small cities with high unemployment rates, protesters mobilized through social media and took to the streets to express a wide range of demands, ranging from social and economic rights to cultural and political ones.
  • Before his arrest by the authorities earlier this week, Zefzafi’s speeches drew tens of thousands of supporters from all over the region, many of whom are plagued by unemployment and the absence of economic opportunities and are upset by the succession of scandals involving associates of the regime who cannibalize all important business opportunities and state investments. For instance, most provisions of an ambitious five-year investment plan launched by the Moroccan king in 2015 with a budget of $600 million have not been implemented or, when initiated, have been dominated by associates of the regime who captured the lucrative aspects of the project and failed to deliver the promised economic and social results to the population.
  • while the grievances expressed by Zefzafi and his followers are also shared outside the Berber-speaking Rif region, particularly in relation to the need to put an end to corruption and the predatory practices of local crony capitalists, the demonstrations of the Hirak movement are thus far unable to take a national dimension
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  • overt ethnic nature of the Hirak protest
  • The Moroccan government was quick to take advantage of the inexperience of Zefazafi and painted the movement as a secessionist security threat controlled by neighboring Algeria. The discourse of pro- and anti-regime advocates is reflective of this dynamic. While online activists dismiss pro-regime voices as “slaves (to the monarchy),” the latter describe the protesters as a racist ethnic separatist group funded by foreign hostile interests.
Ed Webb

Jordan, Facing Royal Crisis, Is a Banana Monarchy Falling Apart on America's Watch - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-hashemites-us-banana-monarchy

USA US monarchy Jordan opinion analysis military diplomacy aid USAID

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Apr 21 - Cached
  • While some allege a real conspiracy tied to Saudi meddling, most analysts believe that the entire affair was a manufactured crisis designed to distract a public enraged about the ruling monarchy’s worsening mismanagement over the past decade. The pandemic made the already-stagnant economy worse, spiking unemployment from 15 to 25 percent and raising the poverty rate from 16 to a staggering 37 percent. Fruitless promises of democratic reform from Abdullah have led nowhere. With tribal activists regularly criticizing the king—the ultimate act of transgression—the monarchy is responding not with better policies and more transparency, but by doubling down with heightened repression.
  • Like all autocracies, Jordan has little tolerance for popular opposition. Moreover, most of the Arab monarchies suffer from dynastic infighting. Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Bahrain have all seen powerful hard-liners muffle dissident princes over the last decade. Kuwait’s Sabah monarchy has been rocked by coup conspiracies and succession disputes
  • It has surrendered much of its sovereignty with a new defense treaty—inked in January without the Jordanian public’s knowledge—giving the U.S. military such untrammeled operational rights that the entire kingdom is now cleared to become a giant U.S. base.
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  • History shows that when sponsoring a client dictatorship becomes a sacred pillar of Washington’s foreign policy, client rulers become extremely dependent upon U.S. support, prioritizing their relationship with Washington over their own people. In Jordan’s case, the government has preserved U.S. dominance in the Middle East and protected Israel while neglecting Jordanians’ own woes.
  • Policymakers fear that reducing any part of their support will destabilize their client state, which could not survive without it. The only option is to perpetuate the current system, even though that regime’s own policies are clearly destabilizing it.
  • Jordan’s transformation into a U.S. dependency began during the Cold War. Washington replaced the fading British in the late 1950s as its great protector, a logical move given the need to back anti-Soviet regimes everywhere. Jordan had no oil. However, so long as Jordan endured, it could be a geopolitical firebreak insulating Israel and the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula from the radical forces of communism and Arab nationalism.
  • Washington helped build the Jordanian state. Foreign aid was one mechanism. In many years, U.S. economic aid exceeded all domestic tax revenues, the only thing keeping “Fortress Jordan” from collapsing into insolvency. While Jordan today receives support from many donors, including the International Monetary Fund, U.S. economic support remains uniquely fungible: It comes mostly in cash, it is guaranteed, and it now exceeds $1 billion annually.
  • the U.S. Agency for International Development began designing and operating much of Jordan’s physical infrastructure in the 1960s, doing the basic task of governance—providing public goods to society—for the monarchy. When Jordanians get water from the tap, no small feat in the bone-dry country, it is because of USAID. Even the Aqaba Special Economic Zone, a mega-project aimed at turning the Red Sea port city of Aqaba into a regional commercial hub, was funded and designed by U.S. technocrats.
  • The General Intelligence Directorate, glorified by Western journalists as an Arab version of Mossad, spends as much time smothering Jordanian dissent as battling terrorism. It owes much of its skills and resources to the CIA.
  • Of course, being a U.S. protectorate brings occasional costs. Dependency upon Washington’s goodwill, for instance, gave Abdullah little room to halt the Trump administration’s “deal of the century.” That provocative plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma incensed Abdullah, as it favored Israel’s land claims while sidelining Jordan’s traditional front-line role as mediator to the conflict.
  • Washington cannot imagine any other kind of Jordan, because it never had to. It may yet learn the hard way.
  • The Middle East remains a revolutionary place, as six of its autocratic rulers have lost power to mass uprisings in the last decade. Whether Jordan is next depends upon if the monarchy can fundamentally rethink its approach, rather than fall back upon the United States for affirmation.
Ed Webb

Morocco: Rapper gets one-year jail for insulting police | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ng-police-191125194717788.html

Morocco censorship rap music protest politics authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - Cached
  • A Moroccan court on Monday sentenced rapper Mohamed Mounir, known as Gnawi, to one year in jail for insulting police on social media.
  • The song, Aach al Chaab - which translates to "long live the people" - has been viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube since it was released last month.
  • rages against the authorities and criticises the country's widening economic gap, a message aimed at the disillusioned younger generation
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  • One passage of the song reflects on the Hirak protest movement in Morocco's impoverished Rif mountain region.
  • Most shockingly to many Moroccans, the song also directly criticises Morocco's king and his adviser, a criminal offence.
  • Young people make up one-third of Morocco's 35 million population. A quarter of those aged between 15 and 24 are unemployed and out of school, according to official figures.
Ed Webb

Will Tunisia, Algeria relations recover through land border reopening? - Al-Monitor: In... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...-through-land-border-reopening

Algeria Tunisia Morocco WesternSahara polisario Israel diplomacy energy economy democracy authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jul 22 - Cached
  • Tebboune announced that land borders between the two countries would reopen July 15. The announcement represented a breakthrough in the silent crisis between the two countries as the closure of the land borders has heavily affected Tunisia in particular.
  • disputes between the two countries have pushed Algeria to pressure Tunisia on several issues, including in delaying the reopening of the border.  Among the files that may have contributed to the silent tensions is Tunisia's position on the Western Sahara dispute pitting Morocco against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.
  • Tunisia has in the past tried to distance itself from the Western Sahara conflict, amid reports of Algeria’s attempts, in vain, to lure Tunisia to its side.
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  • on May 26 Tebboune stated from the Italian capital, Rome, that Tunisia is facing a political impasse and needs support in reinstating democracy
  • Tunisia has valid concerns about Algeria raising gas prices in light of the global energy crisis.
  • Algeria sells gas to Tunisia at preferential prices, and the latter earns a right of passage of 5.25% on the total of Algeria gas transported through Tunisian territory to Italy.
  • Algeria has expressed concerns over potential Tunisian normalization with Israel despite the fact that Saied had stated during his electoral campaign in 2019 that “normalization with Israel is tantamount to treason.”
  • Taboubi leads the UGTT, a historically strong and popular union in Tunisia with more than 1 million workers. In an explicit reference to Morocco's normalization with Israel, Taboubi said in his June statements that a campaign to push Arab normalization with Israel aims to pressure Algeria, which leads a campaign to boycott Tel Aviv in the North African region.
  • Although the opening of the land borders appears to be an indication of the beginning of the recovery of Tunisian-Algerian relations, other measures will need to be in place to guarantee this recovery
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