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Belonging to and longing for the village: how the earthquake in Morocco reveals the importance of the homeland in shaping diaspora identity

By ISS Blog Bliss 24 October 202325 December 2024 1743 views

What happens when a country gets hit by an unexpected, highly damaging earthquake? How does the aid this country receives afterwards look like when it has a diaspora community of more than one million people? And how does a tragic event such as an earthquake affect those million people and their diaspora identity? While diaspora identity is often defined by referring to the country of origin, in this article Malika Ouacha discusses how the earthquake in Morocco affected her and led her to foster a deeper understanding of her identity as member of the Moroccan diaspora.

As I was preparing myself for another day of Family Constellation theory, I heard my husband scream from the living room: “What? An earthquake last night in Marrakech on the scale of 6.8 Richter?!” I didn’t really understand what he meant. “An earthquake? This heavy? But that has never happened before in our region,” I was thinking. At the same time, I remembered that there had been one in 1960 in Agadir, a city some 250 kilometres to the south of Marrakech.

The longer Nicolaas, my husband, continued to read the news article out loud, the more I understood that the news was real, that it really had happened. And that I had to start searching for my phone and call as many people as possible to find out whether they were safe. After trying several times and not being able to reach them, we decided to wait a bit longer. In the following hours, friends and relatives confirmed their safety, but they had a hard time describing what had happened. It was scary, unreal, and immensely tragic. Lives were lost, but initially, no-one knew how many. Thoughts started mulling through my head, and I found myself asking: How do you grieve such an event when you have just recovered from a pandemic which your country [Morocco in my case] barely survived?

Although I feel like I found my home in both two countries, I was fascinated by the instant feeling I experienced right after the news reached us. I live my life miles away, and so do many other diasporans, yet I felt that the affected people’s need for shelter and protection was my own need for a second or two.

Does this mean that one of the two countries is more important? Or that I am emotionally more attached to one compared to the other? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t want to experience a natural disaster to find out. Therefore, I continued trying to go about life as usual that day, and in the days that followed, while also trying to process what had happened and what this could mean for the future. All the while, I kept having a feeling deep down that nothing would be the same after an earthquake like this one. Because although I was born and raised in Europe and only lived in Marrakech and the High Atlas Mountains for a few years, the annual return of my family and myself to the village we hail from each summer during my childhood and early adulthood resulted in a feeling of everlasting belonging to this specific region.

It made sense to me to respect my parents’ rules to speak only Tachelhiyt, the South-Moroccan language, in our household, even though we lived in the Netherlands, so we could return to the village safely every summer, knowing that my siblings and I spoke the language of the village. I could independently have conversations with my grandparents and cousins, walk to my uncle Mohamed alone, and talk to people on the streets.

My parents were assured of my safety in the village because I could ask a stranger on the street to assist me if I needed help. I could do this in the Netherlands, too, but I always sensed that my parents felt that my siblings and I were safer in the village in the Atlas Mountains, more protected. It seemed as if, even fifty years after having moved, the Netherlands kept feeling like a temporary place of residence to them. They never called it home like I did, although the two places both always felt like home to me.

Diaspora identity: how far is too close?

This lack of a sense of belonging in the Netherlands and the corresponding sense of still belonging in Morocco, which is how many diasporans still feel, is the reason why the earthquake affected more than just properties, workplaces, and human lives that were lost — it also affected diaspora identity despite the distance between those countries we were born and raised in and those countries we originate from. The earthquake made me ask whether we, as Moroccan diaspora, still belong there and whether our roots affect our lives here in Europe.

This left me to question whether our understanding of diaspora identity has really hit the core of both the phenomenon and the theoretical concept. Or if we still hover above its official definitions in academic and political debates. Is it truly just ethnicity and cultural norms and values? Or is it the combination of these three concepts, and our sentiments, our individual emotional household, and the way we view and experience the homeland? I tend to lean towards the latter conclusion given my reflections and analysis of the recent earthquake in Morocco and Turkey earlier this year.

Do we need saving from a permanent saviour?

I’m still reading one after the other request for donations from people who ask for money, food supplies, tents, and other things needed to survive. Yet, a long-term plan from the authorities remained absent until September 14^th, when King Mohamed VI, Morocco’s current ruler, according to MAP donated USD 100 million to implement a long-term resettlement plan to rebuild the homes and lives of the victims of the earthquake. Where victims will be relocated to remains unclear, but affected friends and relatives spoke of the king’s act as a “a ray of sunshine during a heavy thunderstorm”.

In a country where the king has the last word in every decision needing to be made, this gesture signifies the presence of the government in a way that the region has never seen, as South Morocco has been and continues to be one of the least developed regions in its entire kingdom. I sensed an unexpected feeling of relief, although I saw many volunteers and philanthropists devote their time and means to the victims much earlier than the king did.

So perhaps the king’s ruling superseded the efforts of international NGOs and other non-profit organizations who were helping the affected people with their best intentions but within their own terms. And perhaps he therefore embodies a permanent saviour, as the king remains the king whose moral responsibility it is to look out after its own citizens. Maybe a permanent saviour saves this part of my identity, too, and therefore that of a diaspora as a collective, as the country is left in better hands now that a long-term plan has been demonstrated. Or maybe he saves, the least to say, only the memory of a country we once knew and still hold on to. Even if it is just in our nostalgic minds.

This could mean that the place my parents call home is left in better hands, and therefore a part of me, too, as it is a place close to my heart where I spent fruitful years in my early twenties and studied anthropology, volunteered at an orphanage, and did my first real ethnographic fieldwork after my graduation. A place where my late parents, grandparents, and ancestors were finally laid to rest, where close friends and relatives have their homes, where they enjoy their workplaces in the (finally post-pandemic) popular touristic medina and the ancient kasbah, and where we continue to meet several times a year. A place where I showed my Dutch husband the forever solid foundation of my Moroccan values and norms, which no lifetime outside of South Morocco could ever suppress.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Malika Ouacha is a Lecturer & Researcher at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, the Netherlands.

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Power to the People? The Right to Information Law in Morocco

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 October 202019 January 2025 4289 views

Morocco’s recently enacted Right to Information Law is a potentially powerful tool in the hands of its citizens, but their ability to use it is still largely dependent on the government’s commitment to transparency and political will to enforce it.

With the ratification of the Right to Information Law (31.13) in February 2018, Morocco has officially joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP).¹ This is a major step for the monarchy as it vows to commit to the four key principles of the OGP: public access to information, asset declarations by public officials, fiscal transparency, and citizen participation. On March 12, 2020, Law 31.13 came into force two years after its promulgation. According to the new law—and pursuant to Article 27 of the 2011 constitution—citizens have the right to request information held by the public administration, elected institutions, and public service provision organizations. Whereas the Right to Information Law promises to promote transparency and responsiveness as well as to restore public trust in state institutions, it is still unclear as to how it will benefit disadvantaged groups in marginalized regions and improve local governance. Law 31.13 has the potential to improve the quality of public services and empower citizens, but there are also major obstacles and gaps that require immediate attention—including the lack of political commitment to transparency, the prevailing institutional culture of retaining information, and, most importantly, the increasing closure of the civic space and crackdown on opposing voices.

Discussions on a Right to Information Law were initiated as early as 2007, following Morocco’s ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption (Resolution 58/4). However, it was not until the Arab uprisings and the February 20^th movement when government officials and civil society actors embarked on an initiative to promote accountable, responsive, and inclusive governance.² As a result, Article 27 was drafted and included in the 2011 amended constitution, and, therefore, access to information became a fundamental right to all citizens and legal residents of Morocco. A specialized commission composed of members of ministerial departments, government agencies, private sector companies, and civil society organizations was later established to work out the details of the law. Law 31.13 was the product of these collective efforts. It was ratified in February 2018 after years of debate and legislative battles. The law was originally scheduled to come into effect a year after its publication in the official gazette in March 2019. However, Law 31.13 was only officially enacted in March 2020, following a one-year delay due to logistical hiccups and implementation-related issues.

In a nutshell, Law 31.13 grants citizens the right to access information retained by government entities. Individuals can submit a free application to the relevant institution and request information on items such as laws, data, and reports. However, there are exceptions that apply to the type of information requested, such as those relating to homeland security and citizens’ private data. The law, under Article 29, also outlines penalties for citizens’ misuse of the requested information. Government agencies must respond to requests within twenty working days of their receipt. In some urgent cases (e.g. protection of lives or public safety), information must be provided within three days. Information officers’ failure to respond to requests is penalized under Article 19 of the law.³ Consequently, the implementation of law 31.13 relies on two main pillars: the appointment of well-trained civil servants who can adequately respond to public requests for information, as well as the proactive and timely publication of data that is accessible to the public.

Law 31.13 has the potential to be an effective tool for empowering citizens, especially those in marginalized regions, such as those in the rural margins of the monarchy. Most of these regions have witnessed intense popular unrest over the past few years, as citizens demand improved availability of basic services, such as healthcare, electricity and clean drinking water. The recent regionalization reforms introduced in Morocco’s 2011 constitution⁴ and the ensuing Organic Laws⁵ provided a significant boost toward strengthening the role of local governance and citizen participation in the decisionmaking process. However, the realization of these goals was unlikely without citizen access to relevant information. The municipal councils are now obliged to comply with Law 31.13, which will enable citizens to scrutinize their local representatives and hold them accountable. Karim El Hajjaji, co-founder of Tafra Association⁶, says “So far, it is extremely difficult to know what the communes [municipalities] are doing with the public resources they have in hand. Law 31.13 makes it mandatory to publish not only their budgets, but their public procurement calls and processes, spending programs, and all information related to local governance.”⁷

Thus far, the diminished availability of financial resources and qualified human capital are often cited as the biggest obstacles toward the successful implementation of the law. But in practice, altering societal and institutional culture is the real challenge. The law requires the Moroccan territorial collectivities (regions and municipalities) to nominate new information officers tasked with responding to citizens’ requests. These territorial collectivities are generally showing willingness to engage and are sending their newly nominated information officers to trainings. However, Ahmed Jazouli, a Moroccan policy expert involved in the training programs of civil service agents, maintains, “The main obstacle is the culture of retaining information by civil servants. They should be trained on releasing information and on the proactive publication of data. It is essential to focus on changing the dominant culture among public servants.”⁸

Apart from changing bureaucratic culture, it is key to foster a political culture of transparency, which is currently lacking. Most public institutions still hold back information that may show evidence of mismanagement or misuse of public resources to avoid legal scrutiny. According to the new law, it is mandatory for municipalities to make their financial data and development plans available online, yet few municipal budgets are currently accessible online. For instance, the city council of Casablanca has made significant efforts to promote dematerialized services and to keep its website updated. This example stands in contrast to other major well-endowed cities such as Rabat, which currently lacks a website. According to Karim El Hajjaji, “It is definitely not a matter of financial resources, but rather of political will.”⁹

Far-reaching campaigns are also crucial for raising public awareness of the law and its impact on their everyday lives. The law offers an opportunity, but it is up to citizens to exercise their rights to ensure equitable service delivery policies. Civil society organizations have a strong role to play in this regard. For example, Transparency Maroc, together with several national and international partners, organized a group of civil society organizations to lobby for a transparent and participatory budget. Similarly, referring to the Right to Information Law, Transparency Maroc is demanding more consistent information about the special COVID-19 fund, which was set up by the Moroccan government in March 2020 to compensate those who lost income due to the lockdowns.¹⁰ Indeed, the government’s management of this fund—which supports over five million households—has received widespread criticism from activists and NGOs. Oxfam Maroc, for example, is advocating for the fund to come under parliamentary oversight and be subject to checks by the Court of Audit. Others, including Tafra, called on the government to disclose the data used to develop the scenarios for the evolution of the pandemic in Morocco. However, the Haut Commissariat au Plan refused to do so, citing personal data protection constraints. This means that researchers and experts–such as those at Tafra–are not able to quality check the scenarios put forth by the government and thus cannot be part of the decisionmaking process in terms of lockdown policy and how the special fund is spent.

Finally, the potential of the Right to Information Law cannot be assessed without taking into account the closing civic space, including the restriction of media freedom in Morocco. More recently, the government used the COVID-19 crisis to pass a new emergency law, No. 2.220.292, declaring a health emergency and setting penalties of a up to three-month prison sentence and a fine of up to 1,300 Dirham (around 134 USD), for anyone breaching “orders and decisions taken by public authorities” or for anyone “obstructing” through “writings, publications or photos” of those decisions. Apart from prosecuting more than 90,000 people for breaking the law and other crimes, authorities have used it to prosecute several human rights activists and citizen journalists, accusing them of “incitement to violate the authorities’ decisions during the health emergency,” when in fact they criticized the “cronyism” and unequal distribution of aid by local authorities during the COVID-19 crisis.

The continued crackdown on journalists and opposing voices stands in stark contrast to the government’s recent efforts aimed at increasing citizens’ trust in the government and responding to calls for transparency. Such trust is arguably a pre-condition for citizens to invoke the law and make use of its provisions. In the meantime, disenchanted citizens would rather mobilize collectively and in the streets of major cities, as in May 2020, when protestors gathered to contest their exclusion from the COVID-19 fund. In short, while the Right to Information Law is a potentially powerful tool in the hands of citizens and civil society organizations, its application and enforcement largely relies on the government’s political will and commitment to genuine reforms.

This research is part of a larger project on the dynamics of decentralization in the MENA region. The project is generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

This blog article was first published here by the Sada Journal.

About the authors:

Marwa Shalaby is an assistant professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses primarily on the intersection of the politics of authoritarianism, and women in politics. Follow her on Twitter @MarwaShalaby12.

Sylvia Bergh is an associate professor in development management and governance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, and a senior researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Global Governance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Her current research focuses on social accountability initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa region.

¹ Seventy-eight countries and a growing number of local governments—representing more than two billion people—along with thousands of civil society organizations are members of the Open Government Partnership.

²A recent report by the OECD points out that most MENA countries lacked access to information laws prior to the Arab uprisings. In the few MENA cases that promulgated such laws before the uprisings, many provisions penalized the sharing and communication of information without prior authorization by the relevant authorities.

³ The law states that officials who fail to provide citizens/legal residents with requested information will be subject to disciplinary actions, however, the specifics of such penalties remain unclear.

⁴ According to Article 1 of the 2011 amended constitution, “the territorial organization of Morocco is decentralized, and based on an advanced degree of regionalization.”

⁵ OL #113.14 outlines the authorities and responsibilities of the different local governance units (i.e., regions/provinces/municipalities) and it puts in place participatory mechanisms for citizens (Article 119).

⁶ Tafra Association is a research center in Rabat whose mission is to improve the understanding of Moroccan institutions to participate in the consolidation of the rule of law in Morocco.

⁷ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

⁸ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

⁹ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

¹⁰ Getting access to this fund is even more important given the fact that 46 percent of the active population has no health insurance and 4.3 million households are employed in the informal sector without social security benefits.

Development Dialogue 2018 | Morocco’s ‘ninjas’: The hidden figures of agricultural growth by Lisa Bossenbroek and Margreet Zwarteveen

By ISS Blog Bliss 6 December 201818 May 2020 2712 views

In Morocco’s Saïss region an agricultural boom is unfolding, premised on a process of labour hierarchisation shaped along gender lines. Female wageworkers find themselves at the lowest strata and take little pride in their work and are stigmatised. In such a context, how are rural women able to engage in agricultural wage work without losing their dignity and without being stigmatised? What can we learn from their daily working experiences?

“NINJAS” FEMALE WAGEWORKERS

While driving through Morocco’s agricultural plain of the Saïss in the early morning, the roads are crowded with vans and pickups that are packed with workers, the majority of whom are women. The way in which these women are dressed has earned them the nickname of ‘ninjas’: they have wrapped thick scarves around their faces, barely showing their eyes (see Picture 1). This outfit is symptomatic of their paradoxical situation: although they are indispensable for realizing Morocco’s ambitious agricultural modernization plans, their contributions tend to go or are made invisible, also by themselves. Female labourers may say that their dress is meant to protect themselves from the sun—“because we do not want to become black”—as well as from dust and pesticides. Yet, in addition to these practical considerations, many also admitted that their scarves conveniently serve the purpose of hiding their faces, allowing them to remain invisible and “anonymous”.

THE EMERGENCE OF A GENDERED LABOUR HIERARCHY

Their experiences are embedded in a new hierarchical labour order that is currently emerging (Bossenbroek 2016). Whereas most male labourers whom we interviewed take some pride in their work as they often get the better-paid jobs and could use it to model and perform a particular modern rural masculine identity, women find themselves at the lowest strata of this hierarchy. This newly emerging gendered labour hierarchy is grounded in, reproduces, but also slightly alters prevailing normative notions of femininity and masculinity in the study area. These prevailing norms divide various activities between the genders, while also narrowly circumscribing what is appropriate behaviour for men and women. Men are expected to be or become the breadwinner of the household, responsible for maintaining their families. A father, or husband, who falls short of financially supporting his wife or family is not well perceived in the society. In this regard, a woman working for wages automatically raises questions about her husband’s (if she has one) ability to provide. During various interviews, women stated for example that “a husband who accepts to let his wife work outside, is not a real man and can expect trouble”, or as a young unmarried female wageworker once said when asking about her future husband: “It does not matter what kind of work he does. It is more important that he actually has a job.”

Prevailing feminine socio-cultural gendered norms further circumscribe the various activities and identities of female wageworkers. This makes it difficult for rural women who engage in wage work to combine their remunerative activities with the identity of being a virtuous rural woman. Although women often engage in farm work, they take little pride in their activities as rural female identities rather rest on domestic tasks. They are in charge of the good functioning of their household and for raising the children. Their mobility is restricted and closely watched and controlled (see also Belarbi 1995). In addition, the activities rural women engage in as well as their mobility are deeply entangled with notions of honour and shame. These notions guide interactions in certain social contexts, specifically in public interactions between non-intimates (Abou-Lughod 1985, p. 247).

Such normative gender identities and norms are importantly (re-)produced and reinforced by gossip and rumours that circulate. There are for instance many negative stories about women working for wages in the agricultural sector. Male farmers and foremen may refer to female wageworkers as single young women with illicit behaviour, or as women “who make the farmer lose his mind”.

Hence, in order to continue with their wage work activities without losing their image of a respectable woman, female wageworkers develop different tactics. They for instance actively hide the fact that they work and perform as a good housewife in charge of her household, or present their work as a logical extension of their role as mother, as one female mother worker stated: “I have to work in order to keep my children out of the misery and provide them with a better future”. In the meantime, they fulfil the role of female breadwinner and trespass on the public domain, considered masculine, on a daily basis. In doing so, they negate on a daily basis hegemonic definitions of womanhood and come to explore new concepts of self, female status, and human worth (see Ong 1991).

References:

Abou-Lughod, L. (1985) ‘Honor and sentiment of loss in Bedouin society’, American Ethnologist 12 (2): 245 – 261.

Belarbi, A. (Eds.) (1995) Femmes rurales. Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec.

Bossenbroek, L. 2016. ‘Behind the veil of agricultural modernization: Gendered dynamics of rural change in the Saïss, Morocco’. PhD Dissertation Wageningen University.

Ong, A. (1991) ‘The gender and labor politics of postmodernity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 20 : 279 – 309.

This blog article is part of a series related to the Development Dialogue 2018 Conference that was recently held at the ISS. Other articles forming part of the series can be read here, here and here

About the authors:

Lisa Bossenbroek obtained her PhD in 2016 with the rural sociology group at the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). As part of her research she studied the role of young people in agrarian dynamics and the interactions of processes of agrarian change and gender relations. Currently, she works as a post-doc at the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social Sciences (EGE–RABAT), Morocco.

Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance Education with the Integrated Water Systems and Governance Department at IHE Delft Institute for Water, and with the Governance and Inclusive Development group, University of Amsterdam. She is concerned both with looking at actual water distribution practices and with analysing the different ways in which water distributions can be regulated (through technologies, markets and institutions), justified (decision-making procedures) and understood (expertise and knowledge).