The Rif, a rural, mountainous region in Northern Morocco, has historically been a center of activism and dissent against the Moroccan government.
When hundreds of women gathered in the northern Moroccan city of Al-Hoceima on Saturday to protest abuse and corruption by the state, Moroccan police cracked down quickly.
Reuters reported that authorities surrounded the protesters, who were gathered in a public park, and prevented other from joining the demonstration. Protesters chanted “freedom, dignity, and social justice" as police broke up the gathering.
The demonstration, organized by the “Hirak” movement, was protesting state corruption and demanding increased access to jobs and improvements in the region’s infrastructure. It was also a response to the arrest of Hirak’s leader, Nasser Zefzafi, who was detained last week and charged with threatening national security.
Celeste Hicks, a freelance journalist reporting from Casablanca, told Al Jazeera that demonstrations in the region have been occurring for months.
"The protests have been going on in various shapes and sizes for a seven months now,” she said, “but it's not really clear what's going to happen next.”
Protests are not uncommon in Morocco. During the four months earlier this year when I lived in Morocco as a study abroad student, I witnessed demonstrations in Rabat—the country’s capital— nearly every week, with protesters demanding action on various issues, many related to education and employment. While there was typically a large police presence at these protests, they usually remained peaceful and were allowed to run their course.
However, Al-Hoceima is located in Morocco’s Rif region—a mountainous, largely rural part of the country. Demonstrations have been brewing in the region since October 2016, when a fishmonger in Al-Hoceima was gruesomely crushed to death in a garbage truck after he tried to retrieve fish that had been taken from him by police.
The Rif has a long history of clashes with the Moroccan government. In 1959, Crown Prince Hassan II quelled an uprising in the region, killing more than 10,000 Rif tribespeople. After his rise to the throne in 1961, he largely ignored the region, which sank into poverty. Even under the far less brutal rule of King Mohammed VI, who became king in 1999, the Rif has remained one of Morocco’s poorest regions and a hotbed of political activism.
Among the central complaints of protesters in Al-Hoceima and the Rif are political repression, minimal employment opportunities, and the region’s lack of development, which has come as the government has invested in the country's urban centers.
For example, a high-speed train connecting the cities of Casablanca, Rabat, and Tangier is set to open in 2018. The project will cost an estimated $2 billion—money that could have been invested in underdeveloped parts of the country. In addition, Morocco recently signed an agreement with China to build an industrial and technologically focused city just outside of Tangier. The $10 billion project will be paid for by the Moroccan government, as well as by the Bank of Africa and a Chinese business group.
The Moroccan government also spends a significant amount of money lobbying the U.S. government on key issues, particularly its territorial dispute over the Western Sahara. In 2013, Morocco spent $4 million lobbying the U.S., ranking it sixth among all nations.
Activism, such as the protests in the Rif, has produced results before in Morocco. During the Arab Spring, large demonstrations led King Mohammed VI to announce a series of political reforms and changes to the Constitution. These included the calling of a national election and an initiative to have greater power sharing between the palace and the parliament, although the implementation of these reforms has received mixed reviews.
Morocco is extremely conscious of its image. If the protests in Al-Hoceima grow large enough and gain enough traction in the international press, the king may be forced to address demonstrators' demands and invest more heavily in a region that has long been neglected.