Avuncular American

Following Morocco's Elections From Afar

Party poster show, Election Day minus 4

UPDATE 11/26/2011:  Checking international media sources, it appears that the moderate Islamist PJD is claiming victory in yesterday's parliamentary elections in Morocco.  And it looks like voter turnout, though slightly higher than in 2007, is still below half the electorate - the result no doubt of a vigorous boycott campaign by the February 20 movement.

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If it hadn't been for travel back to the US at the very time of Morocco's parliamentary elections, I would have been out, pounding the pavement in my old diplomatic reporting tradition of election observation, low-tech style.  Alas, we'll be away from Morocco on election day, Friday 25 November.

King Mohammed VI has also decided to be away on election day, apparently, as some Moroccan papers have editorialized, as both a sign of confidence in the process and to indicate his neutrality vis-à-vis political parties.

While His Majesty will have the best of political analysis at his disposal, we'll just have to tune in from afar to follow the results.  Happily, with websites of organizations sending observers to Morocco, that will be much easier for us.  So here's where we'll be tuning in for a feel of how things go next Friday:

• First, Morocco's own Observatoire des Elections, a consortium of civil society organizations which will deploy more than 3,000 observers throughout the country
• Some of the observers will have been trained by an organization with long experience in election monitoring, the OSCE's ODIHR - Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights
• IFES, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, has been working with Morocco, and has published a useful Election Guide
• In the Moroccan media, the mission of PACE - the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - has cornered the market on international electoral respectability
• America's respected National Democratic Institute, NDI, has long been working in democratization in Morocco, as has the IRI, the International Republican Institute
• The old standby, the BBC, can be counted on for breaking election news

All that said, I am a bit concerned that electoral fever hasn't yet reached room temperature.  Once - since the brief campaign period began a couple of weeks ago - only once have I even witnessed a political rally.  It consisted of a group of young men, in matching white baseball caps, parading through the medina chanting and letting loose a sheaf of electoral flyers (they were from the moderate Islamist PJD, the Justice and Development Party).

Our photo, taken today - i.e., exactly 4 days before election day - shows the slots on a nearby wall that are supposed to be filled with posters from the 31 parties in the race.  Did they run out of paper?  Or are the parties so enamored of social media that they are forgoing posters?

Methinks it's a sign that some parties are just going through the motions, though some people have said that "February 20" movement activists have torn down posters.  Of the 31 parties in the running, the bottom 16 represent altogether barely 10% of the projected vote.

And that may be part of the problem.  31 parties is a large number.  How can a normal citizen begin to understand what they stand for, how they differ from the other 30?  There is a "G-8" grouping, but some analysts say that the eight parties which form it are so diverse that it is impossible to find a unifying thread.

Which may be one of the reasons that the PJD, those guys with the white caps, are ahead in informal polls.  In a country where the previous turnout, some 37% in 2007, prompted the NDI to write a report on Voter Apathy Morocco 2007, the dispersal of the vote among 31 parties will give the advantage to the party with a plurality.  Is the turnout target this year simply to "do better" than 37%?

Get out the vote: that was the key to the Islamist FIS victories in Algeria in 1990 and 1991, and is the simplest rule of elections.  Apathy hands victory to those who vote.

Gerald Loftus

Legation Open House & Christmas Market

The organizers, with sold-out table

Many websites that provide step-by-step guides to "starting your new tradition" are semi-commercial.  With yesterday's first edition of what might well become an annual event, our intent was strictly charitable, but then charity does start at home.

Saturday's Tangier American Legation Open House and Christmas Market was a roaring success, and not just for TALIM.  Partnering with the multinational women's association Tanger Accueil, which welcomes newcomers to Tangier, we enlisted our own women's literacy program participants plus several associations, such as Darna and 100% Maman, which help single mothers and homeless children.

Extending the geographical reach of our fundraising effort, we also sold beautiful fabric creations of the women of Minattou, working out of the Sidi Ifni (southern Morocco) NGO Dar Si-Hmad.

Beyond simply selling their wares, it was an important opportunity for the charities to become better known among Tangier residents, Moroccan and expat, and for the Legation to reach out to visitors from as far away as Fes, Rabat, and Casablanca (the US Embassy and the Consulate General sent a strong contingent of visitors).

Yes, we sold lots of books too, so this was win-win for all.  And rather than keeping people away, the cold downpours all day perhaps enticed people to spend time in a place where the human warmth was palpable.

Gerald Loftus

MEDays 2011: Tangier Welcomes the Great & Good

No qualitative or political inference to my post title - it's just a phrase, usually denoting the kind of people who show up at international conflabs like Davos and Aspen.  That said, MEDays brought an impressive array of people from all walks and regions to Tangier, for the 4th consecutive year.

It was a Davos kind of "star power," or as one of the speakers put it, "if not A list, then at least B+" list of international political, economic, and intellectual personalities who gathered in Tangier this weekend.  MEDays is the annual conference organized by the Rabat-based think tank Amadeus Institute.

A formidable organizational and programming feat, MEDays builds its annual meeting around topical themes, this year "The South in Global Governance."  I can't speak to all of the plenary sessions, debates, panels, and briefings, but those that I attended on day 3 were uniformly informative, high-level, and highly relevant.

A panel of sub-Saharan African leaders (Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and ministers from Kenya, Niger, and Liberia) reflected on the challenges to democracy in societies emerging from dictatorship, war, and civil upheaval.  "Stabilty and democracy are two sides of the same coin," said Tsvangirai.  Democracy is not just scheduling elections.

Foreign Minister of Liberia, Dr. Toga McIntosh, addressed his country's monumental task of rebuilding - everything - after a disastrous civil war.  Capacity in all areas was jump-started by actively recruiting overseas Liberians from the diaspora, McIntosh himself included.  Rather than "parachuting" these expats into the war-torn country and hoping for the best, they were fully integrated into key positions.

Dr. Peter Nyong'o, Kenya's health minister, was particularly eloquent on the need to be wary of the "military industrial complex," the bane of African democracy.  "We need to encourage American studies," he said, "especially in the arena of civilian control of the military."  Despite encouraging trends in democratization, "the big money still goes to the military."

Though there didn't appear to be any US Government officials present this year (MEDays 2010 featured Congressman Keith Ellison), there was nonetheless a strong American showing: retired career diplomat and former US Ambassador to both Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer; former CNN correspondent and Middle Eastern media consultant Octavia Nasr; and Prague-based Chairman of the Global Panel Foundation Marc Ellenbogen.

Probably the best line at the panel on the US and the Arab world was from Octavia Nasr, who recalled her childhood singing lessons in Lebanon.  Her teacher gently told her that it wasn't how loud she sang, but how well she could hear her fellow choir members.  That lesson in the importance of listening has stayed with her, and is a lesson that all sides in the Middle East would do well to heed.

But most of the time, we're too busy trying to hear our own raised voices.

Hats off to the Amadeus Institute for providing this opportunity to widen our horizons at a crucial time in world affairs.

Gerald Loftus

Moroccan Independence: November 18, 1956

Today Morocco celebrates Independence Day.  "The View From Fez," a fine English-language blog, has some photos from King Mohammed V's return from exile, the date of which determined Morocco's Independence Day.

I know what they say about reading the telephone book, but there is great value in leafing through the 1956 Tangier Anuario Telefonico, reprinted this year by an enterprising Spanish publisher.

Originally published in February 1956, it describes a Tangier that was still the International Zone.

The American Legation, on America Street, whose Chancery had three phone lines: 15904, 15905, and 15906.  There were separate lines for the various military attachés, and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) had a bunch of numbers.

In an alphabetical listing by street, the Legation's neighbors on America Street who have phones are:

• Jaime Benchimol
• Mohamed Zaidi
• Abdeslam Bennani
• Rodrigo Marchena
• Mina Bentz Mohamed Tensamani

Which is an eloquent evocation of the multiculturality, not only of our Beni Idder quarter, but of Tangier itself in 1956.

Other interesting items from pre-independence Tangier, 1956: under "B," there are two pages of banques, bancos, and banks - Tangier was the world's leading tax haven in those days.

There are two columns of Cohens, and almost as many Levys.  RCA was big, but so was Mackay Radio ("part of the American Cable & Radio System") and Pan American Radio (see this Italian source on "Tangeri Internazionale" - though there is a big English excerpt - for trivia on Tangier's role in early pirate Swedish broadcasts!).

Well, much of this started to come to an end after Independence Day 1956.  Tangier's post-International Zone atmosphere continued to be different from the rest of Morocco for years, but gradually the city was integrated into Morocco proper.

Another thing missing in post-independence Morocco: a telephone directory.

Gerald Loftus

A Shah's Triumphant Return To Tangier

There have been Shahs in Morocco.  Of Iran, and of Afghanistan.  We speak of the latter.

Tahir Shah (official site) In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams (Bantam, 2008)

Tangier holds a special place in my heart.  It was there that my grandfather lived, then died, knocked down outside his villa on the steep rue de la Plage by a reversing Coca-Cola truck.  He was an Afghan named Ikbal Ali Shah.  Much of his life was spent traveling in the Middle East and Central Asia, writing books on the worlds he encountered.  When his wife died of cancer before she reached sixty, he was distraught beyond words.  He set sail to Morocco with a sea-trunk full of books, because it was the one place he could think of where they had never been together.

Packed to overflowing, the Legation's conference room was filled with a very Tangier audience of bibliophiles of all ages and persuasions there to hear Tahir Shah read the above and a number of other selections from his dozen books.

A born story teller (not only was his grandfather a writer, but Tahir Shah is the son of Idries Shah, one of the great authorities on Sufism and author of numerous books, including many stories for children), our author charmed the audience during a good hour of readings and discussion.  He was even able to find some tongue twisting challenges in his own prose - did I write this?  We videotaped the session, and hope to make it available in a forthcoming post.

The event - organized at TALIM with the bookstore Librairie des Colonnes - was moderated by Capetown transplant Aman te Water.  Aman selected a fine series of texts for the author to read, starting with his and his family's connection with Tangier, and exploring the craft of storytelling.  Aman te Water:

Shah’s personae, his heritage that blends English, Afghan and Indian, and his ability to translate the traditional into the contemporary have turned him into a messenger of sorts. Through his travels and links to different civilizations he uses his books to bridge the gap and create an exchange between polarities. One can’t help feeling his books draw us closer to an elusive middle ground.

Hosting Tahir Shah and his family - his wife and two children attended, and feature in his touching and amusing books - was pure pleasure, as well as a revelation.  It turns out that I had already written a review of the excellent film Journey to Mecca: in the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta, for which Shah was the principal screenwriter.  After editorializing that the film needed to be shown in Tangier, Ibn Battuta's birthplace and final resting place, I see that it is to be shown starting next month in Casablanca (Casa has an IMAX theater).  I'm very pleased it's coming to Morocco.

Though Shah has chosen to make his home in Casablanca, he appreciates Tangier:

Tangier is a hybrid of Europe, Africa, and the Arab world.  It is a city of such charm and sophistication that the people who reside there sometimes forget their astonishing good fortune.

We were indeed fortunate to have the benefit of Tahir Shah's presence among us on Friday, and if his enthusiasm over our research library is anything to go by - "you have an 1816 Robert Adams!" and other such discoveries - we think we will see him back.  Tahir Shah, man of the "East-West Bridge," probably feels a natural affinity with a place that literally bridges East and West, medina and modern - the Tangier American Legation.

Tahir Shah's impressions of his visit to the Legation, and especially its research library: "The American Legation is one of those rare fragments of history trapped in the modern world. How magical, how absolutely extraordinary... and the books, oh the books!"

We couldn't ask for a better endorsement.

Gerald Loftus

11-11-11 In Tangier: Morts Pour la France

Brief but moving ceremony on the steps of the French Consulate General in Tangier, with newly-arrived Consul General Pierre Thénard presiding.  A reading of President Nicolas Sarkozy's Armistice Day message.  A vin d'honneur.

Very much like in every town and village in France, the monument aux morts has lots and lots of names of the fallen from World War I, 1914-1918.  Fewer for 1939-1945.

But look at the names.  You'll see lots of French names, of course.  But also a reflection of polyglot Tangier, International Zone.  Spanish, Italian, and Jewish, but also lots of Moroccan names, mostly written in Arabic.

Today's ceremony was even more moving because of the presence of three of the Moroccan veterans of World War II.  For how many more 11 Novembres will they be able to mount the steps of the Consulate General?

Readers who haven't had the chance to visit the dozens (hundreds?) of First World War and Second World War cemeteries that cover the battlefields of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg should make a point of seeing them, especially on days like November 11.

You will see, among the thousands of crosses, the occasional Star of David or Muslim crescent.  Sometimes there are entire sections of crescent-marked graves (at right, at Notre Dame de Lorette, an Algerian soldier's tomb), representing the hundreds of thousands of soldiers from North Africa who fought in France's wars in Europe.

Would that all the Arab and African veterans and the fallen of the wars of the Twentieth century receive the dignified honors shown at today's ceremony.

It seems that there are repeated incidents of desecration of the graves of Muslim war dead in France, and veterans from France's former empire must still struggle for equal rights with veterans from metropolitan France.

America's fallen from Operation Torch (November 1942) in Morocco and Algeria, and from the subsequent fighting in Tunisia in 1943, all rest in the beautiful North Africa Cemetery and Memorial (American Battle Monuments Commission - ABMC) in Carthage.

May we remember them all on this November 11, 2011.

Gerald Loftus

What the Africanistas Saw Across El Estrecho de Gibraltar

... they saw Africa.

Notes from a trip across the Strait.

Well, of course they saw Africa: every primary school geography student knows that the Strait of Gibraltar (or, as they say north of the water, el Estrecho de Gibraltar) separates the continents of Europe and Africa.

But Spain's Africanistas were not academic "Africanists" - they were the officers of the Army of Africa, of which Dr. Francisco J. Romero Salvadó writes in his review of Sebastian Balfour's book Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War:

Balfour portrays convincingly the quasi-surreal world dominated by terror, alienation, corruption and unabated warfare which the Army of Africa inhabited. For the recruits, Morocco was a meaningless nightmare in which fear for their lives, anxiety to return home and appalling living conditions went together. However, for the Africanista officers of either the native-led troops or Regulares and the Foreign Legion, the Moroccan campaigns became the crucial part of their upbringing. Indeed, most Africanistas would have subscribed to Franco’s words: 'Without Africa, I can scarcely explain myself’.

Our photo above, taken from the lovely Spanish town of Tarifa, underscores the reality of the 14 kilometers which separate the two continents.  Though we look out across the Strait from Tangier and know that Spain and Europe are there, it was a revelation to see, as we did during our short Aïd al-Adha break, Africa looming up beyond the waters from the Spanish side.

So back to Spain and the Africanistas.  We've touched on Spain's Moroccan adventure before, most recently in our piece on the Lafayette Escadrille in the Rif War in the 1920s, and earlier in Caitlyn Olson's piece on Moroccans On Both Sides in Spain's Civil War.  The Africanistas spent their formative military years in the former, and came to power with their leader Franco in the latter.

Today, the competition across the Strait is more commercial, with the night lights of the new port of Tangier-Med beckoning to the incessant maritime traffic - "Come here, don't get stuck in Algeciras."  By the looks of the lineup of ships awaiting space in Algeciras Bay (photo below, taken from atop the Rock of Gibraltar), Tangier Med (a) might entice ship owners with lower demurrage charges for shorter offshore waiting periods or (b) is 14 kilometers too far south from where the ships want to dock: Europe.

   If Spain still has Africanistas, they are more akin to Africanists elsewhere, people who are more interested in culture than in conquest.  Like the Fundación Tres Culturas, which promotes understanding among the three main religions across the Mediterranean, an echo of the days when al-Andalus represented the ideal of tolerance of the diverse cultures that made up Moorish Spain.

Gerald Loftus

Maghribi Scholars Need Not Apply

Geography lesson (image from Kidsmaps.com)

The Maghrib (or Maghreb) is the accepted term for North Africa.

The Maghrib was the birthplace of the Arab Spring (Tunisia).  Its latest blossoming of freedom was in Libya.

The Maghrib is where AIMS Maghribi Grantees come from.  Or came from.

Click on the above link, and this is what you will see:

AIMS Research Grants for North African Scholars

 Note: Due to funding, this program has been put on hold until future notice; please check this page again in the near future for updates. Thank you.

That's right.  Just when spring is breaking out all over the Maghrib, a valuable American program that has been funding dozens of North African scholars' research projects for the past ten years, is under a big funding cloud.

Actually, while the cloud is big, the amount in question is not: the program costs $25,000 annually, and allows (allowed, past tense) ten Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Mauritanian, and Libyan scholars the chance to conduct research in each others' countries.

This $25 K program, of course, is not even worth a decimal point in the larger scheme of things, though the grants that it used to provide do (did) make a difference to the scholars concerned.  If you were a Libyan, newly able to travel to say, Morocco to conduct work in your field, wouldn't you appreciate a US Government-funded program that allows you to do so?

Conversely, might not an Algerian social scientist jump at the opportunity to look at post-revolutionary, post-election Tunisia?  These grants covered every imaginable subject, and we at TALIM have welcomed scholars in fields as diverse as fine arts and water resources.

Part of even larger cuts to international educational exchange, the Deparment of Education reaction to Congressional appropriations prompted a petition garnering thousands of signatures.  The cuts will threaten the work of TALIM and other American overseas research centers, and even such programs as Fulbright/Hays.

"Maghribi Scholars Need Not Apply."  Is that the message that the US intends to give to North African scholars?

Gerald Loftus

Sheep Tales

The Knife Sharpener of Tangier

This being the eve of the Aïd, the culmination of the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, knives are being sharpened all over the Muslim world, in preparation for the sacrifice of millions of sheep.  BBC has a nice explanation of the feast.  We wish our Muslim friends

عيـــد مبــــارك سعيــــــد

And now, we indulge in some of the sights and sounds of Tangier...

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Knives everywhere.  Not just the usual pocket ones, which you can pick up off a blanket from a sidewalk salesman.  But big ones, including meat cleavers.  Drawn by the sound of the whirling stone, which sends its sparks flying, my wife takes advantage of the guy who's set up shop on our corner and now our kitchen knives are sharper than ever before.

Sheep, and the bleating of sheep, everywhere.  Sheep on roofs.  Sheep tethered on the medina streets.  Hay for sheep.  Sheep dung.  Soon, the day of the Silencing of the Sheep.  Those knives...

A friend, living in the suburbs, wants to have materials delivered for a home improvement project.  Sorry, all the three-wheeled mini-vans have been commandeered for sheep transport.

Beware of hydatid disease, where humans can contract tapeworms from eating the offal of infected sheep.

With our NGO partner FTAM (la Fondation Tanger al-Medina), we distribute Aïd trash bags to the women of TALIM's medina literacy program, courtesy of Amendis, the water company.  The message: throw the huge quantities of sheep waste from the do-it-yourself slaughterhouses into the bags, and not into the storm drains.

However, those nice yellow plastic bags are also great for storing things...

Neighbor Mark comes back from the massive outdoor sheep market, having just bought a goat for a deserving family.

Same outdoor market frequented by Mohammed, who finds that the laws of supply and demand, plus the onset of heavy rains, have brought the price of sheep back up.  Rains mean fresh grass, so sheep farmers can afford to keep those sheep for another season rather their lower their prices.

People who bought their sheep two days ago, before the rains, got great deals.  This is important, when the price of some sheep is the equivalent of a month's pay.  For those who cannot afford the price of a sheep, the response can sometimes be tragic.

I once witnessed the sacrifice of a goat, and partook of the meat hours later.  The meat was a mite too fresh for my palate.

Is there a vegetarian option?  Consult VegetarianMuslim.org.

What can you do with leftovers?  Suggestions from Bangladesh.

For Americans who complain about the cost of a turkey, be happy that you only have to eat turkey sandwiches for a few days, and that the bird does not set you back a month's salary.  I haven't heard of anyone getting into debt to pay for Thanksgiving, but some Moroccan observers are asking, "Must you get a loan to buy a sheep?"

Food for thought.  In the meantime, wishing everyone the best for the Aïd.

وكـل عـام وأنتـم بخيــر

Gerald Loftus

Lafayette, We Are Here In Morocco's Rif

L'Escadrille Chérifienne

Recently Moroccan satellite TV audiences tuned in to ARTE, the Franco-German cultural channel, to see Daniel Cling's excellent new documentary, Abdelkrim et la Guerre du Rif.  For many, it was the first time footage on this war from Morocco's colonial past was seen on TV.

The war was important in many ways - a short-lived "Republic of the Rif" with its own banknotes; a groundbreaking Spanish  amphibious landing decades before D-Day; and one of the first times chemical weapons were used against civilians.  The Third Rif War, 1921-26.

But what caught our attention was the silent-film sequence on the steps of the French Prime Minister's residence, when France proudly paraded its special recruits in the war against a tribal rebellion: the American pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, of World War I fame, now back to fly for France, this time in North Africa.

The romantic notion of American flyboys so eager to fight Germans that they enlisted in the French forces is enshrined in films like this 1958 Tab Hunter vehicle (image from MoviePoster.com).

But the idea of American mercenaries recruited to bomb and strafe in what was one of the twentieth century's first wars of national liberation is perhaps less appealing.  Little has been written about this episode, but we have found two excellent articles, both in French.  El-Mostafa Azzou of Morocco's University of Oujda has written this article carried by Cairn.info, and William Dean, of the US Air Force Air Command and Staff College (ACSC), whose article "Americans in the Rif Rebellion" is featured in the French Revue Historique des Armées.

Writes William Dean:

July 1925: an American colonel named Charles Sweeney, who had served with the Foreign Legion in World War I and later in the US Army, proposed to Prime Minister Painlevé to create an escadrille of American pilots who were veterans of the Escadrille Lafayette.   [T]he Painlevé government foresaw that there would be some political difficulties.  To avoid upsetting the isolationist government of President Coolidge, these American mercenary aviators were to technically be in the service of the Sultan (or Chérif) Yusef of Morocco, who was the de jure ruler of the country.  This was the reason why the unit was called the Escadrille Chérifienne... also referred to in documents as the Escadrille Américaine.

William Dean and El-Mostafa Azzou both describe the motivation of the French authorities to create a propaganda coup with the Escadrille, helping to counter pro-Riffian sentiment in the United States ("the American Friends of the Rif").  American newspapers carried editorials against the war, and against involvement by Americans on the side of the French and Spanish colonizers.  The American Legation in Tangier warned the American aviators that US law prohibited fighting in a war against people with whom the US had no quarrel ("Enlistment of American citizens for military service in Morocco").

In the end, US government concerns about violations of neutrality and hostile public opinion brought the chapter of the Escadrille Chérifienne to a close after only six weeks of combat operations.  France's new Moroccan warlord, Maréchal Philippe Pétain, lauded the pilots for their "devotion to the French cause."

In one of the ironies of history, a bare twenty years later, OSS agent and anthropologist Carleton S. Coon worked out of the Tangier American Legation in the lead up to the November 1942 Operation Torch landings in North Africa.  His job: should Spain join the Axis powers, Coon was to spark a rebellion by the Rif tribes as a diversion to help shield the Allied landing force.

In the end, Spain remained officially neutral, and the tribes kept their powder dry.  Evidently, the bombs dropped by the Lafayette Escadrille two decades before hadn't created any lasting animosity against Americans in the Rif mountains.

Gerald Loftus