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Opinion: Morocco’s war on free speech is costing its universities dearly

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 17:00:34 +0000

Morocco frequently turns to the courts when it doesn’t like what its critics have to say. ̽��ֱ��charges levelled against journalist and historian Professor Maati Monjib reinforce just how common this tendency, which emerged during the 1970s, is in Morocco. ̽��ֱ��State tries to quash critique among journalists and other public intellectuals by using the judicial system and imposing extraordinary fines.

Professor Monjib and six others have been accused of “threatening the internal security of the State” and “receiving foreign funding without notifying the government”. He has staged two very public hunger strikes to protest the allegations. Monjib has been a fervent supporter of investigative journalism in the country and an outspoken critic of the very restrictive state.

Several journalists have left the country in the face of state censorship. Others have quit the profession.

In an age of digital media and the rapid flow of information, the state’s campaign against freedom of expression serves mostly to generate international attention to Morocco’s human rights record. When one journalist or intellectual is arrested, articles published abroad inevitably list the charges against other intellectuals and journalists. These charges are sometimes completely unrelated to their profession.

One blogger wrote of the case against Monjib:

̽��ֱ��campaign against Maati Monjib is incomprehensible … His views may be unorthodox, but hardly a menace that would explain the level of persecution he has endured. ̽��ֱ��level of negative international press coverage his case is generating has done a great harm to Morocco’s image.

Morocco was a French Protectorate until 1956, when it became independent again. ̽��ֱ��country has one of the oldest monarchies in the world, and the King still retains substantial power in the constitution and in governing. Morocco has an elected parliament led since 2011 by the Islamist party Parti de Justice et Developpement.

Morocco has an important geopolitical role as a conduit between sub- Saharan Africa and Europe. While there is a long history of protest and leftist and Islamist opposition in Morocco, the Arab Spring did not have the same depth as in other countries in the region, aside from the 20 Fevrier movement.

Universities under pressure

̽��ֱ��case against Monjib and his co-accused also damages academia and university research in Morocco.

There is very little funding available for research at the public universities that dominate the North African country. Most private higher education colleges and universities focus overwhelmingly on teaching, particularly vocational or professional degree programmes like business management. For now, this takes the place of research or training in research skills.

Morocco has also, particularly over the past five or seven years, followed the lead of the US and Europe when drafting education policies. Recent policy strategies to reform higher education and research have adopted a neoliberal approach. This means treating students like consumers who need to be satisfied with a product, as well as strengthening oversight of “product” sales – that is, teaching – and trying to align skills with job market demand.

Some American and British academics have criticised this trend in their own countries. They argue that students' ability to think critically declines and they acquire less general knowledge when they are treated like consumers.

In Morocco, the language of higher education has become very much about categorising students as customers in an expanding marketplace.

Freedom to think differently

What connects restrictions on freedom of expression for journalists and the motivation and ability of researchers to practice their trade with independence and free thought? Quite simply, without the freedom to think differently, research cannot address real issues: poverty, unemployment and public health. Those who want to do such research or use their education to find practical solutions may try to leave. Those who want to stay in Morocco often leave academia.

Instead, what research and critical thinking does exist in Morocco often comes from foreign academics. Moroccan academic Youssef Chiheb has criticised

the lock that foreign experts and consultants have on the process of finalising public policy or strategies while graduates are not eligible or trained to take on the challenge because of a lack of mastery of a section of knowledge and a firm grip on foreign languages, French and English in this case.

Opening up new spaces

̽��ֱ��threat of legal action may effectively narrow public debate within Morocco, but the growth of online news and blogs, often based abroad, has more than compensated. Access to Internet reporting and diverse, often critical, viewpoints means that an alternative public sphere exists. This is especially true for younger generations.

In my research in Morocco, and in Europe, individuals and groups find satisfaction in initiating social change in their local areas. This suits local governments that lack the resources to address social problems. Individuals and community-based organisations abandon the notion that they can affect change at a national level. They may try to have an influence beyond their country’s borders through the Internet and participation in international movements, whether mainstream or radical.

Professor Monjib and other journalists and public intellectuals work at a national level. They contribute to building a public sphere in Morocco that welcomes debate and new ideas organic to the country rather than imposed from elsewhere. Importantly, they provide an example for expressing different points of view, encouraging especially young people to believe they can make a difference, rather than seeking other outlets to prove themselves – such as becoming radicalised.

If Monjib and his colleagues cannot do this work, their other options are to go elsewhere – or quit. Neither is good for Morocco.

Shana Cohen, Senior Research Associate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Shana Cohen (Department of Sociology) discusses censorship and free speech in Morocco.

Reuters

Professor Maati Monjib has become the face of Morocco’s war on freedom of expression

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Opinion: How free are we really?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:11:02 +0000

Freedom. A word redolent with benevolence. We like the idea of being “free”. We are outraged at the thought of being “un-free”. It is often presented to us as a polarity: free expression, free choice and democracy, on the one hand – and repression, censorship and autocracy on the other. We are to guard the former from the latter.

But is that all? What is the “freedom” we are told about, think about and experience? What does it consist of? What uses do we put it to or – perhaps even more importantly – not put it to?

In the advanced capitalist polities of the West, we are repeatedly told that freedom is the defining value of our time, that it is a precious possession to preserve by almost any means, even a measure of un-freedom, say, in the form of increased surveillance or accelerated militarisation. As such, it is a word that is put to many dubious uses including, of course, the now familiar idea of “bringing” freedom and liberty to a “recalcitrant world”, as David Harvey puts it. He asks:

If we were able to mount that wondrous horse of freedom, where would we seek to ride it?

Where indeed?

Freedom ‘thingified’

Has “freedom” turned into one of those buzzwords honoured more in the invocation than in its exercise? A talismanic utterance commandeered for various agendas including offering a reinforcing platform to the rich and the powerful, even when some of those people are responsible for squashing free expression and academic freedom – and worse – in their own states?

Would you like dignity with those? PROistolethetv, CC BY

“Free speech” – rather than being the nurturing and encouragement of real courage and the opening up of the imagination to new possibilities – is in danger of becoming one of the great banalities of our day, trotted out much more by the establishment for explaining its more degraded moves than a channel for producing meaningful dissent that could lead to material alternatives for the majority.

As something “thingified” – to borrow a word from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism – freedom isn’t seen as a practice which requires constant, vigilant exercise on all our parts. It becomes, for example, something that must be transmitted through teaching from an already free West to the un-free zones of the world. Here’s US president, Barack Obama, addressing the British parliament about the “Arab Spring”:

What we are seeing in Tehran, in Tunis, in Tahrir Square, is a longing for the same freedoms that we take for granted here at home … That means investing in the future of those nations that transition to democracy, starting with Tunisia and Egypt – by deepening ties of trade and commerce; by helping them demonstrate that freedom brings prosperity.

Freedom friendship: Obama addresses the UK parliament.

Once again then, freedom carefully channelled through the checkout lane.

Gregarious tolerance

It’s often assumed that science and rationalism are “free” while religion and faith are not. Yet some of the most uncritical acquiescence to the regimes of our day comes from science and many scientists in their collaboration with the privatisation of knowledge by big corporations who determine what questions get asked and what gets funded.

More often than not, what must be opposed is not just the openly repressive or oppressive (that of course, must be done – and is done by people who show astounding courage in their daily lives under harsh conditions: Saudi bloggers, women seeking education in Afghanistan, Irom Sharmila on hunger strike for a decade against army atrocities in India). What we must all guard against is rather more subtle and creeping.

We may have to recognise that the greatest danger to our exercise of freedom is lapsing into habits of thought where we acquiesce – where it becomes easier to think of the way things are as the way things ought to be, or will always be.

Speaking of intellectuals who shy away from the task of speaking difficult truths, the late Edward Said deprecated what he called “a gregarious tolerance” for the way things are. This gregarious tolerance is rife in our society and more tragically, more inexcusably, in our universities and among our intellectuals where one of the biggest assaults on independent thinking – increasing tuition fees, bloated managerial salaries, greater corporate presence in research funding – is failing to provoke a collective resistance.

Mounted Police at the Tuition Fee Protest. SomeDriftwood.

We need to guard against turning “freedom” into a weapon of smugness, cultural certainties to be wielded against apparently lesser cultures rather than a tool constantly sharpened through speaking truth about and against power. When freedom is seen as a “thing” – a value to be worshipped rather than as a practice – it atrophies into something that shores up power and the status quo ordained by it and as such becomes its opposite, an ossified, rather toothless idea.

Frederick Douglass. Wikimedia commons.

Freedom as an idea and practice, of course, also has a very different history or histories when we think of struggles against power from below. That sense of freedom was perhaps best articulated by remarkable former slave and anti-slavery campaigner, Frederick Douglass, in his famous speech commemorating the West Indian emancipation. After noting that those “who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”, Douglass famously declared:

̽��ֱ��whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.

Maintain the rage

There Is No Alternative – Margaret Thatcher’s beloved TINA – is now being carried forward through Cameron and Osborne’s austerity regimes. An unfree, repressive, autocratic and despotic idea if there was ever one, but using “freedom” as its logo, the claim there is no “alternative” immediately narrows down “freedom” to consumer choice and business transactions at the expense of all other rights.

Cameron, you’ll note, saw no irony in feting Xi Jinping, an unelected ruler from an autocratic regime, and spouting platitudes about human rights. China in many ways represents a capitalist wet dream: a constrained population offering up wage labour without meaningful rights but “free” to consume what they can afford.

Meanwhile as we’ve seen with the hysteria over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, his once rather widely accepted ideas about social and economic justice are shrilly denounced as dangerous extremism which must be rooted out immediately – no free flourishing of alternatives there. Protest and anger? Bring out the demonising smears, the batons, the legislation, the water cannons.

How then to be free? Face them down. “Indignez vous”, as the French campaigner, Stephane Hessel, put it. Stay indignant. Protest, undermine, challenge and change. Douglass again, famously: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This is an edited version of a talk delivered by the author at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Priyamvada Gopal, Lecturer, Faculty of English, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Priyamvada Gopal (Faculty of English) discusses freedom as a practice rather than a value to be worshipped.

Jonathan Potts

Manchester protest (27 September 2014)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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