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Publié le : 02.06.2009
Mohamed Ameur, ministre délégué, chargé de la Communauté marocaine résidant à l'étranger et Driss Benhima, Président du groupe Royal Air Maroc ont signé lundi au siège de la RAM à Casablanca une importante convention de partenariat portant sur les offres de prix compétitifs et promotionnelles par la compagnie aérienne nationale aux familles des Marocains résidant à l'étranger. Read full Press Release:http://www.lematin.ma/Actualite/Journal/Article.asp?origine=jrn&idr=110&id=114342
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If anyone hears from Mr. Benhima and Mr. Ameur let me know, because after 13 month since they took the photo and celebrated a nice MAP news release, they figured the MRE (Moroccans Residing Abroad) have a memory issue and tend to forget.
Yes you see, the more I think about it the more I realize how the game works. As much as we like to discuss these issues, we tend to do just that.... talk. And in this case Mohamed Ameur and Driss Benhima figured it out and did what any smart politician and shrude businessman would do....nothing.
So there you go dear Freinds for every action there is a reaction. You talk they talk. You pickup the phone and call they will call you. You show them that you mean business or else and they will get things done.
So what will it be after 13 months of the famous Benhima-Ameur phtoshoot? A nice facebook blog and a lot of emotions or are we going to do something concrete like a press meeting to expose this false announcement from RAM and the Minister of Moroccans Residing Abroad?
Where are the journalists on facebook? Don't tell me that you are invited to a meeting in Libia or Dakhla and have a conflict of interest to speak-up?
Don't sell the cause for a RAM round trip ticket, a shared hotel room and mass catering? We entrusted you to cover the news and it does not get bigger than this news! Open your minds and tell the world in your words and voices what has been covered with eloquent words written in expensive letter folios with the beloved Royal Seal.
Stay tuned for RAM: Sex, Lies and videotapes PART 3, coming next week.
Until join the discussion now on facebook.
Driss R. Temsamani
info@drisstemsamani.com
Mohamed Ameur, ministre délégué chargé de la Communauté marocaine résidant à l'étranger et Driss Benhima, Président du groupe Royal Air Maroc ont signé lundi au siège de la RAM à Casablanca une importante convention de partenariat portant sur les offres de prix compétitifs et promotionnelles par la compagnie aérienne nationale aux familles des Marocains résidant à l'étranger.
JUNE 2, 2009
Dear Friends, Congratulations; Yes we can make Royal Air Maroc do better!
Five weeks after we petitioned his Majesty King Mohammed VI with an open letter and less than a month after we launched the 361 Degrees Survey on Royal Air Maroc Service with over 1000 Moroccans speaking-Up on RAM, the government noticed and took action.
This is not a fluke or coincidence; It's the result of the new and unique approach the community is taking combined with the New Morocco that is becoming before our eyes!
Our Unique Approach:
As you know, over the years there were numerous complaints made about RAM's services and pricing, but those efforts were always dismissed as the opinions of a few disgruntled customers. This time, we are coordinating everyone’s feedback through scientific methods as well as supporting them with academic
research (which will be coming out shortly). The introduction of this new and unique approach is what will make our demands undeniably realistic, objective and result oriented.
The New Morocco:
With that said, no matter how scientific we get in our approach, it takes a government willing to listen to our grievances for us to make progress. I believe the New Morocco is a ready and willing partner when addressed with the right facts and numbers. And this agreement is a clear proof of it.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This announcement is undeniably a good faith effort. It is work in progress and requires our influence for it to turn into a long-term solution. Let’s immediately focus on it through the following steps:
Step 1: Contact Mr Ameur's office and request details on what should the Moroccans residing in the United States expect from this agreement with Royal Air Morocco.
Step 2: Once we get his feedback, we will craft another survey to tabulate everyone's opinion on the relief measures proposed.
Step 3: We will start an Internet countdown on the homepage of the Moroccan American Community Center to see how long it will take RAM to fulfill on its promises.
Last but not least, we will continue our scientific and academic research currently in progress. This research will address the following points:
And much more to come as we continue to get organized and focused on building a strong community for our people and children.
In the meantime, please share the news of this success and the following links with your friends, convince them to join us, and stay tuned for the next developments.
Open Letter to King Mohammed VI on Royal Air Morocco Petition
361 Degrees RAM Service Quality & Pricing Survey
361 Degrees RAM Service Quality & Pricing Survey Results
Mohamed Ameur and Driss Benhima RAM Annoucement
Best Regards,
Driss R. Temsamani
A year Later... We are still waiting for the special promotion announced on June 2nd, 2009. Royal Air Morocco has not delivered and Mr. Mohamed Ameur & Mr. Driss Benhima need to give answers to more than 4 millions Moroccans residing abroad and who accounted for more than 9% of the Moroccan GDP why nothing can be done about Royal Air Morocco's poor services and high prices.
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"I thought I should call 911," Niass later told a reporter, "but my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told him. He said we shouldn't call 911. Immediately he alerted a police officer nearby."
Western Sahara has never been a country of its own. Historically, the nomadic tribes of the region owed allegiance to the rulers of Morocco, who, in turn, appointed civil governors of the territory, authorized to collect taxes in his name. In the colonial scramble for Africa, Spain claimed a protectorate over the area, although it was only able to make good on its pretensions in the early twentieth century.
Following the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, after barely half a century of colonial occupation, Madrid abandoned the Spanish Sahara in early 1976. Morocco claimed the territory and moved to assume control, which an agreement with Spain had relinquished to it. But Rabat met armed opposition from a self-styled “national liberation” movement, the Polisario Front, which was supported by the communist bloc (even now, Castro’s Cuba continues to provide training and other assistance to Polisario cadres), and cheered on by the same leftist crowd that embraced “revolutionary chic” during the period. The result was a bitter guerrilla war which Morocco largely won by the time the international community managed to achieve a ceasefire in 1991. More than 85 percent of the former Spanish Sahara is thus behind the “sand berm,” the defensive shield of sand and stone barriers erected by Moroccan forces in the 1980s that the UN peacekeepers currently patrol along.
With Morocco in control of most of the territory it claims, the Polisario Front is largely confined to several squalid camps in southwestern Algeria where its leadership carries on the charade of being the self-proclaimed “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.” This diplomatic theater could be ignored for the farce that it is, except that, in violation of international law, thousands of Sahrawis are forcibly kept in the camps in order to create a constituency for the Polisario cause. Moreover, no one even knows how many of these unfortunate people there are; as the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported last year: “Algeria and the Polisario both refuse to allow a census to count and register the refugee population, furthering suspicion that its agents are diverting, smuggling, and reselling substantial amounts of international humanitarian aid.” The truth of this allegation has been confirmed by many Sahrawis who have escaped from the camps, including a founding member of the Polisario leadership, Ahmedou Ould Souilem, whom I interviewed earlier this year, as well as the fact that goods clearly marked as medical and other relief supplies for the refugee camps are regularly seen for sale in regional markets from Mauritania to Niger.
Beyond the tragedy of once free Sahrawi tribesmen being warehoused in appalling conditions, there is now added the specter of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), whose growing links to drug and human smuggling cartels—especially when coupled with its extremist ideology and terrorist violence—have emerged as a significant challenge to regional and global security. A report by the French Institute of International Relations has documented that “Sahrawis are involved in a vast network of smuggling . . . using various routes, passing through the Western Sahara to Algeria via Tifariti and Bir Lahlou, oases controlled by the Polisario Front.” This network, along with the tactical knowledge and weapons training of the Polisario forces, have made the movement especially attractive to AQIM even as the desperate conditions of life in the refugee camps facilitate recruitment into precisely such radical groups. In fact,several (presumably former) Polisario fighters were detained by Mauritanian officials for their involvement in the late-November 2009 kidnapping by AQIM of three Spanish aid workers from the Catalan nongovernmental organization Barcelona Acció Solidària.
Concern for security is the reason why, even if Morocco somehow withdrew from the Saharan territory, a Polisario state there is unthinkable. About the last thing that the world needs is another failed state, much less one in as geopolitically important a subregion as the Maghreb. But massive instability there is exactly what an independent Western Sahara would produce. Not only is the territory bereft of natural resources—aside from the modest mining of low-quality phosphates and few fisheries, there are barely twenty square miles of arable land—but the Polisario Front’s record since its founding has shown it to have managed the remarkable feat of acquiring all the characteristics of a failed state without even having achieved sovereignty first.
For its part, Morocco has shown considerable flexibility, especially sinceKing Mohammed VI succeeded his father Hassan II in 1999. Two years ago, after an extensive internal national dialogue about how to settle the conflict, Morocco unveiled an “Initiative for Negotiating an Autonomy Statute for the Sahara Region.” The proposal’s provisions include not only an elected local administration for the region consisting of executive, legislative and judicial branches, but also ideas about education and justice, and the promise that the additional financial resources needed to develop the region and its institutions would be made available to supplement whatever revenues can be raised locally. The only matters that would remain in the control of Rabat would be defense, foreign affairs and currency, as well as the religious prerogatives of the king as “Commander of the Faithful.”
Recognition of these realities as well as of the considerable promise of the plan which Morocco submitted to the UN is what recently prompted a rare bipartisan majority of fifty-four senators—including Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein and ranking member Kit Bond, and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin and ranking member John McCain—to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to “make the resolution of the Western Sahara stalemate a U.S. foreign policy priority.” The senators reminded Clinton that, in an interview last year, she herself had reaffirmed that support for the “serious and credible” Moroccan proposal is firmly rooted in American policy as something “that originated in the Clinton administration . . . was reaffirmed in the Bush administration and it remains the policy of the United States in the Obama administration.”
While peacekeeping and the diplomatic shuttle have made for a relatively decent living for whole series of UN functionaries over the course of the last twenty years—MINURSO has one international civilian bureaucrat for every 2.5 uniformed personnel, the maintenance of whole lot costing about $150,000 per head annually—it has also not led anywhere. And Ban’s report to the Security Council last month that the status quo is likely to endure “for the foreseeable future” is hardly encouraging. In fact, the UN is right where it was when it started, which ought not to be surprising. Indeed, the secretary-general who launched MINURSO, Javier Pérez de Cuellar, subsequently admitted in his memoirs:
I was never convinced that independence promised the best future for the inhabitants of the Western Sahara. Their number, however counted, is less than 150,000, and aside from its phosphate deposits the land is poor, offering meager prospects of viability as a separate country. Such political leadership as exists is not impressive and in some cases is not Sahrawi in origin. A reasonable solution under which the Western Sahara would be integrated as an autonomous region in the Moroccan state would have spared many lives and a great deal of money.
Unfortunately, left to its own devices, the UN system is unlikely to want any change in the status quo. The African Union is likely to be equally unhelpful since the Polisario’s phantom state is grandfathered in as a member of the predecessor Organization of African Unity, while Morocco is not a part of the club. Consequently it falls to America and its European allies—France and Spain have also endorsed the autonomy plan—who, aside from the peoples of the Maghreb, have the most to lose by the creation of a failed state in the Western Sahara. Thus the United States and the European Union would do well to coordinate their efforts, using the time bought by the upcoming mandate extension to push for what is ultimately the only realistic resolution to a dispute that has gone on far too long.
J. Peter Pham is senior fellow and Africa Project director at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.
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I am not Moroccan, and so my musings on Moroccan identity exist only from the perspective as an outsider. Moroccan identity has been fetishized and orientalized by Westerners since the time of Edith Wharton, and continues to be. In popular travel writing, Moroccans are described as mystical beings, devoutly attached to Islam but yearning for modernity, in love with everything Francophone, and confused, caught somewhere between east and west, tradition and modernity. To them, Moroccans fit one singular, albeit complex, mold. In my classroom, Moroccan students themselves would often refer to the “Moroccan mentality,” an intangible thing that needn’t be defined, as everyone knew quite what it was. Everyone except me, that is. When I first settled into my life in Morocco six years ago, I was indeed struck by certain paradoxes: How my newfound friends could pray the Maghrib prayer then go out clubbing that night, stumbling home intoxicated, just to start over again the next morning. How a female friend would tell me she longed to wear hijab but simply couldn’t, because her parents wouldn’t allow it. But with time, these things seem far less strange; they are small patches in the fabric of Moroccan society, things we just live with. At the same time, I recall being frustrated with the stagnancy of discussion around certain topics. It took almost a year for a close friend to admit to me that she was an atheist, and even then, it’s still our little secret.
And forget bringing up the Western Sahara–despite global opinion to the contrary, nearly every Moroccan I’ve ever met believes it to be wholly and unarguably part of their country. But over time, the diversity that I at first thought was lacking made itself apparent to me, as I navigated Morocco’s tightly woven hip hop scene, met atheists and punks, lesbians, and young Sufi hopefuls. What was nearly impossible to crack on the surface slowly revealed itself to me in my friendships, and as time passed, I found that much of what keeps these “secrets” hidden is a desire to keep up appearances…not so different from life in my own country. Ultimately, however, there is a unifying thread amongst Moroccans that is hard to put a finger on. It is made up of thousands of small parts: it is in the overwhelming sense of hospitality, the willingness to offer–and drink–a glass of mint tea with a stranger. It is in the language, the darija of the streets that puzzles other Arabs but which holds the key to so many doors in Morocco.
And yes, it is in couscous, and djellabas, and tajines, things with roots across the region but that have become so quintessentially Moroccan, synonymous really, just as (for better or for worse) Julia Roberts, McDonald’s, and Mickey Mouse are to the United States. What Morocco is not, however, is a simple place stuck in time, contrary to what many travel writers would have you believe. It is too easy, as many travel writers have found, to stick with the same simplistic tropes: “a place stuck in time,” “a disorienting and surreal mix of old and new.” In focusing on the contrasts, one misses out on what makes Morocco so fantastic: its people and their ability and willingness to reassess identity as time goes on. As Morocco grows and develops, so does Moroccan identity.
(By Jillian York Talk Morocco)
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