Moroccans look forward to political changes that were inconceivable even when the late King Hassan II was liberalising in the 1990s and his Interior Minister Driss Basri (now exiled in France an embarrassment to the Palace) ran the tough security services...
Morocco has not been coup-prone since the 1970s when King Hassan II used the Saharan issue to save his throne but rebellious sentiments could rise especially in the junior ranks were troops told to withdraw; l the 200 000 or so Moroccans who have moved from the north to settle in the Sahara...
While King Mohammed VI does not seem to have the same feel for sub-Saharan politics and global power games as his father five years after King Hassan II's death Morocco remains a player for some of his old allies...
Unlike in the bad old days of King Hassan II's rule the majority of detainees do not seem to have been tortured...
Even the Berber parties a bastion of the late King Hassan II's system of control across his diverse kingdom have come into the melting pot as Moroccans have urbanised...
Vol 44 No 16 |
- WESTERN SAHARA
Moroccans are nervous: there is widespread concern that goes beyond die-hard nationalist circles that `M6' and his team are incapable of managing such delicate political manoeuvres in contrast to his late father King Hassan II and his Interior Minister Driss Basri or Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika...
Critics thought Mohammed by choosing an 'apolitical' head of government had returned to the ways of King Hassan II who made millionaire Mohammed Karim Lamrani his Premier...
In generally free and fair elections on 27 September which lacked the sort of management the late King Hassan II's Interior Minister Driss Basri specialised in some 55 per cent of electors voted 22 parties into the new 325-seat legislature...
The space Hicham aims to fill is that left by the late King Hassan II...
The government and the economy were substantially reformed in the late King Hassan II's last years...
