Morocco is pursuing a dual strategy to tackle Islamic radicals, cracking down on militants since the 2003 Casablanca bombings and combating poverty with a plan to eradicate slums seen as breeding grounds for extremists.
The arrests of 17 suspected members of an al Qaeda cell, who were questioned by an investigating judge last week about an alleged plot to blow up landmark buildings in Casablanca, Morocco's business hub, and its capital Rabat, suggest the threat of more attacks is real.
Tough security measures in the North African country under King Mohammed, a strong U.S. ally whose 6-1/2 years in power have seen some liberalising reforms, coincide with U.S.-backed efforts to stamp out an al Qaeda-linked group seen by Washington as trying to export its holy war from neighbouring Algeria.
The United States aims to deny havens in the Sahara desert to militants from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), operating out of Algeria, a major oil exporter only starting to emerge from more than a decade of civil war that human rights groups say killed up to 150,000 people.
U.S. initiatives include military training for nine West and North African states to fight arms smuggling and extremists, but the GSPC was able to claim its first attack outside Algeria in June, killing 15 soldiers at a remote post in Mauritania.
Some analysts say U.S. assumptions the group wants to thrust out from Algeria, where it seeks to set up a purist Islamic state, are wide of the mark.
"The GSPC has little reality in the Sahara outside the fact that Mokhtar Belmokhtar is originally a smuggler and has excellent contacts there," British-based North Africa analyst George Joffe told Reuters, referring to a GSPC desert chief who one U.S. military source has described as the group's most active and dangerous militant.
"The explanation for alleged terrorism, al Qaeda-style, lies in Algiers, not in Rabat, and has more to do with American gullibility than with any reality I know of," added Joffe.
But others say the GSPC does have ambitions beyond Algeria.
"To set up a group called 'Al Qaeda in North Africa', that's the objective," Mohammed Darif, political scientist at Mohammedia's Hassan II University, told Reuters.
Both Algeria and Morocco are Arab allies in U.S. President George Bush's "war on terror" and both have been targeted for their support for the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.
Al Qaeda in Iraq said this month it would "execute" two kidnapped Moroccan embassy employees, having earlier this year killed two Algerian diplomats working in Baghdad.
After the Casablanca attacks, which killed 45 people including 12 suicide bombers, four men received death sentences for an operation authorities say was bankrolled by al Qaeda.
The bombings shocked Moroccans who believed themselves safe from Islamic radicalism convulsing Algeria since the scrapping in 1992 of elections an Islamist party had been poised to win.
Morocco has jailed more than 1,000 people on terrorism charges, mostly for belonging to the outlawed Salafist Jihad, since the Casablanca blasts. About half have been pardoned.
The government has combined a clampdown on Islamists with measures to confront hardline Islamic preachers in a country which promotes a tolerant form of Islam yet has seen many Moroccans accused in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Of six men who have faced court proceedings worldwide linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, four have Moroccan backgrounds. One of them, Mounir El Motassadeq, was jailed for seven years by a German court in August for belonging to a terrorist group but acquitted of a second charge of abetting mass murder.
Most of the more than 100 people held in connection with the Madrid train bombings, in which Islamists killed 191 people, are of North African descent, largely Moroccan.
Aware of the risk of a violent backlash to tough security measures, Moroccan authorities have tried to improve conditions in the state of 30 million people where nearly 14 percent live below the poverty line and over 40 percent are illiterate.
In May, around the second anniversary of the Casablanca bombings, King Mohammed unveiled a national development plan expected to cost 1.0 billion dirhams ($114.3 million) a year, which initially targets the worst slums and is to extend to hundreds of rural councils and dilapidated urban areas.
"Morocco's problems relate to global poverty, not to global terrorism," said Joffe.
The main source of popular opposition in the kingdom, the Islamist group al-Adl wal-Ihsane (Justice and Charity), which shuns violence and has a strong following in universities and poor districts, is banned from politics but allowed to carry out charity and other work linked mainly to education.
Morocco's moderate Justice and Development Party, the only Islamist political grouping allowed to operate legally, surged in 2002 parliamentary polls to become the biggest opposition group in the assembly, trebling its seats.
Attending a European-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona this week on countering terrorism, Rabat's Minister-delegate for Foreign Affairs Taieb Fassi Fihri insisted each country should go at its own pace on democratic reforms.
"We are doing it for ourselves, by ourselves and because it matches a uniquely Moroccan vision," he told France's Liberation newspaper on Monday. "But in this area, just as with terrorism, we have a dialogue (with Europe). And it stops there." |
Algeria suffered its worst violence since its long civil war yesterday when terrorists affiliated to al-Qaida claimed responsibility for twin bombings in the capital Algiers that killed up to 30 people and wounded more than 100 others. Abdel-Aziz Belkhadem, the prime minister, condemned what he called "cowardly and criminal attacks" after separate blasts at his own office in the centre of Algiers and shortly after at a police station. "The whole block of the entrance to the prime minister's office blew up," said one eyewitness. Scores of ambulances converged on the residential neighbourhood while dazed survivors were led from the badly damaged six-storey building.