Word: moroccan
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...Kaddouri was doing well enough at work that she dared to start wearing a head scarf. Her parents, Moroccan migrants, were alarmed. Their brilliant daughter would risk her job over the hijab? Couldn't she just wear it at home? "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," Kaddouri told them. In some hospitals, nobody minded. But at one, she was asked to remove her scarf. "It's personal," she insisted, mindful that she couldn't say it was religious. She began wearing a surgery cap, until the hospital passed a rule - "designed for me," claims Kaddouri - banning head...
...fervor? Moroccan journalist Ali Lmrabet, speaking from Rabat on Monday, points out that "public opinion and the opinion of parliament are not necessarily the same thing." Certainly the Moroccan government has been discomfited by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón's decision last Tuesday to investigate several Moroccans, including a few high-ranking officials, for alleged atrocities against the North African Sahawari people between 1976 and 1987 after Spain withdrew from its former colony of Western Sahara. The fact that the Spanish monarch's visit to Melilla on Tuesday coincides with the anniversary of the Green March...
...time the ambassador was recalled - by surprise. "It's not the reaction itself, but rather the speed with which relations between the two countries have deteriorated that is so surprising," says Haizam Amirah-Fernández, senior analyst for the Arab world at Spain's Royal Elcano Institute. "Spanish-Moroccan relations are always presented as privileged. But these declarations have been extremely vehement." On Saturday, the Moroccan parliament called for protests outside the Spanish embassy in Rabat, and on Monday, hundreds of angry citizens demonstrated on the Moroccan border with Melilla and in the city of Tetuan...
...been part of Spain for more than four hundred years. But Morocco views the two cities as occupied territories - a last, insulting bastion of Spanish colonialism. Much as any gesture of British sovereignty in Gibraltar raises Spanish hackles, so do assertions of Spanish identity in North Africa irritate the Moroccans. Five years ago, for example, the two countries came to the brink of war when a band of Moroccan soldiers raised their national flag on a tiny, uninhabited island called Perejil that Spain considers its territory...
...Still, Lmrabet is skeptical about the brouhaha. "This isn't about foreign policy - it's for domestic consumption," he says. In his view, the Moroccan government gains something from the ongoing tension with its neighbor across the Mediterranean. In September parliamentary elections, only 37% of eligible voters went to the polls. The low turnout - the worst in the country's history - was widely interpreted as a sign that voters felt irrelevant to the political process. "It's not unusual for Morocco to whip up nationalist sentiment when it wants to create a distraction from the country's real problems," says...