A-Infos (en) France, Alternative Libertair #220 - Algeria: Killings of women in Hassi Messaoud + Morocco: A social context explosive (fr) [machine translation]

Called moderate Islamists take power in Tunisia and Egypt. The first effects are already 
visible, such attempts to undermine equality between men and women. As such, interrogate 
the past: in July 2001, more than a hundred women in Algeria were massacred or raped. ---- 
Friday 11 July 2001 in the Algerian town of Hassi Messaoud, several hundred men invade a 
neighborhood by the preaching of a fundamentalist imam. They burn and destroy houses, 
often unhealthy, but especially massacre, rob and rape women who occupy mostly immigrants. 
One of them is buried alive. Witnesses speak several murders but the police, who expects 
more than 5 hours before working the first night, do not recognize any. These crimes 
continue over several nights in other towns. We do not know the exact number of victims, 
some preferring to go and join their families.

Authorities of the host city in a gym a hundred victims in poor conditions and without any 
care. Only 39 of them will complain and only forty criminals will be identified. But the 
martyrdom of these women do not stop there. The press and the authorities drag their 
victims in the mud, like accusing the Islamists of prostitution and tarnish the honor of 
the families of the perpetrators.

Their crime: being single women ...

Ministers, politicians, and journalists associations, protest and denounce these barbaric 
acts, however, less support for the victims to reassure Western and progressive movements 
denouncing unabashed reading of Islam. Victims will have to wait several days before being 
treated. During the investigation, the police did not spare their humiliation and lawyers 
forget to come to trial. Ultimately, at the appeal trial in 2005, only six executioners 
present three will be paid, and if several murderers are sentenced in absentia, only three 
have now purged their low sentence. This drama reveals the tensions of the time: the 
politics of reconciliation following seven years of civil war in 1999, the Black Spring 
Kabyle July 2001 ... The victims alongside their daily executioners repented Islamist 
state which provides housing and employment . Called moderate Islamists in the government 
and the prevailing sense of impunity for acts of violence committed in the name of a 
certain entity. The massacre of Hassi Messaoud is not an isolated act, but many have gone 
before without reaching the climax. The crime of these women? To be without husbands, 
often widows, divorced or repudiated, ostracized by their families. Fundamentalist imams 
preaching accuse them of prostitution, promiscuous, destroy the family unit. They, who are 
forced to migrate, often with their children, to survive in these oil towns where they 
work in multinationals or as a maid ...

And migrant workers ...

But these women are not only victims of extremism: they are also victims of social crisis, 
accused of stealing the work of men. Disadvantaged workers in a society where women are 
subject to supervision for life [ 1 ], they suffer a dual economic exploitation and 
patriarchal. Just a fundamentalist imam provides moral support for the violence to the 
most exploited is released! At independence, the Algerian society was egalitarian and 
secular law, but in 1984, the Muslim fundamentalist tendencies together got a partial 
return of Sharia. The same process is underway in several Arab countries, it is imperative 
to support and express our solidarity for all social struggles and feminist ...

Michael (AL Nantes)

[ 1 ] See "Algerian Family Code: Monsieur est servi," AL 211 (November 2011).

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Morocco: A social context explosive
The Moroccan regime played a curious game, pulling his left hand he offered to the right 
by the speakers. On the one hand, it conducts calming and prepares other cuts including 
national education. The students retaliated.
Since the moderate Islamist party Justice and Development emerged victorious from the 
recent parliamentary elections in November 2011, the political situation is not brilliant. 
The game Makhzen - Moroccan state apparatus - is to let the government do the dirty work, 
which made him lose his relative popularity very quickly. Such a situation could only lead 
to a revival of social protest. Several steps have been taken to channel popular revolt. 
Among them, we note the increase in the budget of the compensation fund, a mechanism that 
allows the state to reduce the cost of staples, or plan to hire more than 40,000 youth 
itself preceded by a broad process of hiring 200,000 graduates are unemployed by 2015. 
These measures are in addition to the resumption of negotiations with the unions to reach 
an agreement, while avoiding the activists of the left fighting for better undermine their 
role in the major unions such as Moroccan or UMT CDT. These maneuvers seems to leave the 
Moroccan left indifferent, passive as the meeting or too absorbed in playing the game of 
union bureaucracies.

All this might look like progress but in reality it is quite the opposite is expected. 
Morocco has signed a request for assistance from the IMF will require budget cuts and 
impose liabilities that exceed its means as in Greece.

IMF request, the Makhzen obéit

One of these measures is the desire to privatize universities - the last step of a long 
destruction of National Education. Since the early ninety, there is a significant 
devaluation of the tank coupled with very high entry barriers in large schools or branches 
long journey, leaving the university to become the refuge of "hiccups". High school and 
high school students retaliated by creating this summer the Student Union to change the 
educational system (UECSE). Despite its elitist side, where only students with a very good 
average tank have the right to express their anger, this movement is far from being 
embryonic face the current disaster. To the archaic forms of struggles components of the 
traditional left, the desire to reduce the role of unions in social management, and 
disillusionment with political Islam, no one can predict the direction that will movements 
contestions . One thing is certain: between February 20 movement and spontaneous revolts 
against poverty in the Rif or Atlas, the current situation is very explosive. For proof, 
in July, the Moroccan riot police were equipped with 88 armored cars from the United States.

Marouane Taharouri - Paris North AL East, and Rahim Ahmed Ben Moroccan militant libertarian
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