[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 53 (Wednesday, April 27, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E803-E804]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE ARTICLE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. PHIL ENGLISH

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 27, 2005

  Mr. ENGLISH of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, at a time when reform is 
being encouraged from both inside and outside the Arab and Muslim 
worlds, Morocco has been quietly getting the job done. The April 12th 
edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe contains an insightful and 
balanced article on the progress that has been made--as well as the 
continuing challenges--in Morocco. Reform is a long and oftentimes 
difficult process, but both the government and the people of Morocco 
have made a decision about where their future lies. I commend this 
article to the attention of my colleagues.

          [From the Wall Street Journal Europe, Apr. 12, 2005]

                           Maghrebian Nights

                          (By Brian M. Carney)

       Casablanca, Morocco.--There really is a Rick's Cafe in 
     Casablanca. It was opened a year ago by an American 
     expatriate named Kathy Kriger, who decided to stay on after a 
     stint here as a trade attache for the U.S. Commerce 
     Department.
       Ali Kettani, the man sitting across from me at Rick's, is 
     also a returnee. Although born and raised in Morocco, he'd 
     spent the best part of the last 15 years in Paris and New 
     York as a banker. ``Before the previous king died,'' Mr. 
     Kettani says, ``I would have sworn that I would never have 
     come back to Morocco.'' But here he is, moving back and forth 
     between the U.S. and Morocco to raise American money for a 
     planned $35 million Moroccan private-equity fund, which he 
     says is the first of its kind.
       Mr. Kettani's renewed enthusiasm for his country is not 
     unusual in this, the country that claims to be America's 
     oldest ally. (Morocco signed a friendship treaty with the 
     U.S. in 1787 that has been in force ever since.) In February, 
     a bilateral free-trade agreement went into effect between the 
     U.S. and Morocco, lowering 95 percent of tariffs between the 
     two countries to zero and phasing out the rest over the next 
     several years. A so-called ``association agreement'' with the 
     EU is likewise gradually lowering trade barriers between 
     Europe and Morocco. Businessmen in the country hope to 
     capitalize on this privileged access to the two largest 
     economies in the world by trading with both.
       ``The future of Morocco,'' said Ali Belhaj, a businessman 
     and opposition politician, ``is in services, logistics, 
     tourism and agriculture.'' Agriculture is already a 
     substantial chunk of the Moroccan economy, but in the future 
     Mr. Belhaj sees Morocco selling more and more farm products 
     to the U.S. and Europe, thanks to its privileged trade status 
     and low costs. As for services, he offers an example. ``The 
     biggest dental-implant company in Paris is Moroccan. You go 
     to the dentist in Paris, he takes a mold of your teeth and 
     ships it to Casablanca, where the implants are made and 
     shipped back to Paris. We can turn around dental implants in 
     48 hours.'' For Mr. Belhaj, proximity and good relations with 
     the West are the foundations of Morocco's economic future.
       Morocco is a potential bridge between the West and the Arab 
     world in more than just economic ways. At a time when U.S. 
     President George W. Bush's Greater Middle East project is 
     viewed by many in both Europe and the Arab world as a 
     ``neoconservative'' pipe dream, Morocco stands out as a 
     country furiously trying to show that Arab ways and a 
     Western, modernizing orientation are not incompatible.
       Morocco is a nigh-absolute monarchy, but one whose king has 
     been steadily if gradually ceding power to an elected 
     Parliament. The elections in 2002 are generally viewed, both 
     within Morocco and among Western NGOs such as Freedom House, 
     as the first free and fair ones in the country's 1,300-year 
     history. And this year, the Parliament is expected to pass 
     and the king is expected to ratify a law strengthening the 
     role of parties in the country's politics. For Ali Belhaj, a 
     businessman who is trying to found a center-right party 
     dubbed Alliance of Liberties, it is a vital step toward 
     democracy. ``We have 26 parties that get nearly all of 
     their funding from the state,'' Mr. Belhaj says. ``The 
     annual budget for the parties? $1 million. How can you 
     build a democracy like that?'' Even so, he allows that he 
     sees ``the beginnings of democracy in Morocco,'' and would 
     like to see the Parliament strengthened.
       But in terms of civil rights and freedom of the press, the 
     country has made some real strides, enshrining habeas corpus 
     and the presumption of innocence in law in the last few 
     years. The Parliament is working on a bill to decriminalize 
     libel, meaning disgruntled politicians would no longer be 
     able to lock up journalists for writing things the ruling 
     class would rather not see in print.
       In Rabat, the country's capital, I spoke to Ahmed Abbadi, 
     the director of Islamic affairs in the Ministry of Religion, 
     about the role of religion in a modernizing Morocco. Last 
     year, Morocco passed a reform of its so-called Family Law. 
     The new law grants women equal status in the family, with 
     equal rights to divorce their husbands, an equal say in 
     family governance and the right to marry without the consent 
     of a male relative.
       There were Islamist elements who had opposed some of these 
     reforms on religious grounds; I asked Mr. Abbadi what the 
     government's response had been on a religious level. ``We are 
     concerned with finalities,'' he said. ``When you are 
     concerned with finalities, you do not get bogged down with 
     the literal words.'' He continued: ``There is a saying in 
     Islam: `Wherever is the interest of the whole, there is 
     sharia.' '' So bearing in mind the interest of the whole, he 
     said, ``We must determine how to implement the general 
     principles of sharia law in a way that is appropriate to our 
     time.'' In short, the Ministry of Religion determined that 
     the Family Law, giving women broadly equal rights in the 
     family context, was consonant with Morocco's official 
     interpretation of Islam. It's a dose of historical relativism 
     that's badly needed in much of the Arab world.
       What about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's claims ahead of the Iraqi 
     elections that democracy was unIslamic? ``He does not have 
     the skills, the knowledge or the class to talk about 
     democracy,'' was Mr. Abbadi's response, delivered with just a 
     touch of condescension. And, speaking of Saudi Arabia's 
     fundamentalist brand of Islam, he observed: ``When you have a 
     simple society,'' you wind up with a ``simple, superficial'' 
     interpretation of Islam--``like the `Bedouin Islam' in Saudi 
     Arabia.''
       All of which sounded pretty encouraging. So, did Mr. Abbadi 
     see Morocco's flavor of Islam as a model for the rest of the 
     Arab world--a modern, forward-looking alternative to 
     Wahhabist fundamentalism? He didn't want to go that far, but 
     in the end he allowed, ``We believe--humbly--that Morocco 
     could be a model'' for others, although they had no 
     inclination to actively export their interpretation.
       Morocco is democratizing, liberalizing and modernizing on 
     several fronts. Is it a model for the Arab world? I repeated 
     the question to Bob Holley, a former American diplomat who is 
     now consulting for the Moroccan government in Washington, and 
     who facilitated a number of my meetings in Morocco. ``It's a 
     great sales pitch--Morocco as model for the greater Middle 
     East,'' Mr. Holley noted. But in the end, given its 
     historical, cultural and ethnic particularities, ``I think 
     Morocco's utility as a model is limited,'' he admitted.
       Mr. Holley may be right, and in any case Morocco's progress 
     is far from perfect or uniform. After the May 16, 2003, 
     suicide bombings in Casablanca, the police rounded up some 
     2,000 people, a reaction that for some in Morocco harkened 
     back to the bad old days when the government was empowered to 
     imprison anyone it deemed a threat to the public order. (That 
     law, known in the country as Art. 35, has been repealed.)
       But model Arab democracy or not, Morocco is nevertheless 
     showing what is possible within an Arab monarchy that looks 
     west and north, rather than only east or inward. Back at 
     Rick's Cafe, our table-mate, Dr. Bouthayna Iraqui-Houssaini, 
     who owns a medical-supply company here in Casablanca, offers 
     her own appraisal. ``Not everything is good, but it is all 
     changing. People believe life is getting better,'' she said. 
     And that's not a bad beginning.

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