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Rabat – The Morocco Youth Voice protests over the weekend in Rabat were shut down by the police via mass arrests.
On the evenings of Saturday, September 27, and Sunday, September 28, many young Moroccan men and women took to the streets to protest grievances in unemployment, education, and healthcare.
The protests both days were met with strong police force and arrests.
Protestors, mainly organized by the Morocco Youth Voice movement, demanded that the government make progress towards addressing unemployment, overcrowding in schools, and exorbitant costs and inequality in healthcare, arguing that the government must raise standards for such services and ensure that they receive adequate funding and inspection.
Seemingly peaceful young adults who gathered near the Moroccan Parliament to protest were rapidly dispersed by the police with shields and batons. In several cases, detained protestors seemed to be apprehended for arbitrary reasons—they were not attacking or behaving aggressively towards the police prior to detainment.
They were shuttled into vans and allegedly taken to the police station before being released.
“It’s against all the laws,” said Ismail Bidaran, a Moroccan YouTuber and content creator who participated in the Saturday evening protest. “A police officer isn’t meant to attack you, isn’t meant to touch you, [but] they are doing this.”
He described the Moroccan educational system as “overcrowded” and unproductive, and said that people are dying in the Moroccan healthcare system, that “everyone is suffering, basically.”
The protest presence on Sunday diminished in comparison to the march on Saturday. The Saturday protest was larger and more forceful than its Sunday counterpart and required flares and large squads of police to control the crowd. In contrast, the Sunday demonstration was stopped nearly before it started. Police waded into crowds before they took formation, detaining some protestors while ordering others and bystanders to move along.
“There is no communication between the people and the parties,” explained Fatima, a local Rabat student, regarding the protests. She cited polls that indicate a majority of Moroccans no longer trust political parties to represent them.
Following mass arrests on September 27, the organizers opted to reschedule the September 28 protest to October 5, citing the “physical exhaustion of activists from the last protest,” but irate demonstrators took to the streets Sunday evening regardless.
In a statement made Saturday night, the organizers appealed to the Minister of the Interior, asking him to “protect activists and their families,” thanking the police for their “relatively reasonable treatment of detained youth,” and condemning the “militarization of Moroccan streets simply because citizens are demanding their basic rights.”
In the meantime, Moroccans have flooded social media with indignation. Videos of crowd control methods and arrests in Rabat, Tangier, and Casablanca have triggered online unrest. One Instagram user wrote: “To ask for health and education is to ask for life itself… to be met with arrests and violence is a betrayal.”
Others posted pictures on social media with captions calling the police’s methods unfair, saying that activists are gathering “for our rights, for dignity, for health and education.”
The protests this past weekend are the largest anti-government protests to take place in Morocco in years.
