Democratic rights: hostages of geopolitics in the Maghreb

In situations of war or national emergency, democratic rights are suspended or postponed for better times. All constitutions provide for this. In situations of systemic, political or economic crisis, this is also the case. The rights of individuals, which cover a very wide range of human activity, are considered to be the least important. The rights of the ruling elites, economic and financial powers, the military, and religious powers take precedence over them.

During the first decades of the decolonisation of the Maghreb from the French empire, the resulting states devoted themselves to building their own structures, creating their own administrations and recovering the property plundered by the metropolis, and to this end they set aside democratic rights and individual freedoms. Morocco and Algeria did it in the 1970s and 1980s; Mauritania did it much longer since its independence in the 1960s; Libya did it after the overthrow of the monarchy of Idriss Senoussi, until the 1980s and 1990s, when the junta of the ruling colonels led by Muammar Gaddafi and Abdesselam Djaloud invented the Green Book promising very sui generis democratic rights based on popular assemblies. Tunisia, in its own way, was perhaps the exception, for even with a presidential regime led by Habib Bourguiba, during the three decades of his presidency, it admitted political pluralism and a significant margin of rights, which allowed his country to be the vanguard in the Muslim world, among others, of women's rights, in some cases more advanced than those then prevailing in Europe. Before his death, General Zine el Abidine Ben Ali staged a bloodless coup d'état in the mid-1980s, overthrew Bourguiba, citing his "physical incapacity to exercise power", and imposed a police system with a gradual curtailment of all fundamental rights and freedoms, until he in turn was overthrown in January 2011 by a popular revolution.  

In the 1980s the explosion of Islamic movements spread throughout the Maghreb, from Mauritania to Libya, with large demonstrations of popular protest, which in some cases were violently repressed, as in Morocco, and in others, even when repressed, led to a regime of minimal freedoms, as in Algeria. 

With the new millennium, the two main North African countries, Algeria and Morocco, opened up to the establishment of rights and freedoms. The newly inaugurated President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria sought to bring to an end the dark period of the internal civil war of the 1990s, which left 200,000 people dead, and promoted internal economic and social development, favoured multipartyism and championed his country's entry into the international political arena, signing, among others, a Friendship Treaty with Spain, the Association Agreement with the European Union and the Euro-Mediterranean Agreement.

At the same time, the Moroccan regime of the newly installed Mohammed VI surprised the world by releasing political prisoners, allowing notable exiles to return to the country, such as the engineer Abraham Serfaty, founder of a radical Marxist-Leninist current, relying on a youth eager to participate in the affairs of the state, and on the experience and prestige of veteran militants who had been released from prison. The Moroccan monarchy entered a new phase. 

But the impetus given to the process of rights and freedoms domestically in each country was not reflected in regional geopolitics. The only binding body for North African countries, the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), which was born in Marrakech in 1989, was limited to promoting economic cooperation and development; democratic rights and freedoms had no place in it. 

After the last AMU summit meeting in Tunis in 2008, inter-Maghreb relations gradually festered, and the geopolitical rivalry of its main actors, Morocco and Algeria, grew. The issue of 'the decolonisation of Western Sahara', which the UN had promoted at the request of Sultan Mohammed V in the 1950s, became a weapon in the geopolitical dispute, resulting in the curtailment of rights and freedoms. In neither country could the press and media address the issue outside of the official version. Many journalists and social media workers in Algeria and Morocco were arrested and some imprisoned; others were forced into exile. Freedoms of thought and expression were sacrificed on the altar of reasons of state. International media had their access permits to the two countries restricted. In Algeria, the international press was prevented from accessing the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, or the "rebel regions" against Algeria's central power, such as Kabylia, the Mzab or Tamanrasset. In Morocco, the international press enjoyed wide-ranging freedoms in Rabat or Casablanca, but was very restricted, if not prevented, from travelling to El Aaiun or the Rif region. The international, economic, energy and then political crises, right up to the war in Ukraine, have sealed the closure of internal freedoms. And this despite some notable attempts, such as the legal validity of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), which is often very critical of the curtailment of freedoms, or the Moroccan Organisation of Human Rights (OMDH), which is very active in the social sphere and an interlocutor with the state administration. In Morocco, the new Constitution promulgated in 2011 provided legal support for activities in favour of rights and freedoms, but the evolution of the international situation and changes in regional geopolitics have dampened expectations. In Algeria, the situation is more serious; the hibernation in 2019 of the main associations defending rights and freedoms, and the recent dissolution in 2023 of the Algerian League of Human Rights, together with the arrest of press director Ihsan el Kadi, have put all democratic rights and freedoms under suspension. Algerian society is being deprived of its fundamental right to defend its freedoms and its future. 

Faced with this process of saw-toothed evolution of fundamental freedoms in the Maghreb, the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the European Union, the United States, Canada and Japan, among others, are either turning a blind eye or defending their critical or permissible positions based exclusively on their state interests. Permanent or circumstantial allies of the individual actors in regional politics, such as Russia, China, Iran or South Africa, prefer to remain silent. Democratic rights and fundamental freedoms in the Maghreb countries will remain hostage to geopolitics.