Now is the time for changes

The wave0 of popular revolts spreading from Tunisia and Egypt reached Morocco on Sunday. The Moroccan demonstrations were not as massive as those in other parts of the Maghreb and the Middle East, nor did the police initially respond to them with violence, though later in the day there were some confrontations with isolated radical groups.

Far from being a victory for Mohammed VI's regime and thus a defeat for the democratic opposition, Sunday's events now offer Morocco an opportunity to make progress in political liberalization. Unlike what has happened in other countries of the region, the demonstrators were not calling for an end to the existing regime, but only for evolution toward a constitutional system, limits on the monarch's powers and a government elected by popular vote. They also demanded measures against corruption.

Mohammed VI would place his regime on a more solid basis were he to pay serious attention to these demands, especially at a time when a wave of discontent is engulfing all the countries around him. Of all Arab heads of state, he is perhaps the one who has most to gain by distancing himself from the autocrats who are now being challenged from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.

Prior to Sunday's demonstrations, moving to extend the democratizing measures that he initiated on ascending to the throne would have conveyed a message of fear, and certainly of cynicism, in view of the falls of Ben Ali and Mubarak. To do so now, when the demonstrators have treated him as an interlocutor for their demands, not as their enemy, would help to definitively dispel the specter of a revolt in Morocco along the same lines as those in Tunisia and Egypt.

The rise of radical Islamism during recent years is the result of the way in which the blindness of the Western powers and the mean venality of most of the Maghreb and Near Eastern governments have bestowed upon the Islamists the banner of the struggle against tyranny and corruption.

The popular revolts that began in Tunisia, and which had a forgotten prelude in the social demands made by the Sahrawis in the camp near Laâyoune in the Western Sahara Territory, have shown that in the Maghreb and the Near East there exists a public that does not wish to remain trapped in the false dichotomy between dictatorship and fanaticism. The Moroccan government seems to have learned from the experience, to judge from the sound moves it has since made.

Were Mohammed VI to undertake a real democratization of his regime, and a sincere struggle against corruption, his initiative would become an example to be followed by other countries in the region. Given that Moroccans have not been telling him to go, but to correct the democratic deficiencies of his regime, Mohammed VI now finds himself in an optimal position to blaze a trail that will avoid peril and suffering. A trail that will also offer hope of prosperity and liberty for a region that has so far been mired in an immobility which, as we have recently seen, was only bottling up a popular pressure that has since risen to bursting point.