By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 5, 2006
RABAT, Morocco Driss Benzekri spent 17 years in prison for opposing King Hassan II. Today, this scholar of Berber poetry and former Maoist helps Hassan's heir, King Mohammed VI, expose the human rights abuses of his dead father's 38 years in power.
"We must first establish what happened to fill in the blanks in our collective memory to have national reconciliation," says Benzekri, whose exhumation and educational use of past official crimes echoes the 
work of truth commissions formed in South Africa, El Salvador, Argentina and elsewhere. "But the king understands that this accounting must be accompanied by major political reforms, to guarantee that these things never happen again."
These reforms would seem to make Morocco a model for President Bush's drive for democracy in the Greater Middle East, the political side of his "long war" against al-Qaeda and its offshoots. If Mohammed and the country's mainstream political parties can construct a modern -- and moderate -- form of Islamic-based governance, it should cut the ground from under radical jihadist movements that have struck targets here and abroad.
But Benzekri, senior government officials and political party leaders I interviewed paint a different conclusion. Even in an Arab land where moderation in politics and religion has deep roots, the Bush program of rapid democratization stirs opposition and distrust because of its links to the other facets of U.S. Middle East policy. The Bush administration may have as much to learn from the Moroccan experience as do the autocracies of the Middle East.
Any effort to understand that experience starts with Mohammed and his dismantling of much of his father's political legacy: The young monarch has unleashed the most sweeping peaceful political and social reforms of this decade in the Arab world.
Few of his 33 million subjects expected the sovereign, who is 42, to be such a forceful agent for change when he came to the throne in 1999. Educated in the small, extra-elite Royal College in Rabat, Mohammed is known to be intensely shy. He dislikes delivering speeches and is awkward when he does. He does not give substantive interviews to journalists. Moroccan editors have come to understand that his encouragement of greater personal freedom does not extend to reports on the personal lives of the royal family.
But Mohammed has pursued a controlled evolution for his tradition-centered society with surprising determination and skill. Does this stem from courageous commitment to change? Oedipal resentment of an overbearing patriarch? Or political calculation rooted in keen survival instincts? A visitor hears all these, and more, suggested in Morocco.
"He is certainly courageous," says Benzekri, who was surprised to be named by the monarch two years ago to head a high-level investigative commission on human rights, which has staged dramatic televised accounts of the suffering and deaths of political prisoners. "This king also understands that he needs to separate himself from the past."
The publication in January of the commission's final damning report on its review of more than 16,000 cases -- including at least 600 disappearances and secret deaths of activists in detention -- followed a push by Mohammed to modernize the kingdom's family laws and give women more rights.
Speaking as a member of a royal family that traces its lineage to the prophet Muhammad, the king declared that his liberalization of inheritance, divorce and employment laws did not contradict the Koran. "He is a modern man who understands the threat that demographics, youth unemployment and globalization pose to a nation that does not have oil," says one acquaintance of the king. "He has drawn a line between the old ways and his ways."
If there is a larger regional meaning in what is happening here, it is this: The greatest peaceful political change in the Arab world is occurring in a handful of countries where traditional rulers are implementing top-down democratization, which, like Islam itself, emphasizes personal submission to a greater purpose. The Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar lag behind Morocco but are moving in the same direction. Monarchs in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and elsewhere have adopted more rhetoric about freedom, at least when speaking to Westerners.
"Ah, you are so lucky to have a king," one self-styled revolutionary Arab leader said to Moroccan officials recently when they discussed the changes. His deliberate irony was not lost on them. But his point has huge implications for Bush's Greater Middle East effort.
