Newspaper article 6, Contraband Modern in the Fes Medina

OF CONTRABAND CULTURE

By Mohamed Chawqi
al-Ittihad al-Ishtiraki, No. 4555, 30 January 1996

Before launching the Media Campaign Against Contraband, a poll was conducted to survey the opinions of Moroccans about this phenomenon. The results were as follows:

65 per cent of the interviewees buy contraband products;
77 per cent of them believe that contraband creates job opportunities;
50 per cent hold it that buying contraband products is a permissible action.

After the analysis of these results, it became clear that the majority of Moroccans believe that contraband has umpteen advantages and that it is a permissible activity.

This poll and its findings were revealed by the minister of Finance and Foreign Investments in front of the Finance Committee in the parliament. Commenting on these findings, the minister made it clear that, because this poll reveals that contraband, as practices and conventions, is deeply rooted in our commercial exchanges, the Moroccan consumer should be enlightened in order to give up these beliefs and practices. Everything is clear so far. But how has contraband culture come to be dominant in society? And is the contraband activity an isolated activity?

This belief has deep reasons which extend from products to the ballot box. The contrabanding of most exchanges, be they commercial or financial or political, has led Morocco to become a country controlled by parasites. It is this situation that has rooted the belief that "Everything Is Permissible," from political fraud to commercial fraud, in the Moroccan collective psyche. For centuries, Morocco has been producing the same fraudulent structures from the representative institutions to economy and commercial activity to the extent that corruption is no longer a characteristic of a particular domain or institution. It is so prevalent in all the domains that citizens, customarily used to the absence of credibility and transparency, look at anyone whose hands are clean from such corrupt practices as an extraterrestrial being, or as a foolish human at best.

It is obvious that the contraband culture which has controlled the minds and hearts of Moroccans is the child of a watertight plan and strategy. Otherwise, how can we account for the years-old policy of ignoring this phenomenon? And how are we to explain the dubious silence about the rich of the administration, the rich of contraband and drugs, and the rich of the elections during those years and even today?

The poll that was conducted about the contraband of goods is connotatively pregnant. At a time when half of the interviewees maintain that buying contraband products is a permissible action, this means that the Moroccan society suffers from a great deficiency, and that what is urgently needed is a reduction that is not directed at combating commercial contraband, but must be extended to cover all the forms and kinds of contraband, the foremost of which is the contraband of the popular will by means of piracy, counterfeiting, and administrative intervention. Things are interwoven and complementary, a fact which pushes us to say that combating commercial contraband is a good action if it is generalized and comprehensive, but what is better and more valuable is fighting this phenomenon at all levels, commercial or political. This is a precondition for Moroccans in order to have a culture of transparency, fairness and patriotism, that is, a democratic culture instead of the one of robbery and money counterfeiting. The culture that falsifies elections and produces fraudulent institutions is the source of all crises and disasters.

Translated by Jamal BAHMAD