Morocco: The “Brutal” Repression of Peaceful Protesters Is the “Visible Expression of a Political System Based on Violence”
The brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators who took to the streets in several Moroccan cities demanding better public services is “the visible expression of a political system built on violence,” declared the Spanish solidarity platform with the Sahrawi people, Don’t Forget Western Sahara. The organization stressed that this repression must be connected to Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara.
“What happened in Rabat, Casablanca, or Marrakech is neither an accident nor an exception: it is the visible expression of a political system founded on violence, lack of freedoms, and denial of fundamental rights,” the NGO stated in an article titled Denouncing Repression in Morocco is Necessary, Linking It to the Occupation of Western Sahara is Essential. According to the group, “what the international community is only beginning to witness in Morocco today—police violence against its own citizens—the Sahrawi people have endured for nearly half a century.” The key difference, it added, is that “in Western Sahara, repression is coupled with the systematic plundering of natural resources and the construction of a 2,700-kilometer military wall, one of the longest and most mined in the world, which divides families and turns the occupation into a true laboratory of apartheid and military control.”
In this context, the platform argued that while denouncing repression in Morocco is necessary, linking it to the occupation of Western Sahara is “indispensable to understanding the true face of the Moroccan regime—a system that can only sustain itself through violence, censorship, and the complicity of those who prefer to look away while businesses built on the blood and freedom of an entire people are consolidated.” It further explained that Morocco’s projected image abroad as a “stable” and “strategic partner” is nothing more than a façade, one that rests on prisons, subservient courts, and security forces wielded as instruments of terror against the population.
The NGO reminded that the recent brutal repression of protests in Morocco revealed to many “the criminal nature of the Moroccan regime,” but emphasized that an “even worse repression” has been inflicted for decades upon the Sahrawi people in the occupied territories. Since the 1975 invasion, Moroccan occupation forces have imposed a regime of systematic violence: thousands of enforced disappearances, summary executions, and documented cases of torture—even by the UN—alongside arbitrary arrests of peaceful activists and show trials leading to disproportionate sentences. It highlighted emblematic cases like that of the Gdeim Izik political prisoners, which it described as merely “the tip of the iceberg of a repressive apparatus largely invisible to much of international public opinion.”
The platform recalled that numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights Council, and even the European Parliament, have all documented Moroccan repression of Sahrawis and of dissenting voices within Morocco itself. Yet, it lamented, “these reports are ignored by Western governments, who instead of demanding accountability, reward Rabat with trade agreements, investments, and privileged partner status within the European Union.”
