The editor of a Moroccan satirical newspaper today risks becoming the first journalist to be jailed in his country for 23 years when he is expected to be found guilty of insulting King Mohammed.
Ali Lmrabet is accused of insulting the king and is also alleged to have undermined the monarchy and the territorial integrity of Morocco in his colourful, hard-hitting weekly newspaper, Demain.
The charges were put at a one-day trial last week and the verdict is due today. If he is convicted and jailed, it would mark a significant backward step in the liberalisation of the press in Morocco over recent years, according to observers.
The charges are based on a cartoon showing anonymous people receiving bags of cash from royal messengers, in reference to the lack of parliamentary control over civil list money paid to the king from state coffers. A photomontage, which shows the young king being carried on a traditional bridegroom’s litter, has also been produced as evidence against him.
A reprinted interview from a Spanish newspaper with a Moroccan republican who backed the idea of self determination for the disputed Western Sahara region is the basis of the charges of undermining territorial integrity.
Lmrabet said he was being tried because some people in the upper reaches of government and the royal household could not stand being lampooned in a publication that is based on France’s suc cessful satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné.
They had already frightened away all advertisers from what is one of Morocco’s top-selling weekly titles, which sells up to 40 000 copies. A threat to prosecute his printer meant that Demain had not been published for a fortnight.
”The state has said: ‘This time we are going to finish with this man,”’ Lmrabet said. ”There is no satire here. They do not accept humour.”
Yesterday, the editor was two weeks into a hunger strike at his office in the capital, Rabat, as he prepared for what he assumed would be a five-year prison sentence. ”I shall continue my hunger strike when I am there,” he said.
If Lmrabet is jailed, it could turn him into an international cause célèbre. He is already the Moroccan delegate of the Reporters Sans Frontières organisation, which lobbies for press freedoms around the world, and demonstrators were expected to turn up for his sentencing in Rabat today.
”They will have a little Mandela journalist in prison,” pledged Lmrabet.
Lmrabet said he had been plagued by the country’s security services in recent weeks when they should have been trying to stop the Islamist suicide bombers who killed 41 people in Casablanca on Friday. ”We are not the enemies of the state, the enemies are the killers,” he said.
Lmrabet said that if he were jailed the country’s independent press would find it increasingly hard to work. ”It is a warning to say that the party is over.” – Guardian Unlimited Â