Rif revolt continues and show signs of independentism

Riffian banners, Riffian protests

Cuarto Poder[es] reported yesterday that the Riffian national banner has been sighted in the protests against the totalitarian Moroccan regime that erupted earlier this month. The ensign was official in the Rif Republic of the 1920s, when famous Berber leader Abd el-Krim held against the joint imperialist forces of Spain and France for many years. 

Because it seems that in spite of repression, the uprising is extending, village after village, through all the country. IDOM compares it to the harira, the traditional soup, which simmers in a low fire. The Riffian uprising has begun indeed. 

The rebels chant "down with Houlal VI" in reference to the Moroccan monarch, who gets compared with the idol Houlal, destroyed by Mohammed some thirteen centuries ago in Mecca.  This kind of direct confrontation with the figure of the monarchy, indeed sacralized to the point of idolatry, is very rare to see in Morocco. 

But Morocco is a state that breaks apart in its many troubles: even before the "Arab Spring" began, Morocco was already being shattered by revolts in occupied West Sahara and the southern town of Sidi Ifni. The contact with Europe is here even greater than its neighbors, Algeria and Tunisia, and that means that unavoidably the centuries-old mosque-blessed certainties of the Alaouite dynasty are being decodified. Just like any other traditional reality: it is the destructive law of Capitalism: appropriate, use and discard. 

The police forces that attack the protesters in vain are being described as 'occupation forces', just as they are here in the Basque Country. Whatever the Moroccan correspondent of IDOM says, the seed of Riffian independentism is clearly there in such a language and such anti-Alaouite determination. 

Berbers after all are not happy by how the Arabized majority treat them and their millenarian culture. However the demands of the Riffian revolt are also of the kind of jobs for the unemployed: nothing more, nothing less.

Besides the epicenter of the uprising, Bni Bouayach, which has been declared in state of siege and sealed from the outside world, large protests have also been reported in Imzouren, Boukadine and Nador, and outside the Rif region proper, in Oujda and Tangiers also. 

The ample Riffian diaspora has also organized solidarity protests in Madrid, Paris, Brussels and La Hague.