Monarch blames ‘agitators’ for violence

Press, 24 January 1984, Page 10

Monarch blames ‘agitators’ for violence

NZPA-Reuter Rabat, Morocco King Hassan has blamed professional agitators for violence in northern Morocco, where scores of people have been reported killed in demonstrations against food price increases. Speaking on television yesterday in the first official admission of two weeks of unrest, the King accused Marxists, supporters of the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeiny, and Zionists of distributing inflammatory documents in Morocco.

Brandishing three tracts at the camera, one bearing a colour portrait of Ayatollah Khomeiny, the King said that they had been printed abroad and apparently smuggled in by professional agitators. The King said that there had been clashes between stone-throwing demonstrators and security forces but he gave no casualty figures. Big cities such as Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Meknes, and Tangier appeared to have escaped the upsurge of rioting, except for some relatively minor incidents in which stone-throwing teenagers smashed car windscreens and school windows.

There was still no official count of casualties in the smaller towns of Nador, AlHoceima, Tetuan, and Ksar el-Kebir in the north. But unofficial sources said that between 20 and 50 people

had been killed and many wounded in those towns since Thursday. They said that the security forces had opened fire on demonstrators.

Spanish press reports put the death toll as high as 85.

Moroccan authorities have declared the northern towns off-limits for journalists, some of whom have been expelled from the country, making verification of casualty figures difficult. Travellers arriving at Rabat from the north since the riots said that the towns had been virtually under a state of siege, cordoned off by security forces and there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

The King said that violence had begun after “a rabble of smugglers, bandits and idlers” had joined

schoolchildren who had been protesting against alleged increases in examination fees.

The teen-agers’ demonstrations snowballed into a general protest against rising prices of basic foods. The north, one of the poorest parts of the country, was worst hit.

The King said that he had opposed more price increases, expected in a new austerity Budget being prepared to remedy severe deficits.

The Education Ministry announced yesterday that schools in Casablanca would not reopen until tomorrow.

Casablancan schools were given a holiday last week during the Islamic summit conference there which ended on Thursday, and pupils were originally due to return to classes yesterday.

Casablanca, a teeming city of nearly three million people, most of them living in shanty towns, was hit by riots in June, 1981, when an estimated 200 people died in a general strike over food price increases.

Residents said that security forces had been reinforced in the city, apparently to forestall the kind of widespread violence that rocked the northern towns.

Earlier yesterday Moroccan newspapers urged the authorities to end the official silence on the matter,