Indigenous peoples’ rights in Morocco: subaltern narratives by Amazigh women

ABSTRACT

Morocco’s 2011 Constitution affirmed the principle of equality between men and women (art. 19) and officialised the (indigenous) Amazigh language (art. 5) alongside Arabic. However, despite apparent progress in the areas of minority groups' and indigenous peoples’ rights and gender equality, Amazigh women’s rights continue to be violated both from within and from outside their own communities. While the Moroccan State fails to guarantee, inter alia, the Amazigh community’s access to language and education rights (as enumerated in arts. 13–14 of UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [UNDRIP]), this article challenges dominant approaches to the study of Amazigh rights for failing to take into account the lived experiences and counter-narrative of Amazigh women. As such, this article departs from the international human rights-based vindications of Amazigh cultural groups to focus instead on the rights and identity articulation among Amazigh women themselves. This article considers whether local-based remedies might be more effective than trying to graft on larger international approaches when looking at the issue of minority and indigenous women.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous peoples’ rights
• minority groups’ rights
• women’s rights
• gender equality
• Morocco
• North Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Silvia Gagliardi holds a PhD from the Irish Centre for Human Rights (ICHR) at the National University of Ireland in Galway (NUIG), and is a recipient of the prestigious Irish Research Council (IRC) Postgraduate Scholarship (2014–2018). From 2017 to 2018, she taught a BA course in women’s rights at NUIG. She holds an MSc in International Relations (magna cum laude, first honours) from the Università di Roma III (2008) and an MSc in Political Science from the Universiteit van Amsterdam (2006). Her doctoral project analysed the relationship between indigenous peoples and minority groups’ and women’s rights, using post-2011 Morocco as a case study. Her areas of interest and expertise are: human rights, women’s rights and gender equality, indigenous peoples’ and minorities’ rights, North Africa and the Middle East. Prior to embarking upon her PhD studies, the author spent over eight years working for human rights NGOs and international organisations, including Amnesty International USA (2006); the Human Solidarity Group in post-tsunami Sri Lanka (2007); the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from 2008 to 2012 in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe (Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, [the former Yugoslav Republic of] Macedonia and Poland); and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) from 2012 to 2014 in both Tunisia and Lebanon (covering the Middle East and North Africa regions). In 2017, she published an article in the Journal of North African Studies titled ‘Violence against women: The stark reality behind Morocco’s human rights progress (available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GNxZgJZscbgkk9iWpcWB/full). The author currently works as a Humanitarian Protection Advisor at Trócaire (Ireland).

ORCID

Silvia Gagliardi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3802-5521

Notes

1. Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

2. Joshua Castellino and Kathleen Cavanaugh, Minority Rights in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2013).

3. Eric Davis, Memories of State - Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 2005).

4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

5. Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford University Press, 1995); Susan Moller Okin, ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions’, Ethics 108, no. 4 (1998): 661–84; Ayelet Shachar, ‘Should Church and State Be Joined at the Altar? Women’s Rights and the Multicultural Dilemma’, in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, eds. Will Kymlicka and Norman Wayne (Oxford University Press, 2000); Ratna Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 1–37; Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’, Feminist Review, no. 80 (2005): 44–63.

6. Susan Moller Okin, ed., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton University Press, 1999).

7. Chandran Kukathas, ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’ in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kimlicka (Oxford University Press, 1992).

8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric’, 1–37; Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko, ‘Rethinking Human Rights and Culture through Female Genital Surgeries’, Human Rights Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2015): 107–36.

9. Isabelle R. Gunning, ‘Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries’, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 23 (1992): 189.

10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978); Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

11. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.

12. Gunning, ‘Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism’, 189.

13. Morocco has the world’s highest proportion of Amazigh-speakers while estimates of their actual number in Morocco vary between 40% and 60%. For more information, see: http://minorityrights.org/country/morocco/ (accessed January 15, 2018). According to a leading Amazigh activist, the latest statistics as posted on official websites estimated exclusively Amazigh-speakers to be 28% of the whole population while this number would rise to 70% if it included Moroccans who speak both Arabic and Amazigh. Official meeting with A.A. during TWIZA Festival, Tangiers, 16 August 2013.

14. Castellino and Cavanaugh, Minority Rights in the Middle East, 5.

15. Ibid., 6–7.

16. Ibid., 172.

17. ‘It is commonly accepted in the literature on North African history that the indigenous people of this area are the Berbers, or the Imazighen, as they refer to themselves. (…) [However] The current number of Imazighen, or rather speakers of one of the Amazigh varieties, has remained a matter of estimates.’ Katherine E. Hoffman, ‘Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction: Gendered Variation in the Indigenous Margins of Morocco’, Language & Communication 26, no. 2 (2006): 144–67.

18. As external and internal agents use respectively the terms ‘Berbers’ and ‘Amazigh’ (literally, free man) to refer to this community, the author will follow whatever appellation a given scholar or community member used for the group. Throughout the text, the terms will be thus used interchangeably.

19. Allen Fromherz, ‘Between Springs: The Berber Dilemma’, Muslim World 104, no. 3 (2014): 243.

20. In the spring of that year, the Algerian Government decided to cancel an academic lecture by Mouloud Mammeri, a Kabyle intellectual and important member of Algeria’s Berber community. The Government’s decision caused mass protests to erupt in Tizi Ouzou and others parts of Algeria, which came to a head between student protesters and riot police on the 20 April 1980. This series of protests ‘did not bring immediate results, but it did mark the effective birth of a socio-political movement striving to defend Berber rights.’ Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘North Africa’s “Berber Question”’, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 4 (2016): 546. See also: Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, ‘Contested Identities: Berbers, “Berberism” and the State in North Africa’, The Journal of North African Studies 6, no. 3 (2001): 32.

21. Jane E. Goodman, ‘Reinterpreting the Berber Spring: From Rite of Reversal to Site of Convergence’, The Journal of North African Studies 9, no. 3 (2004): 61.

22. Maddy-Weitzman, ‘Contested Identities’, 25.

23. Alison Baker, Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women, Suny Series in Oral & Public History (New York: State of University of New York Press, 1998), 19.

24. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, ‘A Turning Point? The Arab Spring and the Amazigh Movement’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 14 (2015): 2499.

25. Fromherz, ‘Between Springs’, 241.

26. Lauermann defines the Amazigh Cultural Movement as one of ‘Amazigh cultural groups, which operate at the state level.’ See: John Lauermann, ‘Amazigh Nationalism in the Maghreb’, Geographical Bulletin 50, no. 1 (2009): 40.

27. Castellino and Cavanaugh, Minority Rights in the Middle East, 173.

28. David Crawford, ‘Morocco’s Invisible Imazighen’, Journal of North African Studies 7, no. 1 (2002): 59.

29. Moha Ennaji, ‘The Berber (Amazigh) Movement in Morocco: Local Activism, the State, and Transnationalism’, in Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, Routledge Series in Middle Eastern Politics, ed. Moha Ennaji (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 97.

30. Maddy-Weitzman, ‘Contested Identities’, 28.

31. Crawford, ‘Morocco’s Invisible Imazighen’, 54.

32. David Crawford and Katherine E. Hoffman, ‘Essentially Amazigh: Urban Berbers and the Global Village’, The Arab-African and Islamic Worlds: Interdisciplinary Studies (2000): 119.

33. Hoffman, ‘Berber Language Ideologies, Maintenance, and Contraction’, 146.

34. Crawford, ‘Morocco’s Invisible Imazighen’, 60–7.

35. Ibid., 67.

36. Crawford and Hoffman, ‘Essentially Amazigh’, 119.

37. Ibid.

38. Salem Chaker, Berbères Aujourd’hui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 7.

39. Crawford, ‘Morocco’s Invisible Imazighen’, 63.

40. Ibid., 62.

41. Ibid., 65.

42. Crawford and Hoffman, ‘Essentially Amazigh’, 121.

43. Ahmed Boukous, ‘The Planning of Standardizing Amazigh Language: The Moroccan Experience’, IRCAM (2014): 11.

44. Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco, vol. 36, Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, ed. Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), XV.

45. Ibid., XVII.

46. Niamh Reilly, ‘Doing Transnational Feminism, Transforming Human Rights: The Emancipatory Possibilities Revisited’, Irish Journal of Sociology 19, no. 2 (2011): 60.

47. An example of this practice was displayed at several international conferences in Morocco in which the author participated during the 2012–2014 biennium, wherein some secular feminists would not agree to discuss women’s issues at the same table as Islamic feminists. See also: Zakia Salime, ‘Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco’, vol. 36, Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, ed. Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

48. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002).

49. Nadia Guessous, Genealogies of Feminism: Leftist Feminist Subjectivity in the Wake of the Islamic Revival in Contemporary Morocco (Columbia University, 2011), 12.

50. Ibid.

51. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society, Revised 1st Midland Book ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 1987).

52. Fatima Sadiqi, ‘The Impact of Islamization on Moroccan Feminisms’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 32, no. 1 (2006): 38.

53. Guessous, Genealogies of Feminism.

54. Zakia Salime, ‘The War on Terrorism: Appropriation and Subversion by Moroccan Women’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2007): 21.

55. Guessous, Genealogies of Feminism; Aura Lounasmaa, Women and Modernity: The Global and the Local in Moroccan Women’s Ngos’s Advocacy and Public Awareness Work (National University of Ireland in Galway, 2013).

56. Reilly, ‘Doing Transnational Feminism’, 60–76.

57. Sylvia I. Bergh and Daniele Rossi-Doria, ‘Plus Ça Change? Observing the Dynamics of Morocco’s ‘Arab Spring’ in the High Atlas’, Mediterranean Politics 20, no. 2 (2015): 198.

58. Dahir Pertaining to the Promulgation of the Constitution of Morocco (2011), preamble.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., art. 5.

61. Ibid., preamble.

62. Ibid., art. 19.

63. Ibid., arts. 6 and 64.

64. Interview with W.B., Marrakech area, 15 May 2017.

65. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, ‘The 2011 Moroccan Constitution: A Critical Analysis’ (2012), 17.

66. Dahir Pertaining to the Promulgation of the Constitution of Morocco (2011), art. 17.

67. ILO Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (No. 169). 1991 (entered into force).

68. ILO Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (No. 107). 1959 (entered into force).

69. Lee Swepston, ‘Indigenous Peoples in International Law and Organizations’, in International Law and Indigenous Peoples, eds. Joshua Castellino and Niamh Walsh (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2005), 55.

70. Irène Bellier and Martin Préaud, ‘Emerging Issues in Indigenous Rights: Transformative Effects of the Recognition of Indigenous Peoples’, The International Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 3 (2012): 486, note 8.

71. See: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf, p. 4 (accessed February 5, 2018).

72. See, inter alia: Mounira M. Charrad, States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (London: University of California Press, 2001); David M. Hart, ‘The Berber Dahir of 1930 in Colonial Morocco: Then and Now (1930–1996)’, The Journal of North African Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 11–33; William A. Hoisington, ‘Cities in Revolt: The Berber Dahir (1930) and France’s Urban Strategy in Morocco’, Journal of Contemporary History 13, no. 3 (1978): 433–48; Susan G. Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

73. In the RNGS model, the State responses can be: Dual Response (special group involved in policy process and policy coincides with movement goals); pre-emption (special group is not involved in policy process while policy coincides with movement goals); co-optation (special group is involved in policy process while the policy does not coincide with movement goals); and, no response (special group is not involved in policy process and policy does not coincide with movement goals). See: Melissa Haussman and Birgit Sauer, Gendering the State in the Age of Globalization: Women’s Movements and State Feminism in Postindustrial Democracies (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 10.

74. See: UNGA Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Adopted 10 December 1948) Resolution 217 a(Iii) (UDHR); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Adopted 16 December 1966, Entered into Force 23 March 1976) 999 UNTS 171 (ICCPR), art. 9.

75. Interview with F.A., young, homeworking mother, with few years of primary education, originally from the countryside and living in an urban setting, Agadir area, 14 October 2016.

76. Shital V. Gunjate and Udgir Shivaji Mahavidyalaya, ‘Postcolonial Feminist Theory: An Overview’, (Nanded, 2012), 286.

77. Interview with W.B., university professor and women’s rights activist, Marrakech area, 15 May 2017.

78. Interview with A.A., university graduate and job seeker in an urban area but originally from the mountains Middle Atlas area, 26 September 2017.

79. Interview with S.B., Amazigh activist and university graduate working for an NGO, Rabat area, 21 September 2016.

80. Interview with F.A., high school English teacher in rural area, Agadir area, 13 October 2016.

81. Interview with S.B., project manager and PhD graduate, Agadir area, 7 October 2016.

82. Interview with Z.Y., illiterate, homeworking rural mother, Middle Atlas area, 27 September 2016.

83. Interview with L.K., illiterate, homeworking, young mother living in an urban area, Marrakech area, 15 May 2017.

84. Interview with A.A. (afore cited), Middle Atlas area, 26 September 2016.

85. Interview with S.I., university student in her early 20s living in an urban area, Agadir area, 17 October 2016.

86. Interview with Z.W., high school student who grew up in a neighbouring Arab country before returning home to Morocco in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Rabat area, 22 September 2016.

87. Interview with H.B., primary school French teacher in an urban area Rabat area, 22 September 2016.

88. Ibid.

89. Interview with N.A., high school graduate and intern at a women’s local development centre, Middle Atlas area, 27 September 2016.

90. Interview with M.Z., child minder working in a hotel with few years of university education, Middle atlas area, 29 September 2016.

91. Interview with S.B. (afore cited), Rabat area, 21 September 2016.

92. Interview with Z.B., illiterate, homeworking mother living in a rural setting, Ait Baha area, 10 October 2016.

93. See: https://pomeps.org/2016/04/15/women-and-the-right-to-land-in-morocco-the-sulaliyyates-movement/ (accessed November 23, 2017).

94. ‘As a legal status, collective land dates back to the time of the French protectorate (1912–56), which issued a royal decree in 1919 to give status to land that belonged neither to individuals nor to the state but was used by communities (Bouderbala 1996). Since then this decree has regulated the property rights of the vaguely defined category of “tribes, fractions, villages or other ethnic groups” (decree of 1919, Article 1) over agricultural or pastoral land that they use as a collective.’ Yasmine Berriane, ‘Bridging Social Divides: Leadership and the Making of an Alliance for Women’s Land-Use Rights in Morocco’, Review of African Political Economy 43, no. 149 (2016): 351. See also: Negib Bouderbala, Les Terres Collectives du Maroc dans la Première Période du Protectorat (1912–1930), 79 Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée (1996).

95. Berriane, ‘Bridging Social Divides’.

96. See: https://pomeps.org/2016/04/15/women-and-the-right-to-land-in-morocco-the-sulaliyyates-movement/ (accessed November 23, 2017).

97. Berriane, ‘Bridging Social Divides’.

98. Ibid., 352.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council [grant number RCS1327].