Yacoub al-Mansour: Site of the South-West-East-North Hoedown

Filled with the doldrums from early-onset nostalgia, I set out for Rabat to attend a conference sponsored by an organization called Réfugiés sans Frontières (RSF) – Morocco. The conference was held at the Fondation Orient-Occident in Rabat, the kind of place full of European funding and glossy pamphlets, two things that stand out in these parts. Curiously enough – and purposefully I later found out – the center is located in Yacoub al-Mansour, a sprawling conglomeration of neighborhoods that I had visited only once six years ago. The twenty-five minute bus ride from Rabat’s medina took me past a street choked with produce vendors, an outdoor semi-circle of porticoes meant to house small businesses whose plaza served as the site for ongoing games of pick-up soccer, and a shantytown. While Rabat has a distinct downtown, and entire districts full of villas that anchor the diplomatic and political elite circuits, I would guess that Yacoub al-Mansour, with 300,000 people, is at the city’s population density center. Among the neighborhoods inhabitants are many (thousands?) of the city’s sub-Saharan African immigrants, and while sub-Saharan Africans live in various neighborhoods around the city, Yacoub al-Mansour is known for its Congolese community.

The conference took place in a modest, level room, with seating, filled to capacity, for maybe a hundred people. The panelists were five, including a professor, the director of the Foundation, a member of OMDH (a Moroccan human rights organization), the director of RSF, himself a Congolese refugee, and the director of the UN High Commission for Refugees’ (HCR) Morocco bureau, a Dutch man. Behind them stood several men with guitars who were going to give a concert following the debate.

The presentations revolved mostly around HCR’s role in granting refugee and asylum status, and whether it could be more effective (there are reports of people getting deported by Moroccan authorities to Algeria while they wait for HCR to decide on their demand for asylum). There was also a fair amount of criticism for the EU’s immigration policy, which has increasingly emphasized border control over the last decade.

Then, the excitement started. The first man to speak during the open debate was a well-dressed Italian man who identified himself as an invitee representing the European Commission. He denounced the panelists for their irresponsible discourse, questioning the credibility of certain speakers, and claiming that behavior such as that demonstrated at this conference leads to, and indeed invites, immigrant mistreatment in Europe. Directly following this statement, he made for the exit. Two-thirds of those attending, mind you, were sub-Saharan immigrants, so the place was in an uproar.

A member of the audience and distinguished Moroccan professor in the field of immigration took the microphone and, before the Commission representative had left, engaged him with a rebuttal to his claims. Things seemed almost to be settled when a Congolese man subsequently took the microphone and announced that he felt insulted by the Italian man and therefore was going to reciprocate. He had to be shepherded behind a projection screen and cajoled into giving up the microphone by several compatriots.

The open floor returned to some kind of order, but I have to think that the debate the panelists had hoped for never quite materialized. A sympathetic Moroccan woman repeatedly bemoaned the sub-Saharan Africans’ suffering, suggesting that they come to the Foundations’ center for counseling. Another man got up and talked for a while in an excited manner, referencing Sarkozy several times apparently in an attempt to rally support for a new world order. He had to be asked to stop talking. Throughout all of this, cellphones rang and my neighbor’s handbag repeatedly spilled change onto the floor.

The only really interesting exchanges took place between immigrants who posed questions directly to the HCR director, who replied in an admirably measured way given the fact that he was being challenged to defend his bureau’s performance by members of a community that had staged a sit-in in front of the HCR offices the night before. Questions were raised as to how much material assistance HCR can offer, and who and why individuals of certain nationalities (DRC, Ivory Coast) are being granted refugee status while others (Mali, Niger, Senegal) typically are not.

Things were getting academic again when, in closing, the Euro Commish fellow felt the need to defend himself (as almost everyone else had used the platform to do, save certain immigrants and the distinguished professor). In doing so, he claimed to wish only the best for all of Africa and all Africans and, as proof, he said that his wife (not in attendance) was herself an African. Unsurprisingly, this was met with derisive applause.

In the end, I think I was taken as much by the stereotypes fulfilled in the “debate” as anything else: the Junior Berlusconi, well-dressed and poorly-spoken, the Dutch technocrat, evenhanded and good at everything but making jokes and mastering the French accent, the first Congolese speaker, angry, and the human rights militant, full of rhetoric that failed even to stir enthusiasm. Even the musicians behind the stage, waiting for the boggy words to end so that everyone could presumably forget about the issue temporarily and enjoy some old-fashioned African creativity, seemed to be filling a pre-determined role.

I left before the music with a bit of a headache, perhaps from concentrating on so many words that had been thrown about in the hot air. Yet, while I paint a picture of discord and disorganization, the debate also represented very real, lived concerns and needs. As one immigrant noted, people need to have the right to work and take transportation, two things notably restricted for sub-Saharans in Morocco. The immediacy of this issue, then, is anything but academic for those who fled one country and find themselves without rights in another one. At the same time, the reality of the issue, as several people noted, requires the interaction and cooperation of many actors, not by any means limited to HCR, but including the Moroccan state (notably absent at the conference), and the EU (unfortunately misrepresented). I guess, then, the headache could have also been the result of overstimulation, what with a kind of North-South confrontation taking place at the East-West institute.

Post-script: the nature of the immediacy of this situation, is evident in the ongoing sit-in led by Congolese immigrants before the HCR seat in Rabat, which, in response, has closed it's doors.