Moroccan soldiers attack Sahrawi and Moroccan students in Marrakesh

It seems something unites previously-fractious Sahrawi and Moroccan students at Marrakesh University: they're both not jackboot thugs, and they get repressed by the same. On the 17th of May Moroccan police stormed the campus, and while we're just getting the images recently, one thing's clear: it was bad.

Demonstrations started after 19 Moroccans got food poisoning. It seems as though the Sahrawis used student anger to call for self-determination. Police officers uninterested in compromise and negotiation responded, and threw 2 Sahrawis and 1 Moroccan out of windows and shot tear gas at other students (video of the tear gas attack's aftermath).

The Norwegian Support Committee has several other videos shot by Rabab Amidane before, during, and after the assault on campus. I was affected by this one, showing all the university rooms ransacked by Moroccan police. It's sad to see these rooms touched by the hand of a Moroccan elite afraid of its own sons and daughters.



This anti-student bias isn't limited to the police: according one of the videos, some in Marrakesh are refusing to rent to the rebellious students, leaving them to sleep on the streets or in internet cafes.

I recently read Joseph Califano's The Student Revolution, a book about unrest at universities across the world in 1968. One of Califano's themes is that poor university conditions allowed small radical groups of students to win support from the student mainstream for their off-campus politics. Maybe the same thing will happen in Morocco, as Sahrawis are able to mix with politically-active Moroccans on student issues.

Update: the Moroccan student isn't dead, fortunately. I'm sorry for the mistake.