MOROCCO: Many elite Arabs opt for American-style education, moving away from the French mold

The 259 students who graduated this year from the Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco’s only English-language college, are practically guaranteed a job -- unlike those Moroccans who went through the country’s French-inspired education system.

Commencement weekend at AUI, as it is commonly known, is not a very Moroccan affair. The atmosphere at the campus, set amid the pine and cedar forests of the Mid-Atlas mountain range, is part Swiss ski village, part Ivy League college. The university is in Ifrane, a mountain resort originally built for the French colonial elite wishing to escape the summer heat of Casablanca and Rabat. On a recent weekend in June, it was beset by a different kind of elite: AUI’s class of 2010 and their proud parents.

It was quickly obvious from the speeches that AUI did things the American way. 

“AUI gives you not just a degree but a whole new personality,” said alumni President Khalid Baddou. 

“AUI is more than a university; it is a community with an amazing culture. Here, you are given the weapons to face the real world with,” said science and engineering graduate Ahmad Arjdane.

MOROCCO: New magazine braves risks to give voice to Arab homosexuals

Mithly means "the same as me" in Arabic; it is also a respectful way to refer to homosexuals. It is a word that the people behind Mithly magazine would like to see replace the more common "shazz," meaning pervert or deviant in Arabic, or "zemel," an expletive to describe gays in the Moroccan Berber dialect.

Mithly was launched in the Moroccan capital Rabat earlier this month. Even though the magazine has received partial funding from the European Union, it was printed clandestinely and its first 200 issues were distributed under the counter. 

In Morocco, as in the rest of the Arab world, homosexuality is a criminal offense, punishable with six months to three years in jail.

"So far the reporting about homosexuals in Morocco has been the monopoly of the mainstream media, most of which describe us as perverts and a menace to society," said a journalist for Mithly who identified himself only as Mourad. "Mithly is a chance for homosexuals to give their side of the story. We wanted to give homosexuals in the Arab world a voice."

MOROCCO: Rock, rap and heavy metal music fans rejoice in newfound freedom

Most of the head-bangers pogo dancing wildly to heavy metal music at Casablanca's Tremplin Festival recently were too young to remember a time when people were sent to jail in Morocco for doing just that. 

Seven years after Morocco's satanic-music trial, the alternative music scene in the North African country is alive and kicking; it has even received a grant from king Mohammed VI himself.

The Tremplin festival, which took place at Casablanca's disaffected art deco slaughterhouses, is a kind of  "American Idol" for the alternative music scene in Morocco: The winners go on to play the much larger L'Boulevard festival in Casablanca next month. The last edition of L'Boulevard drew no less than 160,000 visitors, spread out over six days and two football stadiums – enough to attract the interest of major commercial sponsors.

It wasn't always like this. One of the members on this year's jury was 30-year-old Nabyl Guennouni. Now a manager at an events agency in Rabat, Guennouni was one of 14 heavy-metal musicians who in 2003 were arrested and sent to prison for practicing "satanism" and "endangering the Islamic faith."

"We weren't doing anything wrong, but the authorities didn't understand what we were doing," he said. "They saw a bunch of kids hanging out together dressed in black T-shirts, and they wanted to know what was behind it."

MOROCCO: Christians deported, accused of proselytizing to orphaned children

Their crime, Herman Boonstra said, was letting the kids read from a children’s Bible. “Stories of Noah and the ark and Jonas and the whale. Stories which appear in the Koran as well.”

Last week, Boonstra, of the Netherlands, and 15 other foreign nationals at the Village of Hope orphanage in Ain Leuh, a town in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains, were deported by Moroccan authorities for proselytizing. Elsewhere in Morocco, more Christians were deported or put on a list for deportation, including a “significant” number of Americans, the U.S. Embassy reported.

On Friday, Boonstra and others from the Village of Hope issued an appeal to the Moroccan king on their website, asking him "to act with mercy and help us reach a point of compromise and reunite the 33 children with the only parents they know."

Herman and Jellie Boonstra consider the eight Moroccan children they had taken in as their own. At Village of Hope, children were placed in family units, with a man and woman, rather than dormitory-style accommodations. The orphanage was home to 33 children in all, mostly abandoned by women who had become pregnant out of wedlock.

“They were our children. Now suddenly they aren’t anymore,” an emotional Boonstra told Babylon & Beyond by phone from Spain.

MOROCCO: 'Superterrorist' Belliraj denies accusations, claims torture

The accusations read like a spy novel. Following his arrest in early 2008, Moroccan authorities linked 52-year-old Abdelkader Belliraj, a Belgian citizen of Moroccan descent, with virtually every known terrorist on record.

Belliraj allegedly met with Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri during the week preceding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; was granted a private audience with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; and was tied to six murders in Brussels, Belgium, during the 1980s -- four of them as a hit man for Abu Nidal, the Palestinian militant whose organization is credited by the U.S. State Department with terrorist attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring almost 900 people.

Belliraj allegedly confessed to all these allegations under interrogation by Moroccan police but retracted everything at his trial, claiming he had been tortured. He was convicted and received a life sentence in July 2009, together with dozens of other defendants, who received sentences of two to 25 years in prison.

Last week, as his trial was set to start in a court in Sale, near the Moroccan city of Rabat, Belliraj gave interviews to two Belgian newspapers on a cellphone that had been smuggled into his cell.

MOROCCO: Caught between two worlds, teen fears for her safety in both

Should women escaping religious or cultural oppression in their own countries be offered asylum the way political dissidents are? 

That's the issue that's come up with a teenage Moroccan girl who fled to Europe but was forced back to her home country. 

In August 2005, 14-year-old Najlae Lhimer left Morocco for France to escape an arranged marriage imposed by her father. Four-and-a-half years later, she finds herself back in Morocco – hiding from her family and desperately trying to find a way back to her friends and high school in France.

Najlae was deported to Casablanca on Feb. 20, one day after she went to the French police near Orléans, doctor's certificate in hand, to file a complaint against her brother, who she said had been beating her for the past year and a half.

Instead she found herself detained for being in France illegally, and she was put on the first available flight to Casablanca.

"I feel like I'm in a foreign country," she said during an interview in a Rabat hotel on Saturday. "I have only one dream today and that is to return to France and continue my studies."

MOROCCO: Pioneer of independent press silenced amid censorship worries

Morocco is probably among Arab nations with the most vibrant press. But after a decade of openness, press freedom appears to be on the decline again. 

The latest victim: Le Journal Hebdomadaire, the first publication to openly criticize the monarchy.

One day late last month, Hicham Bennani was putting the final touches on an article for the next edition of the French-language weekly newspaper.  It was about the rapid rise of the Parti Authenticité et Modernité, or PAM, also known as the "Parti de l'Ami du Roi" (the party of the king's friend.) 

"But I had like a premonition that I was working for nothing," the 30-year-old said.  

His premonition proved correct: That evening, as the paper was being put to bed, bailiffs entered the offices of Le Journal in Casablanca. 

"At first they just served us with the court papers," said another journalist, Omar Radi, 23. "But 15 minutes later they returned with a locksmith. That's when we knew the end had come."