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Anarchism in Morocco has its roots in the federalism practiced by Amazigh communities in pre-colonial Morocco. During the Spanish Civil War, Moroccan nationalists formed connections with Spanish anarchists in an attempt to ignite a war of national liberation against Spanish colonialism, but this effort was not successful. Despite the brief establishment of an anarchist movement in post-war Morocco, the movement was suppressed by the newly independent government, before finally reemerging in the 21st century.
Morocco was largely stateless until the establishment of the independent Amazigh kingdom of Mauritania in the 3rd century BCE, but was eventually incorporated into the Roman Empire. The Muslim conquest of the Maghreb took place throughout the later 7th century CE, bringing Morocco under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate and converting the indigenous Amazigh tribes to Islam, though they still retained their customary laws. [1] In 740, spurred on by Kharijite agitators, the native Amazigh revolted against the caliphate. Morocco subsequently passed out of the caliphate's control and fragmented into a collection of small, independent Berber states such as Berghwata, Sijilmassa and Nekor. [2] The Berbers went on to shape their own version of Islam. Some, like the Banu Ifran, retained their connection with radical puritan Islamic sects, while others, like the Berghwata, constructed a new syncretic faith. [3] [4] By the 11th century, a series of Amazigh dynasties rose to rule over all of Morocco, these included the Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids and Wattasids.
In the 16th century, Wattasid rule was displaced by the Saadi dynasty, which itself was succeeded by the Alaouite dynasty in the 17th century. But the centralized rule of the Alaouite Sultanate could not be totally extended throughout Moroccan territory, as many Amazigh tribes did not recognize the Sultan and did not submit to the government. These tribes organized federations from the bottom-up, in opposition to the central government, in which neighborhood representatives and village committees coordinated day-to-day affairs. Within these federations, property and the means of production were held collectively, where farms were worked on a cooperative basis without money exchanging hands. The Moroccan anarchist Brahim Filali examined the Amazigh federalism of pre-colonial Morocco and compared it to the modern-day concept of anarchist federalism, posing it as an example that could be drawn upon by African anarchists in their own organizing. [5]
At the turn of the 20th century, Morocco was colonized by Spain and France, which divided the country into two European-controlled protectorates. The new governments faced resistance to colonial rule, particularly from Amazigh tribes, who were seeing their autonomy being stripped away. Early anti-colonial revolts were led by the Jebala and Izayen confederations, but the most prominent of these revolts culminated in the Rif War of the 1920s, in which Rifians led by Abd el-Krim briefly established a confederal republic and conducted a protracted guerilla war against the colonial regimes. However, the Republic of the Rif was eventually defeated and Abd el-Krim was exiled to Réunion. Resistance to colonial rule continued into the early 1930s, but was eventually crushed.
With the outbreak of the Spanish coup of July 1936, the nationalists seized control of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Many Moroccans were drafted into the Army of Africa to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In response, the anarchist newspaper Solidarid Obrera began to openly call for the self-determination of the Rif, drawing attention to the nationalists' "reign of terror" in Morocco, and urged workers in the Rif to prepare an armed insurrection against the nationalists. [6]
In August 1936, Joan Garcia i Oliver met with the Egyptian teacher Marcelo Argila and sent him to Geneva in order to contact Moroccan nationalists. He returned in the company of the Moroccan Action Committee (MAC), which proposed to Garcia i Oliver a Moroccan uprising in exchange for a declaration of independence and the provision of arms and finances. The Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA) agreed to the terms, signing a pact with the MAC on September 20. Meanwhile, Pierre Besnard, secretary of the International Workers' Association (IWA), also proposed a plan to break Abd el-Krim out of his captivity on Réunion, but this too required a declaration of independence for Spanish Morocco to be secured. [7] However, when a copy of the proposals were delivered to the republican government of Francisco Largo Caballero, the plan was rejected, in an attempt to avoid conflict with France. [8] [9] The CCMA was subsequently dissolved on October 1, and even when Garcia i Oliver and other leaders of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) joined the republican government, no major changes were made to the government's position on Morocco. In contrast, the nationalist commander Francisco Franco had been persuaded to grant certain freedoms to Moroccans, which included allowing the publication of a local newspaper. [7]
Anti-Moroccan racism began to swell through the ranks of the republican faction, with Federica Montseny characterizing the military uprising in such terms: "if they were Spaniards, if they were patriots, they would not have unleashed the… Moors on Spain, imposing on Spain their fascistic civilisation, not as a Christian civilisation but a Moorish civilisation". When enemy soldiers were captured by republican forces, Moroccans faced particularly discriminatory levels of violence from their captors. Republican propaganda urged men to enlist in order to prevent Spanish women from being "despoiled by the Moors", in a move which was criticized by the anarcha-feminist Mujeres Libres. The editorial board of Solidaridad Obrera was also replaced with another, which began to propagate racist and even imperialist views in the paper. [6]
In 1940, the Italian anarchist Celso Persici fled from the French authorities to Casablanca, where he joined the Moroccan resistance to fight against Fascist Italy in the Italian campaign. [10] Following the end of World War II, the Mouvement libertaire nord-africain (MLNA) was established in French Algeria, with contacts in the French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco. Guy-Virgile Martin was among the anarchist activists with a presence in the North African press, working as a teacher in Morocco, where he experienced the country's independence from France. [11] In a letter sent to the Algerian anarchist Fernand Doukhan in January 1958, Martin described the isolation that anarchists were experiencing in the newly independent Morocco, which led him to join the Moroccan Communist Party, in which he became a leading figure. [12]
With the founding of the Moroccan anarchist journal Ici et Maintenant in 2004, the editor Brahim Filali began to receive harassment and threats for his work, culminating in the journal's offices being set on fire on June 23, 2005. These acts of intimidation were met with condementation by Reporters Without Borders, which connected the harassment to the newspaper's support of a miners' strike in Imini. [13] Filali appealed for support, which was taken up internationally by the General Confederation of Labor in Spain and Alternative libertaire in France, which helped to put together an appeal titled "Protect the freedom of the press in Morocco, support Brahim Fillali", which was signed by 20 French, Spanish and Moroccan organizations and communicated to the Moroccan press on August 5, 2005. [14] Undeterred by the repression against the publication, Filali was among a group of Moroccan anarchists that established the Centre libertaire d'études et de recherches (CLER) in Rabat, which worked to "collect, classify and archive everything that has to do with anarchism", establishing a library, translating works into the Arabic language and organizing a number of events. [15]
Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Khaṭābī, better known as Abd el-Krim, was a Moroccan political and military leader and the president of the Republic of the Rif. He and his brother M'Hammad led a large-scale revolt by a coalition of Riffian tribes against the Spanish and French Protectorates of the Rif and the rest of Morocco. His guerrilla tactics, which included the first-ever use of tunneling as a technique of modern warfare, directly influenced Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. He also became one of the major figures of Arab nationalism, which he actively supported.
The Government of the Republic of the Rif was established on 18 September 1921 when the Riffian Tribes, led by Abd el-Krim, beat Spain in the Battle of Annual during the Rif War and created the Confederal Republic of the Tribes of the Rif.
The Spanish protectorate in Morocco was established on 27 November 1912 by a treaty between France and Spain that converted the Spanish sphere of influence in Morocco into a formal protectorate.
The Republic of the Rif was a confederate republic in the Rif, Morocco, that existed between 1921 and 1926. It was created in September 1921, when a coalition of Rifians and Jebala led by Abd el-Krim revolted in the Rif War against the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. The French would intervene on the side of Spain in the later stages of the conflict. A protracted struggle for independence killed many Rifians and Spanish–French soldiers, and witnessed the use of chemical weapons by the Spanish army—their first widespread deployment since the end of the World War I. The eventual Spanish–French victory was owed to the technological and manpower advantages despite their lack of morale and coherence. Following the war's end, the Republic was ultimately dissolved in 1926.
Anarchism in Africa refers both to purported anarchic political organisation of some traditional African societies and to modern anarchist movements in Africa.
Joseph Déjacque was a French political journalist and poet. A house painter by trade, during the 1840s, he became involved in the French labour movement and taught himself how to write poetry. He was an active participant in the French Revolution of 1848, fighting on the barricades during the June Days uprising, for which he was arrested and imprisoned. He quickly became a target for political repression by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's government, which imprisoned him for his poetry and forced him to flee into exile. His experiences radicalised him towards anarchism and he regularly criticised republican politicians for their anti-worker sentiment.
The Restoration or Bourbon Restoration was the period in Spanish history between the First Spanish Republic and the Second Spanish Republic from 1874 to 1931. It began on 29 December 1874, after a coup d'état by General Arsenio Martínez Campos ended the First Spanish Republic and restored the monarchy under Alfonso XII, and ended on 14 April 1931 with the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic.
Gaston Leval was a French anarcho-syndicalist, combatant and historian of the Spanish Revolution.
Anarchism in France can trace its roots to thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who grew up during the Restoration and was the first self-described anarchist. French anarchists fought in the Spanish Civil War as volunteers in the International Brigades. According to journalist Brian Doherty, "The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist movement's many publications was in the tens of thousands in France alone."
The Rif War was an armed conflict fought from 1921 to 1926 between Spain and the Berber (Amazigh) tribes of the mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco.
André Prudhommeaux was a French anarchist bookstore owner whose shop in Paris specialized in social history and was a place for many debates and discussions. He was an agronomist, libertarian, editor of Le Libertaire and Le Monde Libertaire, writer, and journalist.
During the Third Rif War in Spanish Morocco between 1921 and 1927, the Spanish Army of Africa deployed chemical weapons in an attempt to put down the Berber rebellion against colonial rule in the region of the Rif led by the guerrilla Abd el-Krim. In 1921, following the Rifian victory in the Battle of Annual, which was considered the worst Spanish defeat of the 20th-century, the Spanish army pursued a campaign of retribution involving the indiscriminate and routine dropping of toxic gas bombs targeting civilian populations, markets and rivers.
Fédération Anarchiste is an anarchist federation in France, Belgium and Switzerland. It is a member of the International of Anarchist Federations since the latter's establishment in 1968.
Georges Vincey was a French metal worker and militant anarchist. In October 1954 he became the first administrator of the newly reinvented Monde libertaire, a monthly publication produced on behalf of the Paris based Anarchist Federation.
Le Libertaire is a Francophone anarchist newspaper established in New York City in June 1858 by the exiled anarchist Joseph Déjacque. It appeared at slightly irregular intervals until February 1861. The title reappeared in Algiers in 1892 and was then produced in Brussels between 1893 and 1894.
Libertarian possibilism was a political current in early-20th-century Spanish anarchism that advocated achieving the anarchist ends of ending the state and capitalism by participation in structures of contemporary parliamentary democracy. The name of the political position appeared for the first time between 1922 and 1923 within the discourse of the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist Salvador Seguí when he said, "We have to intervene in politics in order to take over the positions of the bourgeoisie".
Georges Fontenis was a school teacher who worked in Tours. He is more widely remembered on account of his political involvement, especially during the 1950s and 1960s.
Anarchism in Portugal first appeared in the form of organized groups in the mid-1880s. It was present from the first steps of the workers' movement, revolutionary unionism and anarcho-syndicalism had a lasting influence on the General Confederation of Labour, founded in 1919.
Anarchism in Bulgaria first appeared in the 1860s, within the national movement seeking independence from the Ottoman Empire, strongly influenced by the Russian revolutionary movement. Anarchism established itself as a distinct political movement at the end of the 19th century. It developed further in the 20th century, so much so that Bulgaria was one of the few countries in Eastern Europe where the organized anarchist movement enjoyed a real establishment throughout the country, until the seizure of power by the Bulgarian Communist Party. Under the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the anarchist movement survived underground, but was the victim of severe repression. From 1989, anarchism has been freely reconstituted.
Anarchism spread into Belgium as Communards took refuge in Brussels with the fall of the Paris Commune. Most Belgian members in the First International joined the anarchist Jura Federation after the socialist schism. Belgian anarchists also organized the 1886 Walloon uprising, the Libertarian Communist Group, and several Bruxellois newspapers at the turn of the century. Apart from new publications, the movement dissipated through the internecine antimilitarism in the interwar period. Several groups emerged mid-century for social justice and anti-fascism.