Brussels, 07/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - European Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy Commissioner Štefan Füle began a two-day visit to Morocco on Monday 7 February. The purpose of the visit, the commissioner said before his departure, is to give “a further push in reforms currently underway, particularly in areas such as justice reform and the convergence of Morocco's regulations with the EU's”.
The political tensions in the Maghreb, in Tunisia and Egypt principally, will form the backdrop to his meetings in Rabat where he will have talks with the prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, minister of economy and finance, minister of agriculture and maritime fisheries, with the first presidents of the two Chambers of the Moroccan Parliament, and the secretary-general of the Maghreb Arab Union.
“We will also discuss how the EU can best support regional integration in the Maghreb in order to help support job and growth creation”, Füle said. The regional dimension, promoted by Morocco, has the further advantage of tying the “southern provinces”, the disputed Western Sahara, more closely to the country. The commissioner will also take a ride on the tram in Rabat, an EU-funded project.
Morocco, like its neighbour Algeria and, further away, the countries of the Mashreq, which a re seeking to avoid any rise in pressure from the people of the kind seen in Tunisia, is adapting its economic policies to meet the needs of the street (lowering the prices of essential foodstuffs, providing support to those people and regions left behind by the development process, victims of less than reassuring governance). Throughout the Maghreb, alarm bells have been sounded. Though governments have been trying to persuade everyone that their cases are all different, the same “ingredients” are to be found in them all, retorted Moroccan writer and keen observer of his society Abdellatif Laabi. In a long interview in the French-language weekly TelQuel (As it is), he says that “the country's economic lift-off, some of the first fruits of which are beyond doubt, while others have to be treated with more caution”, has been achieved “at the cost of democracy”. Echoing this sentiment, Algerian daily Le Quotidien d'Oran wrote in its editorial a few days ago that “political openness, democratisation and greater respect for popular sovereignty and civil and individual liberties” are unavoidable. Such a “prospect, which was quite unthinkable for any Arab country before the Jasmine Revolution, is on the way to becoming a reality in Egypt and also in Jordan, Yemen and Sudan. Algeria will not be left unaffected”. (F.B./transl.rt)