Fátima has just returned from visiting her husband in Mohammedía prison, 20 kilometers from Casablanca. Her daughters, five and three years old, have just returned from visiting her father at his workplace, a kind of factory or office with a pink-painted façade. “I told them that she had to go to work,” says the woman. The lie has nothing to do with shame for the crime committed, but with the need to protect children from situations that, perhaps, they cannot assimilate. Zouhir Ainaaissa, a Spanish citizen born in Morocco, is serving a two-year prison sentence for sharing news and videos on Facebook about the Rif protests in 2017. He has already been behind bars for 14 months and has asked, so far without success, to serve the sentence. in Spain.
Zouhir, 35, has lived in Catalonia since he was a child. His parents left the Rif region from which they originate and settled in Montesquiu (Barcelona), a town of about 1,000 inhabitants in inland Catalonia. From here he has not moved. When he met Fatima, he lured her to her town, where they make a living and have started a family. They both work in the same company: she is an administrator, he is a refrigerator technician. Despite his imprisonment, the job “will be waiting for him,” as the boss has promised Fátima.
The businessman’s empathy is a sign of the affection that the residents of Montesquiu feel for Zouhir and his family. His parents had participated in the so-called “linguistic couples”, which allowed locals and newcomers to hold meetings to promote the learning of the Catalan language. The mayor, Carles Colomo, also remembers the involvement of the Ainaaissa in the town festivals and how in the calçotades popular people kept “some cuts of chicken” for themselves. The City Council has unanimously approved a motion to request his release and his return home and denounces that he has been the victim of an attack on freedom of expression.
The peaceful family life was broken during the holidays of 2022. “We were thinking about where to go, whether to stay here or travel to Morocco. We hadn’t gone for a long time. In the end, we decided,” explains Fátima. They traveled to the south of the peninsula and traveled by ferry with the two girls. When they disembarked in Nador, on the night of August 8, the police took Zouhir into custody without explaining why. He did not know it (he could not know it), but the authorities had issued a search and arrest warrant against him for events that had occurred four years earlier.
In the spring of 2017, intense protests broke out in the Rif (northern Morocco) led by young people, fed up with the lack of opportunities. Neither the remittances sent by migrants from Europe nor the cultivation of hashish that enriched a few had improved their living conditions. The mobilizations were harshly repressed by the Alawite monarchy, but videos of what happened in cities like Al Hoceima were spread on social networks. From his home in Montesquiu, Zouhir shared some of those videos and news on his Facebook profile (already in 2018).
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Morocco’s zeal towards any movement with autonomist or separatist overtones is extreme. And its surveillance capacity has been proven through the use of systems such as Pegasus, the software Israeli for espionage through mobile phones. Zouhir’s case also demonstrates that the regime effectively monitors social networks, even of citizens who have lived abroad for decades and who, like him, now only use the Spanish passport. “Zouhir shared those videos in Spain, but the Moroccan Penal Code allows criminal acts committed outside the country to be prosecuted under a single formula, that of a threat to national security,” says Marc Serra, the family’s lawyer who, with many difficulties, He is trying to make the man serve the remainder of his sentence in Spain.
Serving the sentence in Spain
Zouhir was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dirhams (about 1,000 euros) for a crime of insulting the flag and symbols of the Kingdom and instigation to commit these acts through electronic means. The proven facts of the sentence only state that he spread the videos of the Rif protest. Nothing more, he didn’t even leave comments on those posts. “When the protests subsided, he stopped sharing posts, his Facebook was inactive,” says Fátima, who was in shock for an arrest that has altered family life. The man was convicted in the first instance and on appeal with a speed that the Spanish justice system would like. He has already been in prison for 14 months because, in Morocco, the sentences are almost completely served.
The lawyer (and Montesquiu with him) is trying to get the family reunited as soon as possible. Last February, a file was opened so that, as a Spanish citizen, he could serve his sentence in a Catalan prison. The petition has not yet been resolved, as time passes and the two years in prison approach. Communication is not easy and is always indirect, through the Spanish consulate or embassy. “We are completely unaware of the status of the procedure. He meets the requirements, because he has Spanish nationality and has paid the fine. But it seems that the Prosecutor’s Office has yet to rule. We are not moving forward,” laments the lawyer. In parallel, Zouhir has also requested his provisional release.
From his cell in Mohammedia, a prison painted pink and where security measures are more lax, Zouhir can barely communicate with his family. He has the support of a brother who lives in Morocco. But he cannot receive letters from his wife or drawings from his daughters. Fátima has been able to go see him three times this year; the last one, this week. “I have seen him well. Holding on, but good.” The visits are short and somewhat disappointing because, unlike in Spain, there are no face-to-face rooms, only a huge room where the rest of the prisoners are: for the girls, the co-workers of a father who has already been away for too long. from home and whom they have, says Fátima, very much looking forward to having back home.
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