Clinton vows support to Muslim world

John Thorne
Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 12:15AM UAE / November 3. 2009 8:15PM GMT

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, speaks during the Sixth Forum for the Future in Marrakech, Morocco, yesterday. Abdelhak Senna / AFP

MARRAKECH, Morocco // Ten years ago in Morocco, Hillary Clinton met an illiterate father who dreamt that his daughter would become a doctor.

“Talent is universal; opportunities are not,” Mrs Clinton, now the US secretary of state, said yesterday in the Moroccan city of Marrakech, recalling the father she met and pledging redoubled US support for education, women’s rights and civil society throughout the Muslim world.

Local civil society leaders, meanwhile, stressed hopes that Mrs Clinton’s fine sentiment and promises of greater engagement will be accompanied by an increase in hard cash.

“We will seek to work with all of you in government and civil society to try to build local capacity, and empower local organisations and individuals, to create sustainable change,” Mrs Clinton said at the opening of the Forum for the Future, a yearly gathering of officials from the West and the Muslim world, as well as civil society leaders, to share ideas on development in Muslim countries.

Many of those countries suffer from ramshackle education systems and high unemployment, especially among youth, which has been aggravated by the global financial turmoil of the past year.

“True progress comes from within society and cannot be imposed from outside,” Mrs Clinton said, citing the call in June by Barack Obama, the US president, for a relationship with Muslim countries that is “comprehensive, rather than focused on a few political and security issues”. That should offer hope to Nawal Chahid, of the Women’s Association for Development and Solidarity (AFDS), a cash-strapped non-governmental organisation that runs five free dormitories for poor female students in south-central Morocco.

“The student residences are full, and many girls are left without housing,” said Ms Chahid, who manages the Marrakech dormitory, reserved for university students and called the Dar Talabat. “We can’t give the girls much, but we can give them food, a roof and help with studies.”

The AFDS has received targeted funding for its dormitories from USAID, a foreign aid arm of the US state department, and other international donors. But this year funding for dormitories has dried up apart from a token sum from the Moroccan government, and the organisation is running up debts, said its president, Malika Chahid. “Illiteracy is a major problem, and we simply don’t have the funds we need.”

While Mrs Clinton did not announce any major new spending programmes, the US, which gives billions of dollars annually to Middle Eastern and North African countries, earmarked US$700 million (Dh2.6billion) for Morocco over five years from 2007, and now plans to send embassy officials into the field to offer technology and training to non-governmental organisations, which often have the best new ideas.

However, governments must follow up by turning those ideas into policy, said John Groarke, the mission director for USAID in Morocco, which spends $23m a year supporting development and civil society. “We don’t want to invest where we don’t see a commitment.”

Ideas abound at the AFDS dormitory, a rust-coloured apartment block opposite the school of science at Marrakech’s Cadi Ayyad University. In plain white rooms, devoid of televisions and sealed at night by a 9pm curfew, 26 university students complete their school work.

“I want to create schools and institutes to teach the French language better,” said Khadija el Hamri, 19, an economics student from the oasis town of Zagoura, in eastern Morocco’s Draa valley, working in the common room with the other girls. “A lot of our reading materials at school are in French, but at my school they didn’t teach the language properly.”

“My town needs more support for traditional crafts like carpets,” added Khadija Haji, 22, from Tamagrout, a village near Zagoura. “I’d like to go back and start an association to help get our carpets on to the world market – and I’m studying English because it’s the industrial language and one day I want to be a professor.”

“Too many girls aspire only to marriage,” said Malika Chahid. “We want them to dream bigger.”

Women’s status has improved in Morocco under King Mohamed VI, who introduced a new family code in 2004 granting them equality with men in key areas.

Twelve per cent of council seats were reserved for women in local elections in June.

However, a democratic mindset is still elusive in Moroccan politics, said Zakia Mrini, a council president in Marrakech and founder of the Association Annakhil, a foreign aid recipient that trained 200 female candidates before June’s election and is hoping for more funding.

“People must vote for the platform, not the person, and elected officials must engage even with those constituents who did not vote for them,” she said.

Such criticism, direct but constructive, shows the value of civil society, said Mrs Clinton. “It pushes political institutions to be agile and responsive to the people they serve.”

jthorne@thenational.ae