Thursday 7th of January 2016, will be remembered in Morocco as "Black Thursday".
Student teachers protesting against two government decrees have been demonstrating peacefully for many weeks. The government measures makes an end to the automatic recruitment by the Ministry of Education of the students having finished their course successfully and one year of internship. Now they will have to compete on the private market to get a job. Public education will now be at the service of the private sector. Twenty thousand students marched all over the country last Thursday in the cities of Casablanca, Tangier, Marrakech, Fès, Oujda, Inezgane. They were met with a barrage of truncheons by the police. In one city alone, Inezgane, 100 students were injured (37 of them in a critical state). All over the country the balance sheet is identical.
[More pictures and videos here and here]
The Ministry of Interior has of course its own version of reality. The representatives of the brutal arm of the state, claim they have been attacked by "confrontational" students. They talk of a "few light injuries and pretended faintings" (!). To add insult to injury, the Minister of Interior, claims most of the injuries have been caused by stones thrown by the students themselves and not by the police. This repression has caused a great commotion in the country falsely acclaimed internationally to be an exception in the turbulent Middle East thanks to the enlightened leadership by the King Mohammed VI. This is of course a blatant lie as "Black Thursday" demonstrates.
The comrades of the IMT in Morocco are participating in this movement. We ask all our readers and supporters to express their solidarity against the repression of student teachers. You can do this by making photos with posters of students, teachers, trade unionist showing their solidarity and by publishing them on social media.
Please send messages and pictures to:
contact@marxy.com and editor@marxist.com
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