Uneployment Crisis The jobless graduates ‘holocaust' is faced with cowardly, ambiguou

[sbs]

Some very striking incidents marked the capital, Rabat, during the last weeks of the departing year. The protagonists were a bunch of unemployed young diploma holders, who used to stage sit-ins before the Parliament and other public institutions.

Six unemployed graduates set themselves alight in front of the Health Ministry after soaking their clothes in petrol last December.

In an unprecedented move, some of the youth who were taking part in a demonstration set themselves alight, as a form of protest against their precarious conditions.

Three days after this attracting incident, another group of about 500 youngsters from the Union of Unemployed Graduates broke into the buildings of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of National Education, where the sit-in lasted until the late hours of the night.

These two incidents were echoed in the national media; yet they were not highlighted and analysed as such events deserve.

This phenomenon has very deep connotations. It requires profound and comprehensive reflection. The case of those five or six people invites us to raise objective and realistic questions about this turning point in the long history of counter-unemployment militancy, which has been one of the major troubles in the country over the past years.

What is meant here is not to sympathise and express solidarity with those people who –let's call the spade a spade- have chosen to commit suicide through that tragic way, which is more gruesome than suicide itself.

Nor is it expected at this stage to stress the responsibility of the government as far as the issue of unemployment is concerned.

Writings on this morbid tumour of unemployment have all been relevantly sound as to drawing attention to the hair-raising figures relating to the percentage of diploma holders who are still without a job, and the social injustice that results from that.

The sole aim of my approach, in fact, is to tackle these events and their repercussions from a different perspective. The spirit of responsibility, honesty and frankness entails the clear admission that the situation of those youth, regardless of its precariousness and complexity, can in no way justify their acts.

The comments on different national media have for the most part opted for this perspective. The Istiqlal Party's parliamentary group raised a question on the incident of the youngsters who set fire on themselves in an upper house session. The party's representative in the House of Counsellors called on the Government to find radical solutions to this social scourge, underlining that the acts of those youth is “contrary to the precepts of the lofty Islamic faith.” He considered the incident as “an intrusive phenomenon in our culture” and that “protest is legitimate only within the norms and the laws.”

As for ‘squatting' the headquarters of ministries, the chairman of the national body for the support of unemployed graduates, Abdelkader Azrii, said his institution “backs the strife of the unemployed until they reach their rights,” but it “does not interfere in their decisions and the form of action.”

Both approaches are euphemistic in their refusal of this suicidal behaviour. But are implicit signals enough to tell those youth that they are taking the wrong path?

Some media went even further in their tacit and ambiguous dealing with the issue. They laid the blame for that Hitchcock-like ‘holocaust' on Moroccan security services, deeming that act as a form of “militancy”.

Instigating the spirit of despair and ‘heroizing' these acts of vandalism, suicide and self-destruction is in no way different from the politicization of the tragedies and actions of unemployed graduates.

At this very critical juncture, one has to seek answers to some thorny questions pertaining to the issue of unemployment. Why do other people find job opportunities? Should “the right to work” be restricted to public institutions? Are there any constraints that require the immediate integration of these people in public work?

By raising these questions, it becomes possible to stress that the scourge of unemployment cannot be approached through make-believe solutions or demagogy. The phenomenon, like any other structural problem in our society, requires remedies within a comprehensive development strategy which transcends the narrow perspectives, not through some ‘pain-killers' that were included in the recommendations of the Job Initiatives Days.

[razrif]

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Try to localise the Jodie Marsh pics to Celeb BB-related (or Jodie-related ) threads, Razza. Taaaaaa very much. VP