Morocco | GlobalPost

Morocco expels Christian evangelists

Solana PyneMarch 12, 2010 07:43Updated May 30, 2010 13:25

RABAT, Morocco — For 10 years, foreign Christians ran an orphanage called Village of Hope on the slopes of Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains, taking in abandoned Moroccan children and raising them in their homes. But it took just a few hours Monday evening for Moroccan authorities to dissolve those foster families. Police gathered the 16 foreign volunteers and their biological children in a conference room and told them they had to leave the country immediately. Across the parking lot, 33 Moroccan children learned they would stay behind.

Crusading Moroccan magazine closed

Erik GermanMarch 14, 2010 09:10Updated May 30, 2010 13:25

CASABLANCA, Morocco — For the security agents coming to shut down Morocco’s crusading newsweekly Le Journal, it was ostensibly a bankruptcy. The magazine owed more than half a million dollars in unpaid debts and back taxes and a judge ordered the seizure of the publication’s assets. But Le Journal’s dissident editor, Aboubakr Jamai, described the Jan. 27 closure of his magazine another way. It was an “execution,” he said.

Morocco’s battle over booze

Solana PyneMarch 15, 2010 06:37Updated May 30, 2010 13:25

RABAT, Morocco — The buying frenzy begins around 6 p.m. Men throw elbows and shout, pushing to the front of the checkout line, clutching bottles of booze. Lines, if you can call them lines, form eight or 10 deep, each man looking for the fastest way through. Buyers jostle and press forward. Some stand on tiptoe to pass clinking baskets of bottles to friends closer to the register. The air reeks of spilled beer.

StreetLife: Rabat's mobile medina

Erik GermanMarch 10, 2010 07:51Updated May 30, 2010 13:25

Morocco's organic farming is growing

Erik GermanFebruary 16, 2010 12:07Updated May 30, 2010 13:21

SHOUL, Morocco — On a 50-acre farmstead outside the country’s capital, the scene did little to evoke agriculture on the cutting edge: Two lanky men in mud boots labored across a loamy field. Slowly and by hand, they dropped seeds into rows of furrowed dirt. Behind them, a third man guided a horse-drawn harrow that looked as old as farming itself, covering each kernel with a layer of coffee-brown earth.

Helping Morocco's handicapped

Solana PyneFebruary 21, 2010 09:57Updated May 30, 2010 13:21

Video: Moroccan winemaker thrives

Erik GermanFebruary 3, 2010 08:26Updated May 30, 2010 13:19

MEKNES, Morocco — Asked to brainstorm unlikely business plans, you might devise something more improbable than a winery in Muslim Morocco — perhaps a boat dealership for Bedouins? a sex shop in the Vatican? — but the list wouldn’t be long. More surprising still is the fact that Morocco’s oldest winery, Celliers de Meknes, has made a brisk business of selling booze in a country where 98 percent of the population is forbidden to drink alcoholic beverages.

On Location: Death in the Sahara

Erik German January 8, 2010 07:30Updated May 30, 2010 13:18

OUJDA, Morocco — In his eight-year struggle to find a home in Europe, Nigerian migrant Kingsley Okojie, 35, describes crossing oceans and deserts, escaping prisons and border guards and watching dozens of friends perish along the way.

On Location: Oujda — Death in the Sahara

Solana Pyne and Erik GermanJanuary 8, 2010 07:28Updated May 30, 2010 13:18

Western Sahara activist returns home

Erik GermanDecember 24, 2009 07:30Updated May 30, 2010 13:17

RABAT, Morocco — The 32-day hunger strike that prodded Morocco to let human rights campaigner Aminatou Haidar return to her home may have left her physically weakened and confined to bed, but she remained brazenly defiant in her cause. “I’m never going to apologize, not to the king nor to anyone else,” she told reporters from her home in Layounne, in the disputed territory of Western Sahara. “Because I’m not guilty, I’m not a criminal. The guilty party is the Moroccan regime.”