Moroccan time

The Embassy--up To Its Old Tricks

Giving its support to this tiny group, the embassy has invited some government members to attend its meeting at the end of the month according to an e-mail circulated among some community members.

Once again, our community regrets and condemns this kind of behavior towards Moroccan Americans. We feel that the Moroccan embassy in Washington DC is exploiting our community in order to serve some individuals who are neither qualified to represent the community nor interested in working with us beyond their personal agendas.  These individuals are mainly friends of embassy employees.  Last year, the embassy created an association with a different name to serve certain people, and this year they have created a new association to serve others.
This leads our community not only to question the credibility of those associations but also to lose any interest in dealing with the embassy employees regarding community issues.
We believe that the credibility of any association comes from the community members, not from the government or embassy employees.

We had hoped that our embassy would learn from past mistakes when Moroccan embassies supported what were then called Widadiate (associations), which were also composed of individuals who were chosen by the embassies.
This previous experience failed simply because, on the one hand the process was undemocratic, and on the other, the people chosen to serve were embassy cronies with personal agendas that were far from the interests of the community.