From Blogger to Hero … to Political Leader?

On a recent evening at a busy downtown Rabat café, a long-haired, bearded young man carrying a black briefcase comes waltzing in through the front door. He has the look of someone looking for someone else.

His energy is contagious. His dark eyes scan the sea of tables. They stop on me. I nod. He nods back.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, in French, sliding into the booth next to me.

“Not a problem,” I say.

My fixer asks if he wouldn’t mind sitting across from me; she knows that it’s easier for me to interview someone with a microphone face to face. The young man rolls his eyes with annoyance. He stands heavily and plops down on the far bench.

My pizza arrives. I pick up a slice and take a bite. It’s not bad. The crust is thin, the way I like it, but there’s a bit too much cheese and not enough tomato sauce. When you’re from New York no other pizza ever compares.

“Can we get started?” the young man says impatiently. “I have an interview with The New York Times in few minutes.”

“You’re an hour late,” I say, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin. “We all have busy schedules.”

He doesn’t seem to see a need to respond. It’s easy to understand Najib Chaouki’s impatient, slightly arrogant attitude. This Moroccan Facebook activist – one of the architects of Morocco’s “February 20th” democracy movement – has gone from a largely unknown, behind-the-scenes social media surfer to a national hero practically overnight.

All of the foreign press wants to talk to him. His time has become extremely valuable. He seems drunk with it. He leans forward importantly.

“Vas-y,” he says. Let’s go.

I ask him to respond to the often-repeated criticism of Morocco’s youth that they are uninterested in politics.

“Young people are not interested in the official discourse of the regime,” he says, “but we can’t say that young Moroccans are not interested in politics. When young Moroccans don’t go to vote that’s a political statement. We’re very interested in politics, but not in the politics of the state.”

He goes on to tell me how he’s been an activist for years, and how he’s grown accustomed to being followed, harassed and generally monitored by Moroccan intelligence. “State terror,” he says with a smug smile, “you get used to it.”

I ask him if he was surprised that the online movement’s call to protest brought into the street sectors of Moroccan society that normally wouldn’t sit together at the same table: secularists, Muslim activists, Berbers, angry, unemployed, uneducated youths from the
country’s poorest neighborhoods.

“That’s my Morocco!” he says enthusiastically, aggressively. “This isn’t about ideology. All of the different currents of our society came out to demand the same thing of our king: democracy and freedom.” He leans back. His eyes are scanning the café again.

Throughout the rest of the interview Chaouki seems slightly frustrated, as if this is bothersome, beneath him. But when it’s over he leans close. “I am also a journalist, you know. I write for an Arab language website. It is filled with the best scoops. All the
foreign journalists go to it for the latest news.”

“They all read Arabic?” I ask.

“Soon it will be in French,” he says gruffly. He looks slightly embarrassed. “I need a pen.”

“I don’t have one,” I say.

Chaouki points to his briefcase, still resting next to me on my side of the table. He does not ask me to please pass it to him. He doesn’t ask at all. He just points. I hand it across the table.

He writes out the name of the website, his cell phone number and his name on a scrap of paper. He makes sure I can read the spelling of it.

“Thank you,” I say. “I think I’ve got it.”

“No problem. Are we done then? Because I have my rendezvous with the
New York Times.”

“Vas-y,” I say. Chaouki stands and shakes my hand and picks up his bag and moves briskly across the café to another booth, where a western looking man and woman await. I watch him sit down and lean forward as reporter’s pads open.

This young man has reminded of someone but I can’t put my finger on whom. Then it hits me. A young Fidel Castro. Or at least the descriptions I’ve read of his youth in biographies. The fiery, revolutionary spirit, the love of attention, the sense of one’s own importance. It seems to me that Chaouki has the same sort of ego-driven drive required to stomach the nasty business of becoming the leader of a nation. I wonder if that’s what destiny has in store for him.

Then my fixer, who’s been sitting silently throughout the interview, finally speaks.

“You know, I like what he has done,” she says. “But I would never, ever follow that man.”

I know what she’s trying to say. But maybe others will. I double-check the spelling of Najib Chaouki’s name on the scrap of paper. It’s a name I plan to follow.