Amazigh activists criticize “booby-trapped” questions in the census, and demand protection of the true identity of Moroccans

Agadir24

The Loyalty to the Amazigh Alternative Group denounced the Planning Commission’s continued “ignorance” of the Amazighs’ demands and aspirations regarding the census, calling for “a structural change in the census form and the way questions related to identity, culture and the language spoken” are included.

The group expressed its fears that the census process expected at the beginning of next month will be similar in form and content to the census conducted in 2014, the results of which showed the Amazighs as a minority in the country not exceeding 27 percent, due to the census form whose questions were prepared according to “a purely ideological standard that is hostile to the Amazighs.”

Based on this, the group announced in a statement its “rejection of the formula on which the census form was built,” stressing that it “contains booby-trapped, inaccurate questions that include Moroccan colloquial language within the category of the Arabic language.”

The same source considered that this formula “aims to assess the process of ‘brutal Arabization’ in which the state and parties have been involved for half a century, and is not a real, objective census based on scientific standards that do not evade highlighting the true identity of Moroccans.”

In the same statement, a copy of which is available to Agadir 24, the group condemned the delegation’s continuation of its “discriminatory policy towards the Amazighs,” considering that “it is unreasonable to consider millions of Amazighs who speak the vernacular language but do not master the Amazigh language as ‘Arabs’ even though their fathers, mothers and grandfathers are Amazigh.”

Accordingly, the Loyalty to the Amazigh Alternative Group called on all Moroccan citizens who speak the colloquial language or Amazigh to “affirm their Amazigh origin and their Amazighness as the mother tongue and the language of origin despite the use of the colloquial language in daily communication,” and to “be careful to express and answer in Amazigh the questions of census workers as it is an official language of the Moroccan state.”

In addition, the group called for “employing Amazigh speakers in the census process in all major cities across Morocco to question citizens in the Amazigh language, while adopting regional expressions in this regard.”