Tribal authority rules supreme in Morocco's highlands

The Ait Ouirrah are a Berber tribe that live high up in the Middle Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The area is around 270 kilometers from the Moroccan capital Rabat, but the rule of the state barely touches the lives of tribesmen.

Here instead, the amghar, or supreme tribal leader, has absolute authority over members of the tribe who elect him. He governs according to tribal custom in all matters of life,

I do not want to talk about those who demand that we abolish our traditions and customs.

and violators of these laws are ostracised from the community.

On the way to meet Moha Oukhlaf, the amghar of the Ait Ouirrah tribes, residents cautioned us that the man rules his tribes of the Middle Atlas Mountains with an iron fist.

Nobody would join us to meet the leader fearing severe consequences if he was angered.

In the village of Ksiba Moha Ousaid, Fatima, a woman in her fifties said that the amghar solves problems between tribal members in a makeshift court that meets every Sunday on the Ait Ouirrah tribe's market day.

"All problems relating to land, water rights and even inheritance are taken to the amghar by tribal elders. These problems are solved within a week at most, by referring back to the customs of our ancestors," Fatima says.

Better than bureaucracy

She says that people are happier with this system. Going through state courts is long and convoluted, coming to a conclusion sometimes years later that pleases neither the plaintiff nor the accused.

Fatima's family explains how the amghar's rulings work. "In the beginning the aggressor is made to feed a number of tribe members ranging between 20 and 100 people as punishment."

If the aggressor does not accept the ruling of the amghar he willl be the subject of an embargo, and even his relatives will refuse to speak to him. In the town shopkeepers won't sell him anything. On the streets, taxi drivers won't stop for him.

"This continues until he shows modesty and submits to the tribe's authority."

Essaoui Mimoun is an elected member of the local village council who was sentenced to the harshest punishment in tribal law – his ostracisation by the Ait Ouirrah tribe.

"It all started when I opposed the decisions of some other members of the village council," he says.

He did, so, he said becaue he didn't think the rulings were good for the village. But that only "angered the amghar who supported those members who opposed my view and shared their political leanings."

Mimoun was effectively expelled from the village.

"Everyone cut me off and no one wanted to speak to me and even my children were punished by other kids in the village. No one wanted to play with them. The women of the tribe also refused to speak to my wife."

The outcast responded by organising a meeting with other people disgruntled with the amghar's rulings. He took on the tribal chief.

Seeds of revolt

We met the group in the village coffee shop, and it soon became obvious that the main disagreements with the amghar were about local politics and control of the village council.

Elders in the group believed that confronting the amghar was a challenge to tribal customs.

Younger members disagreed saying that the problem is with the Moha Oukhlaf and not the tribe's customs. Some of the village youth even timidly suggested they were against local laws that run parallel to state law.

We met the amghar Moha Oukhlaf at his home to a frosty reception: "What exactly do you want? Are you part of the conspiracy of those who rebel against the tribe and its customs?"

He wouldn't agree to the interview until his grandson intervenes and checks our identity cards.

"I do not want to talk about those who demand that we abolish our traditions and customs," Oukhlaf said. "These laws have been our custom for many years, even before French colonisation of Morocco."

When he dies, the elders of his tribe will gather and elect a new amghar, he says, and the tradition will continue.

"Our forefathers were used to solving all the tribe’s problems between themselves, without involving any strangers, even representatives of the central government.

"It is shameful for a person to go to a court or something like that and bypass the tribe. Such a person has no place among us."

He says the custom is a way of diffusing tensions, and stopping cycles of vendettas emerging between families.

The imour is the amghar's representative to smaller tribal branches. According to Oukhlaf there are 83 imours in this region.

"All the Ait Ouirrah tribes agree on our customs and traditions except those who want to transgress upon their fellow tribe members. They are not part of us and we have nothing to do with them," he says.

"None of us speaks to a person who rebels against us or deals with him until he shows humility to the tribe and returns to its authority."

State power

The amghar says that this traditional form of legation does not contradict state law.

"Each one of us has his own specialty. I do not arbitrate in conflicts unless they are brought to me by an imour. More than 1,160 cases have been brought to me and were solved at the time."

He says that whoever wants to use our system and solve his problems within the tribe is free to do so, and whoever wants to go to the state can do so as well.

Moulime Laaroussi, a sociologist at the University of Hassan II in Casablanca, disagrees however.

She says that the amghar system contravenes the country's legal system and the tribe's punishments, such as ostracising transgressors are a violation of human rights.

Al-Araby al-Jadeed contacted the Minister of Justice and Liberties, Mustafa Ramid, about the amghar tribal system. His press advisor did not respond to numerous requests for a response. 

Meanwhile, the amghar rules in the mountains far from Rabat rule.

This article is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.