THE CRUSADER.

Aboubakr Jamai publishes a newsweekly out of Casablanca. It's written in French and called Le Journal Hebdomadaire--the weekly paper--though people who read it just say Le Journal. You would be hard put to confuse Le Journal with any of the other Moroccan weeklies, most of which devote themselves to the virtues, real, anticipated, or imagined, of the king, Mohammed VI, and his old school friends who control the court, and the government of what he once accurately, if inadvertently, described as an executive monarchy. Jamai's weekly is a thorn in the side of the executive monarchy and, in fact, of most of the executives in a country where corruption is endemic, and business at almost every level is conducted according to a time-old ritual exchange of cash for favors. Le Journal is stubbornly uncorrupted and unbeholden. It is critical, confrontational, exasperating, angry, and didactic, and, like Jamai himself, not much loved by the people who seek power in Morocco.

Jamai founded his magazine in 1997, a year and a half before the death of Mohammed's famously despotic father, Hassan II. He was twenty-nine then and, like most young Moroccan intellectuals, had expected "great changes" from Mohammed. His disappointment is evident in the editorials he writes for every issue of Le Journal: "Sire . . . We do not understand your treatment of dissident voices or the perpetuation of your control over the broadcast media. . . . We do not understand why you do nothing about the extortions of your police or the iniquitous 'justice' rendered in your name." He says that, seven years into Mohammed's reign, "we are not yet a constitutional democracy, not even a true constitutional monarchy." He likes to remind Westerners that, whatever image they take away of a country in a new era of democracy and entrepreneurship and economic freedom, the parliament remains a rubber stamp for the monarchy, with no powers of its own, and the King's control of the economy is nearly total. The biggest holding company in Morocco belongs to Mohammed VI and his family. According to Le Journal, he controls more than fifty per cent of the capital invested in Morocco's stock market, not to mention (with a group of demonstrably loyal families) as much as eighty per cent of the country's agricultural production. Perhaps even more important, he controls, through his various ministries, the appointments and licenses and permissions that could let in a small measure of competition. He maintains eight royal palaces and innumerable estates; the royal budget, paid for by Moroccan taxes, runs to two hundred and fifty million dollars a year. The average yearly income in Morocco is fifteen hundred dollars.

Mohammed is also, to those liberals who do support him, the last bas-tion against an Islamist revival that has been sweeping across North Africa since he came to power. They are careful to praise him publicly, whatever they say in private. Jamai is the exception--"the one who tells the regime, 'You are lying,' " his friend Fouad Abdelmoumni, who runs a micro-credit association that provides cheap loans to Morocco's poor, told me--and he is paying for it. At one time or another during his magazine's short history, it has been banned, seized by the police, boycotted by advertisers, abandoned by printers, targeted for demonstrations, and attacked by the state media and by most of its own competitors; and Jamai himself has been hit with so many lawsuits and convictions that his debts today amount to a million and a half dollars in fines, damages, and back taxes--arguably disastrous for a publisher with twelve reporters, a print run of twenty-five thousand copies, and a loss of eighty per cent of his adver-tising revenue in the past six years. A defamation lawsuit that ended in April left Jamai with damages alone amounting to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars--the largest press penalty in Moroccan history. The trial was ludicrously pro-forma, and had the case been heard in Europe, where the magazine has a small but influential audience of North African dissidents, journalists, and civ-il-rights activists, Jamai's punishment would probably have been a symbolic euro and a dressing down by the presiding judge.

In Europe, of course, Jamai would be considered a normal journalist on a regrettably headstrong tear. But in Morocco "normal" is a sometime concept, and the definition of defamation can have more to do with the friends and the politics of the man you offend than with any law against offending him. There is no strong journalistic tradition behind magazines like Jamai's--no "freedom of information," no public access to information, not even a paper trail for good reporters to trace. As often as not, they run with what they "know," or think they know, rather than with what they can document. In this, Morocco is no different from most of the other countries in North Africa and the Middle East that are not under iron censorship, countries where journalists are free to negotiate, at their peril, the shifting continuum of what is usually referred to as "the transition," and quickly discover that the transition to a free press is like Zeno's arrow or Lenin's revolution--a process that never ends.

Compared with some of its neighbors, Morocco could be called progressive in terms of press freedom. Jamai thinks it is simply more sophisticated--you could say legalistic--in its repression. Jamai has lived as a student in Paris. He put in a year at Oxford, getting an M.B.A., and a year at Yale, as a World Fellow. He knows that the work he does is what Western journalists are supposed to do--think twice about what passes for reality. Watch groups in the West complain constantly and officially about the harassment of Le Journal--about the ruinous fines, the rushed hearings, the summary judgments, the reluctance of some judges to even call, let alone admit, defense witnesses. Newspapers in Europe report faithfully on every trial. Jamai is in touch with them all, and in fact spends a good deal of time feeding them information. Occasionally, it helps. A few years ago, he published an interview with a former Interior Ministry secret agent who claimed not only that Mehdi Ben Barka--a much loved socialist politician exiled by ...