Prison terms and hefty fines loom over two journalists after judges decided their cartoon was insulting to the Moroccan flag and a member of the royal family.
Moroccan courts on Friday (October 30th) convicted two journalists of desecrating the national flag and failing to show proper respect for a member of the royal family.
Editor Taoufik Bouachrine and caricaturist Khalid Gueddar were put on trial after the daily Akhbar al-Youm published a cartoon of Prince Moulay Ismail's wedding in its September 27th edition.
Two trials involving the pair wrapped up on Friday. In the first, judge Nour El Din Kassin sentenced each to a year in prison and a fine of 100,000 dirhams. The judge also ordered the closure of the newspaper.
Public prosecutors argued that the lines in the cartoon could easily be construed as part of the Star of David. But defence attorney Mostapha Remid argued that Gueddar did not intend to draw a star of that type.
"The misunderstanding was due to the fact that only part of the star was showing behind the haphazardly sketched prince," he said.
This is the first case in Morocco in which individuals have been prosecuted for defiling the national flag. Authorities made the act punishable in 2005, after Polisario supporters burned the Moroccan flag in the city of Laayoune and other Sahrawi areas.
"The objective, of course, was for the new law to be a deterrent," said an attorney working on the case.
In the second trial, the journalists were charged with violating Moroccan law by failing to show respect for the prince, a cousin of King Mohammed VI. Prosecutors maintained the cartoon was drawn to ridicule the prince.
Judge Hussein Jaber found both defendants guilty of failing to show proper deference to the prince. He handed down to each a suspended sentence of three years in prison, and also ordered them to pay 3 million dirhams in compensation to the prince. Jaber also fined the defendants 50,000 dirhams each.
The defendant's attorneys had chosen not to contest the charge.
"We chose not to raise our case, out of reverence for the prince," said the defence team. "We deemed it sufficient to refer in our [defence] to the apology published by [Bouachrine and Gueddar] in a number of Moroccan newspapers."
For his part, Bouachrine insisted that the caricature was not intended to be sarcastic. "Our goal was not to ridicule or scorn," he said. "Rather, we sought to redress some shortage we had. The issue in which the cartoon appeared was published on Friday, and included four pages on the wedding that took place on Saturday. Since we had no photos of the wedding, we drew [an image] ourselves."
Bouachrine dismissed prosecutors' allegations that the prince's hand gesture in the cartoon was anti-Semitic. He said the prince's outstretched arm represented a greeting to wedding guests, not a Nazi salute.
"That issue included a 12,000-word piece on the wedding, as well as a separate column about the young German woman the prince married, and that she is a Muslim," said the editor. "The whole text, however, included no disparagement of the prince."
By Mawassi Lahcen for Magharebia in Casablanca
© Magharebia.com 2009
