ANGER GROWS IN MOROCCO'S RIF MOUNTAINS, HOME OF HASH AND REBELLION

In the Cafe Berber yesterday business was brisk as customers sipped
glasses of mint tea while two men in Adidas trainers and padded Nike
sports jackets touted walnut-sized samples of the local cash crop -
"kif", or Moroccan hashish.

The cafe, where no visitor can sit for more than a few minutes before
receiving a whispered offer of a fudgy brown piece of "chocolate",
lies on the bustling main street of Ketama. A tatty and lawless
enclave perched high in the inhospitable Rif Mountains of north-west
Morocco, it is the centre of a cannabis industry estimated to be worth
more than UKP7bn a year.

Surrounded by forest and inaccessible valleys, this is Morocco's Wild
West. Assani, one of half a dozen "businessmen" hanging around the
Cafe Berber and other outlets offering "good smoke, good dreams" for
100 dirhams (UKP6) for a blob of sweet-smelling hash, shook his head
when asked about life in the Rif.

He said: "Here in the Rif we are free and we are poor. Why should we
care what the government orders when it does nothing for us? We are
the untouchables. All there is here is the kif. It keeps us alive, not
the government. Where is the King when we need him? He has abandoned
us."

Even in a region as fractious as the Rif, which has a long and bloody
history of insurrection against what its indigenous Berber inhabitants
call the "Dahilla" or the people of the east, in particular the
government in Rabat, direct criticism of the monarch, Mohammed VI, is
rare and, to ordinary Moroccans, deeply shocking. As one official put
it: "You can call politicians what you like but nobody speaks ill of
His Majesty."

But Assani's words were being echoed throughout the villages and towns
at the centre of kif production leading down from the Rif peaks to the
port of Al Hoceima, where an earthquake on Monday night killed at
least 600 people and has left 30,000 homeless. Some estimates have
said the final death toll could be as high as 3,000.

As the rescue operation struggles to reach those in need, discontent
has erupted into civil unrest with protest marches and road blockades.

Mohammed, a father-of-four from the village of Imzouren, one of the
worst-affected communities, joined a march on Al Hoceima on Thursday
which resulted in scuffles with police. He was shaking with fury as he
explained that he and his family had waited for 72 hours without food
or shelter. "God bless the King who loves us. But he is doing nothing
for us in our hour of need. We are Moroccans, we are his people but
they treat us differently. In the Rif, we are second-class citizens."

Provincial officials in Al Hoceima and the health ministry in the
capital, Rabat, admitted to delays and difficulties in reaching
outlying villages flattened by the tremor, which measured 6.8 on the
Richter scale, and getting supplies to the tented camps which have
sprouted up around the port.

The country's constitutional monarch visited the disaster zone within
hours of the quake and sent a personal message to his "loyal and
devoted subjects" vowing to "personally oversee the mobilisation of
the organs of the state and all its human and material resources to
come to the aid of the victims". But such assurances have done little
to quell a wider discontent.

According to experts, the fury has it roots in a more profound schism
between the people of the Rif and their nominal rulers, which has its
clearest expression in the stranglehold of kif on the local economy.

Professor Pascual Moreno, head of the International Centre for Rural
and Agricultural Studies in Valencia and an expert on the Rif, said:
"Cannabis has filled a void created by the inaction of the colonial
rulers and the failure of the Moroccan government to improve the
infrastructure and standard of living of the Berbers. Now kif is king."

The United Nations Office on Drugs Crime reported in December that
cannabis production was expanding so rapidly in the Rif that it was
causing soil erosion and deforestation. The area under cultivation has
increased from 5,000 hectares in 1950 to a current level of up to
200,000 hectares. Some two-thirds of the Rif population, amounting to
800,000 people, most of them Berber, depend on the crop for their
income. They produce 47,400 tonnes of hashish a year, which is
smuggled into Europe via a network of ports, chief among them Al Hoceima.

But while the overall trade is worth an estimated UKP7.2bn, crime does
not pay for the overlords of Ketama and the peasant farmers in its
hinterland. The vast majority of the profits are taken by drug
kingpins, many of them British, Dutch, Spanish and German criminals on
Spain's Costa del Sol.

The average income from cannabis for a Rif farmer is just UKP1,280 a
year, and the region's share of the plunder is UKP141m - just 2 per cent.

Observers of the trade say it is the legacy of decades of repression
and ambivalence by the Rif's rulers - the colonial powers of France
and Spain, and then the government in Rabat, which two years after
independence brutally suppressed a rebellion by the Berbers in 1958.

Professor Moreno, who led an unsuccessful UKP750,000 European Union
project to persuade farmers to grow avocados instead of kif, said:
"Resentment of that suppression is still felt strongly. The Berbers
feel attacked and abandoned. There has been some investment in roads
and schools but compared with the rest of the country, the Rif is
under-developed and deprived.

"More and more people resort to growing kif or leaving to work abroad
because there is nothing else to do. In the end you get a place like
Ketama, which is like a final frontier: all that is missing is cowboys
carrying pistols. There is so much cannabis that the region cannot
even feed itself - 80 per cent of its food has to be imported. Without
huge investment by Rabat, nothing will change."