Nasser Zefzafi and the Moroccan Makhzen: A Nation Ruled by Fear, Silencing Dissent Through Intimidation
✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada
Algiers – December 2025 – The chilling revelation that Nasser Zefzafi—one of Morocco’s most recognizable opposition figures and a central icon of the Rif Movement—has received explicit death threats is not an isolated incident, nor a mere security concern to be addressed bureaucratically. It is a stark manifestation of a state-sponsored architecture of repression designed to suffocate dissent, where a single word becomes a liability and a single video becomes grounds for execution long before a courtroom is even convened.
What is most alarming is not only the nature of the threat, but the grotesque irony that the victim is expected to remain silent. The public prosecutor is granted a 72-hour window to “react” to a video threatening murder, as though the fundamental right to life could be negotiated through administrative deadlines, or bartered in exchange for procedural courtesy. The message is unmistakable: protection is conditional—not on citizenship or law, but on silence.
This grotesque inversion of justice exposes the profound dysfunction of Morocco’s legal institutions under the Makhzen. Instead of guaranteeing the safety of a citizen whose life is threatened, the system forces him to defend his right to exist, as though fear were a punishable offense and self-preservation a criminal act. The state, rather than dismantling those who openly announced their intent to kill, frames the targeted activist as the problem that must be managed.
It is a political doctrine articulated with brutal clarity: those who challenge the regime become targets. Today it is Zefzafi. Tomorrow it may be any activist, journalist, student, or ordinary citizen whose demands for dignity, accountability, and social justice disrupt the regime’s fragile facade. The repression that has haunted freedom of expression, assembly, and protest for years has now reached its violent culmination—not merely silencing voices, but threatening their physical elimination.
The danger lies precisely in this transformation: when the state becomes indistinguishable from the threat, when its institutions are weaponized not to administer justice but to perpetuate fear, the nation ceases to operate on the foundation of law and migrates into the terrain of coercion. Violence becomes its administrative vocabulary, and “deterrence” its governing method. Citizens are not engaged but subdued; not represented but neutralized.
This incident is not an aberration—it is the continuation of systemic persecution that has targeted a generation of activists, particularly among the youth: peaceful demonstrators, digital content creators, and human rights advocates who dared to transform their collective grievances into political momentum. The Makhzen’s strategy is unmistakably preventive: extinguish possibility before it becomes political reality.
Yet, the regime’s efforts to extinguish public anger are as futile as they are repressive. Fear does not quiet conviction; it exacerbates it. Threats do not stabilize regimes; they delegitimize them. Today, Zefzafi stands on the frontline of persecution, but behind him stands an entire society that refuses to forget the broken promises of justice, dignity, and freedom.
The only genuine response—beyond routine declarations of concern—is to dismantle the machinery of intimidation, guarantee the safety of every activist, release political detainees, and hold accountable those who threatened the life of a citizen under the watch of the so-called “national security state.”
Who authorized the Makhzen to barter with human life? Who decided that murder threats could be evaluated on a bureaucratic timeline? When did the right to exist become a privilege, contingent on silence?
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