Hash (3 page)

Morocco produces more hashish than any other country on earth. Western influence has not only fuelled cannabis cultivation in Morocco, initially through colonialism, it has also steadily pushed up hashish production in the country ever since the onset of the hippy culture in the 1960s.

According to European Union estimates, hash production is Morocco’s main source of foreign currency and is a major contributor to the kingdom’s gross domestic product.

Some 42 per cent of global hashish production originates in Morocco. The rest of the world’s hashish is produced by nearly ninety other countries, including Pakistan (18 per cent), Afghanistan (17 per cent), Lebanon (9 per cent), and India (9 per cent). It is mostly destined for the western and central European markets such as those of the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Belgium and the Czech Republic. Not surprisingly, most of these markets are dominated primarily by Moroccan hashish.

The cannabis plant first took root in Morocco’s Maghreb region in the seventh century AD in the wake of the Arab invasions. However, historians today insist that hash cultivation only began in the fifteenth century. Much later,
in the nineteenth century, Sultan Moulay Hassan (King Hassan I) officially authorised cannabis cultivation for local consumption in five douars, or villages, of the Ketama and Beni Khaled tribes, in the Senhaja area of the Rif.

In 1912, the kingdom was split into two protectorates by Spain and France, and the right to cultivate cannabis was granted to a few tribes, this time by Spain. In 1920, local warlord Abdelkrim el-Khattabi unified the Berber tribes of the Rif in their resistance to Spanish authority and set up the independent Republic of the Rif (1921–6), before being defeated by a Franco-Spanish coalition.

Abdelkrim el-Khattabi successfully advocated against ‘un-Islamic’ cannabis cultivation and consumption during the five years that the independent Republic of the Rif existed. But after 1926 – according to the United Nations Bulletin of Narcotics – the restored Spanish colonials ‘set up a zone of toleration to the north of Fez’, around the town of Ketama. That zone was gradually reduced until it was officially abolished in 1929, although production continued at a high level.

The French rulers of Morocco tried to ban hash production by royal decree but it wasn’t until 1954 that cultivation was completely prohibited in the French protectorate. In 1956, when Morocco gained independence from France, that cannabis prohibition was extended to the former French and Spanish zones.

In 1958, the Berbers rose in rebellion against the government and the uprising was put down by a military expedition
composed of two-thirds of the Moroccan army, which, under the command of then-Crown Prince Hassan, even resorted to napalm bombing the Berbers. The civil unrest was partly caused by economic deprivation, since Moroccan Berbers made up the majority of the poorest classes in Morocco. Berber regions had not seen the same development aid as Arabised coastal and urban regions. Eventually it was decided to once again allow cannabis cultivation in the five historical douars of the Ketama and Beni Khaled in order to try and end the conflict in the Rif region.

The town of Ketama – a rural community in the heart of the Al Hoceïma Province of the Taza-Al Hoceima-Taounate region – would eventually become the unofficial hash capital of Morocco. Today it has a population of around 20,000 with an average of ten people per household. Yet behind this poverty lie some of the richest drug barons in the world.

Cannabis cultivation in the Rif expanded greatly in the early 1980s, thanks to ever increasing European demand for hash which had forced the Moroccan cannabis economy to switch from
Kif
, a mixture of chopped marijuana and tobacco, to producing pure hash. Wars in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Syria, plus increased global counter-narcotics efforts had created a gap in the market, enabling Morocco to step in and become the world’s number one hash producer.

And as this trade has thrived, so Tangier and the surrounding coastal region evolved into the hash hub of the world. Today, vast hash transactions infuse large amounts of cash into the local economy. At the same time, the recent Algerian civil
war next door created a black market in small arms passing through Morocco. This lethal combination of weapons and money sparked intense and violent competition among drug runners in northern Morocco.

Large quantities of Moroccan hash are also sent to West Africa where they are exported through a so-called ‘backdoor route’ to Europe. Recent seizures of cocaine and hashish packed together in the same manner were made in Morocco and in Spain. Colombian drug traffickers have allied themselves to their Moroccan hash counterparts and either now ship cocaine directly to Morocco, or store it temporarily in West Africa. Some Moroccan hash is also exported to Algeria, via the Oujda–Maghnia road, a notorious route for contraband and people-smuggling.

In more recent years there have been numerous examples of the Moroccan hash barons’ power and influence. The drug lords use increasingly complex money laundering schemes involving numerous countries. Many in Morocco believe the drug trade has ‘gone industrial’, integrating itself into large Moroccan firms in agribusinesses, fishing, transportation and import-export operations. It’s the perfect cover for hash smuggling.

One of Morocco’s most notorious hash barons – arrested in the mid-1990s – revealed at his trial how his sophisticated and massive organisation had multiple international connections. His gang transported hash out of the central Rif, stockpiled it in the Rif ‘border’ town of Tetouan, shipped it to Spain by sea where it was then delivered to wholesalers
in Amsterdam. In addition to bank accounts in Morocco, Spain, Gibraltar and Canada, along with a yacht and fifteen cars, this particular hash baron boasted of personal, commercial and political ties to the Castro regime in Cuba. He was also in regular contact with the Colombian cocaine cartels, eager to use Morocco’s easily penetrable borders as perfect distribution points into Europe.

Today, Morocco’s hashish trade is estimated to net $12 billion a year, providing a livelihood to nearly one million people and hash production continues to soar in the Cherifian kingdom, in the heart of the Rif region, where the Berbers’ favourite saying is that ‘only Kif grows on the land of Ketama’.

According to Dutch and European Union official estimates, cannabis was grown on around 25,000 hectares in the mid-1980s, on 60,000 hectares in 1993, and on 75,000 hectares in 1995 and it’s safe to assume it has been rising at that rate ever since. Pollen counts in Southern Spain recently revealed that huge quantities of cannabis pollen were blowing north from the Rif Mountains, 42km across the Straits of Gibraltar and up to 160km inland.

In the mid-1990s, record rainfalls followed drought years, helping the Rif area increase its cultivation of cannabis by another 10 per cent (the average hectare of cannabis produces two to eight tonnes of raw plant). This meant more jobs in the drug trade for those who could find no other work. With the hash trade continuing to grow, areas used for cultivation spread beyond the traditional growing areas of the central Rif to the west and south in provinces including Chefchaouen,
Larache, Taounate and also to the east in the province of Al Hoceima.

The inhabitants of this barren region of Morocco are known as Riffians, a Berber people with their own language called Riffian, athough many speak Moroccan Arabic, Spanish or French as second or third languages. Riffian Berbers are defined as Mediterranean, making these tribes closer to Europeans than to Africans (which explains why so many of the people I encountered in this region had blue eyes and European features).

The Berbers are often portrayed as nomadic peoples crossing the desert on camels. But they also practise sedentary agriculture in the mountains and valleys in this region. Throughout history the Berbers have engaged in trade, which has had a tremendous influence on the history of the African and European continents as they were the first to establish trade routes from as far afield as West Africa to the Mediterranean and have helped connect the peoples of southern Europe with much of sub-Saharan Africa for more than a thousand years. No wonder that many of the Berbers of today provide the backbone for the production of hash demanded by Europe and beyond.

For centuries, the Berbers in these parts cultivated the lowlands in winter and grazed their flocks in mountain meadows during the summer. Others were year-round pastoral nomads. The principal Berber crops then were wheat, barley, fruits, vegetables, nuts and olives. Cattle, sheep and goats were maintained in herds, together with oxen, mules, camels
and horses for draft and transportation. But the value of hash has overtaken everything to become the crop of choice for most Berber farmers.

Hash thrives on the Rif region’s steep slopes and poor soils, combined with heavy but irregular rainfall compounded by a lack of irrigation infrastructures, making most crops other than cannabis not worth the intense labour they require. Rain-fed cannabis cultivation brings seven to eight times more revenues than barley cultivation.

Today, as they have done for hundreds of years, those same sedentary Berber farmers occupy single-storey stone houses while seasonally nomadic groups erect strongholds of pounded earth for defence and storage and live in goat-hair tents when at pasture. Meanwhile the Berber women – who have a greater degree of personal freedom than females among the traditional Arabs – work at pottery making and weaving. Almost all Berbers are Muslims, but various pre-Islamic religious elements survive among them, chiefly the worship of local saints and the veneration of their tombs.

Berber local governments tend to be more communal and less authoritarian than their Arab counterparts. Yet Berber society can be fragmented with a handful of families making up a clan. Several clans form a community, and many communities make an ethnic group. The simplest Berber political structure, found in villages in the Rif mountains, is the
jama’ah
, a meeting of all reputable adult men in the village square. Fully nomadic groups elect a permanent
chieftain and council, while seasonal nomads annually elect a summer chief to direct the migration.

Every now and again the Moroccan government captures a hash shipment to try and demonstrate to US and European authorities that they are serious in their fight against drugs. In 2008, the Moroccan navy seized three tonnes of Europe-bound hashish off the Mediterranean port of Nador. Local politicians suspected that ‘raid’ was set up through local hash barons, who wanted to help the government look as if they were winning their ‘war’ against drugs. Moroccan drug lords also suspected that a local terrorist group was trying to muscle in on their hash crop. They were right.

A joint secret service investigation by French and Spanish intelligence officials later established that this shipment of hash together with another hash seizure by the Spanish authorities off the island of Ibiza was an important part of a complex financing network serving the Algeria-based Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, affiliated since 2005 with al-Qaeda. The group admitted responsibility for two bombings in Algiers that killed thirty people and left 200 injured.

The investigation – by Spain’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia and France’s Renseignements Généraux – was first launched after Spanish police found that the Islamists behind the deadly March 2004 bombings in Madrid that claimed 191 lives bought their explosives from former miners based in northern Spain, in return for blocks of hashish.

Meanwhile, Moroccan government officials continue to bridle at open criticism of their ‘policy’ on hash.

When Moroccan politician Chakib el-Khayari criticised his country’s loose anti-drug policy he got three years in prison. Moroccan officials claimed that el-Khayari made his outburst at the request of the Spanish secret services. In response, the Moroccan government closed down two European manned observation posts set up as part of the so-called war on terror. Many believe Moroccan authorities were sending out a clear message to their critics: don’t touch our hash, or we’ll be less than co-operative in the fight against terrorism.

Hash trafficking from Morocco, it seems, also goes hand in hand with human trafficking. There are many different methods used to smuggle migrants: in cargo boats or fishing boats, but there are also networks in Morocco with contacts within the crews of passenger boats and customs officials who accept unrecorded passengers. In Larache province, the cheapest and most popular method is to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in
pateras
, small five-to-seven-metre fishing boats. These illegal migrants smuggled to Europe are often forced to carry hash to hand over the other side.

In Morocco, few cannabis growers from the Rif have the resources and connections required to ship hashish to Tangier and the other main ports on the Mediterranean coast, let alone across the sea to Spain. Hashish trafficking from the Rif area relies on ‘bought’ roads and traffickers, not farmers, have the financial and socio-political means to do this.

‘Buying the roads’ is renowned as an integral part of the Moroccan trafficking and smuggling process. Hash barons
often pay for tracks and roads to be built across national and international roadblocks and checkpoints. They look on it as purchasing the transit of their cargo, no matter what that cargo consists of. Both legal and illegal goods can be traded on the same routes or even together in the same shipment.

So the mountaineous Rif region’s reputation as a ‘country within a country’ is clearly defined. It’s a dangerous place where the law of the gun rules above all else. But it is the obvious first step in uncovering the truth about hash.

My journey into the hash badlands of Morocco’s Rif Mountain region began with a meeting in a fashionable pub in London’s trendy King’s Road with a former cannabis smuggler called Si, who still owned property in Morocco and had promised he could get me access to one of the secretive, isolated mountain-top hash farms that dominate the Rif region.