Thousands of people, including trade union members, marched in Morocco’s cities on Sunday demanding a faster transition toward democracy and decrying terrorism, a few days after a bomb in a crowded tourist cafe here killed 16 people, nearly all of them foreigners, and wounded almost two dozen more.
Heavy rain kept the number of protesters down, as did the sense that the terrorist attack, believed by Moroccan authorities to be the work of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had already created a sense of both vulnerability and national cohesion.
Several hundred people rallied and marched in Marrakech, but most of them were not part of the campaign known as the February 20 Movement, which is calling for more democracy and a constitutional monarchy, inspired by the protests elsewhere in the Arab world. But there was concern among onlookers that Morocco, which depends heavily on foreign tourism, needed no more instability just now.
“It’s terrible; we pray for the victims and hope they will find those who did it,” a protester, Mohammed al-Kadri, who works for the local electrical company, said of the bombing. “We will not allow anyone to touch the king. We love him and feel as if he is one of us.”
