The old man Brahim is part of the dead that no one counts: those who are alive. He rubs his forehead, crossed by two strips of tape, points his fingers to the sky in search of divine mercy and points to a mountain of rubble behind him. His house. The earthquake that hit Morocco on Friday the 8th, the most powerful in the country's history, swallowed the village of Imi N'tala when hundreds of tons of mountain fell on the houses. Brahim doesn't point out rocks, he points out tombs. Buried under a river of stones, he says, where the devastation is such that it is impossible to differentiate where one house ended and the next began, is his family. His wife, his mother, his son and his nephew are dead and he, he says, would like to be too.
"What I am going to do? My whole family is dead, my house is gone, the village is gone. I have nothing left. What am I going to do? ”She repeats without stopping. Brahim, about 70 years old, although he does not know his exact age, is not dead because, minutes before the earthquake, he went down to a nearby stream to look for water. As his strength fails, he sits on some twisted iron next to a burst of fallen walls, broken mattresses and broken wood, he covers his hands with his face and cries uncontrollably. “Isn't it better to die?” he whispers. When his tears dry, Brahim gets up and wanders like a living dead among the rubble of the village where he was born and that he will never be again.
Their story is that of hundreds: beyond the number of victims under the rubble – nearly 3,000 dead and 5,600 injured – the Moroccan earthquake has left thousands of lives broken on the surface. The earthquake has hit the most humble regions of the Atlas Mountains, villages inhabited by farmers or shepherds, who were poor but not miserable, and who now have not only lost a good part of their loved ones and friends (in many towns more than a third of the residents have died), but also the possibility of moving forward. At the entrance to Imi N'tala, a Mallorcan firefighter with a thick goatee and tattooed arms observes the magnitude of the destruction and calculates. “Even with heavy machinery it would take months to remove so many tons of stone and rebuild. And that's if what's left of the mountain doesn't fall,” he says. In a village like Imi N'tala, which can only be reached by a narrow, winding path that climbs along a cliff, it would take a lot of will to rebuild the village and, in the process, the lives of guys like Brahim. And there isn't.
The slow reaction and apathy of the Moroccan authorities, who took almost two days to provide help and gave the green light to the rescue teams 72 hours after the catastrophe, has sent a cruel message to those who have lost everything: they matter. bit.
Until King Mohamed VI, who was caught on vacation in Paris by the earthquake, traveled to Marrakech on Tuesday to visit some injured people and was photographed donating blood, no minister dared to travel to the Atlas, the hardest hit region. In Amizmiz, a city at the foot of the mountains from which aid was coordinated, it was rumored that a politician had traveled: one from the secret services to silence criticism of the monarch and his government.
They did not arrive in time to silence Abderrahim, a resident of Tafgarte, where almost a hundred of his 450 neighbors died. At the bottom of a hillside covered in rubble, Abderrahim searches for three family members among the destruction. He throws stones a few meters or, if they are very heavy, he pushes them until they roll down the mountain. He has been doing it for hours: he has put bandages on his fingers and the ones on his thumbs are stained with blood. Abderrahim adjusts a blue cap with a silver puma on the side and explodes with rage. “Where is our king? Many hours have passed and no one has arrived. We have to remove the stones with our hands to rescue the corpses of our relatives. It's as if we were animals. And the king?”
His cry of rage and mention of the crown is a rarity in Morocco. Many do not dare to criticize the king, out of fear or taboo. But, beyond the fear, villages like Anerni, 70 kilometers south of Marrakech, are proof of oblivion. With access cut off by a rock slide, you have to walk three kilometers to reach the first houses. Two days after the earthquake, only one government representative had arrived. And, after recording the number of dead, he left.
Anerni is proof of more things. Faced with misfortune, Morocco has opted for geopolitics instead of solidarity. Despite the severity of the earthquake, it has only accepted rescue teams from Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the United Kingdom. More than fifty countries, including France, the United States and neighboring Algeria, which put aside bad relations and reached out to the Moroccan Government, received a no for an answer. As a consequence, in the first hours after the earthquake – 72 hours is the time limit to find the majority of survivors – civil society acted as a patch. Hundreds of Moroccans organized themselves to bring blankets and food or travel with their own vehicles to the affected villages and bring food, water and blankets. Just a few hours after the earthquake, Mustafa Adjou, a mountain guide from the Toubkal Mountaineers Association, had already traveled to Amizmiz, 56 kilometers south of Marrakech, to, from there, access ground zero of the earthquake.
Protected by a climbing helmet and wearing a sleeveless fleece, he helps a woman who is looking for her mother among the ruins of her house remove debris. The windows on the first floor of the building are half buried and, where the dining room and kitchen were, there are only stones. “It's safe there,” the woman tells him. Mustafa glances suspiciously at the ceiling, which threatens to fall off, but he doesn't think too much about it. He jumps up and begins to empty the room of stones. Since there are too many of them, after a while he comes out of the hole to catch his breath. “These people need everything. Blankets and food, but also help to get their relatives out of there,” he says. When asked why help is taking so long, Mustafa throws things out and talks about the difficulty of access to villages that can sometimes only be reached on the back of a donkey or a mule. No mention of the Government's decades-long neglect of a Berber region that lacks basic infrastructure or where, now that the earth has roared, the nearest hospitals are an obscene distance away.
It was not until Thursday, almost a week after the earthquake, when King Mohamed VI announced the first measures. In addition to emergency aid of 30,000 dirhams (2,750 euros) for the families of the more than 50,000 affected households, it was conveniently reported that Al Mada, the financial group whose main shareholder is the Moroccan king, the richest man in the country, will donate 1 billion dirhams (91.6 million euros) to the fund to manage the effects of the earthquake. The royal cabinet specified where the money will go: 140,000 dirhams (12,800 euros) as help for the reconstruction of each completely destroyed house and 80,000 dirhams (7,300 euros) to rehabilitate each partially affected home.
At the exit of Aynghed, a half-ruined village, a teenager lies stretched out on the ground with his head resting on a mattress and a messy pile of belongings. Before him is his house. It was: barely three of the four walls remain standing. The young man, who has a scratch on his elbow, doesn't even flinch when he sees this journalist arrive. His grandfather, Hassen Ait Boyahya, does come close. The man explains that he has lost his daughter and his grandson, the mother and brother of the boy lying at his feet. Hassen gets emotional and cries, but the boy doesn't react and places his hands under his head, as if we were bothering him because he was about to take a nap. At the end he opens his eyes, but he doesn't look at us and loses his sight in his destroyed house. Living Dead.
