A visit to market Morocco

One week after US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes's four-day jaunt across Morocco, aimed at bolstering America's woeful image in the world, Morocco's ambassador to the United States was visiting Boston and Cambridge to deliver a far simpler message on a decidedly smaller stage.

``Today we're open for business," Ambassador Aziz Mekouar told the Boston Rotary Club on June 7. ``I've been telling everybody."

Mekouar was touting the Kingdom of Morocco's free-trade agreement with the United States, an arrangement that he hopes will increase commerce between the countries from $1.1 billion to perhaps $7 billion within five years.

His whirlwind tour included meetings with MIT's dean of graduate students, Isaac Colbert, and the MIT Arab Students' Organization, as well as with senior faculty at Bentley College in Waltham and leaders at WorldBoston, an international exchange nonprofit organization. He also visited MIT's computer labs and spoke to a group of Armenian government officials training this summer at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Traditionally pro-American, Morocco entered into the bilateral free trade pact in June 2004, and it went into effect on Jan. 1.

``This agreement offers Morocco a real chance to break out of the pack," says Harvard Business School's senior associate dean, John Quelch, an Englishman who serves as honorary consul of Morocco in New England. Already, says Quelch, computer-maker Dell Inc. has relocated its French-speaking call centers to Morocco and plans to hire as many as 3,000 Moroccans to staff them. ``This is just one example of a US multinational company discovering the value of Moroccan human capital."

Adel Belcaid, a Moroccan student at MIT's Sloan School of Management who invited the ambassador to Boston and chaperoned him across town through sheets of pouring rain, came away impressed. ``I am happy to have him as the ambassador," said Belcaid. ``I'm usually very critical toward my country. Whatever they do, it's not enough. But I had lots of time to test him and evaluate him because I was his driver, and I think he's very smart."

Even as Mekouar spreads the good news about life in Morocco -- its free trade agreement and recent advances in women's rights, human rights, and democratic reforms -- he hopes to foster a sense of community among Moroccans in the United States, he said.

``I'm not telling you to come back," Mekouar said to Moroccans at the Arab Students' Organization event. ``I'm very proud of Moroccan-Americans. But it does seem to me that they don't know each other very well." Though concrete numbers are hard to come by, Massachusetts is home to around 20,000 of the approximately 100,000 Moroccans thought to be living in this country.

``Moroccans here have been very focused on settling in, but now that they are settled, they want to be in touch," Mekouar said.

The ambassador began each of his talks by mentioning, with the slight sheepishness of a man delivering a well-worn diplomatic cliché that remains too good to pass up, that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as a sovereign nation, back in 1777. America's troubles with Barbary Coast pirates led to a request for protection from the sultan of Morocco that put the country forever into US history books.

Shooting down Dutch claims that Holland was in fact first to recognize America when a small Dutch Caribbean colony offered a 21-gun salute to an American ship (a greeting given to vessels from independent states), Mekouar demurs with a smile: ``No, we were first. But it's fun."

In a letter to the sultan, George Washington wrote that in America, ``there are no mines of either gold or of silver, and this young nation, just recovering from the waste and desolation of a long war, has not, as yet, had time to acquire riches by agriculture and commerce. But our soil is beautiful, and our people industrious, and we have reason to flatter ourselves that we shall gradually become useful to our friends."

This year's free trade agreement represents probably the second-most important event in the long history of US-Morocco relations, and Mekouar is determined to make the most of it.

``We're neighbors," he says. ``We have only the Atlantic between us."