2024-05-11 13:07:22
In an editorial under the title “Flagrant crime: the French State Press Agency (AFP) persists in exonerating the Algerian regime and charging Morocco”, the newspaper underlines that it is increasingly worrying to note that the AFP persists in sparing Algeria by reserving for it, unlike Morocco, preferential and most accommodating treatment, despite the adoption, Thursday in Strasbourg, of a resolution condemning without appeal the regime Algerian.
Recalling that the European Parliament (EP) condemned, last Thursday, by an overwhelming majority of votes (536 for, 4 against and 18 abstentions) Algeria, guilty of repressing freedoms of the press and expression, as evidenced by the case of journalist Ihsane El Kadi, sentenced on April 2 to five years in prison, the publication writes that the AFP had, in its dispatch on the incongruous EP resolution concerning Morocco, deliberately used very critical language towards the Kingdom, presenting the MEPs as having “strongly criticized” and “demanded” actions against the country.
On the other hand, the newspaper continues, the French Agency slips, in its dispatch on the EP resolution condemning Algeria, into a more watered-down language grid, contenting itself with asserting that the MEPs “have requested” and “call “Algeria.
“This difference in treatment in the choice of terms is intended to lead to an erroneous perception of the real situation in the two countries,” believes the daily.
And the newspaper notes that the contrast between the said resolution and the AFP dispatch did not fail to arouse the astonishment of observers, who point out this systematic relentlessness and this blatant partiality of Agence France Presse against the Morocco and its interests and question, once again, the reasons for its partiality in the treatment of Moroccan news.
According to the publication, the AFP’s tendentious treatment of Morocco is in line with the French political and media pressure deployed to attenuate the content of the EP resolution against Algeria.
In this regard, “Le Matin” explains that the usual maneuvers carried out in the aisles of the legislative institution and in certain European capitals did not have the expected success, to the great dismay of certain MEPs and other French political and media circles, who clearly spared no effort.
The editorial, which recalls that leading French media had affirmed, without being contradicted, that the presidency of the Renew group in the EP, close to the French government, succeeded, initially, in withdrawing the draft resolution against the Algeria from the EP agenda, specifies that this information was confirmed to other media by two political sources within the European institution.
2024-05-11 13:07:22