There are those dossiers that lead you to believe that information is really just a Russian doll, a slightly creepy matryoshka.
Lucas Tripoteau and Camille-Cerise Gessant provided us with a full and accurate summary of the judgment recently returned by the Court of Justice concerning the fisheries agreement in place between the European Union and Morocco until July of this year (see EUROPE 11970). From a European point of view, this information required no further clarification. Elsewhere in the world, however, a judgment from the European Court may be fodder for articles and commentary the tone, phrasing and underlying meaning of which speak to a time that many Europeans believed had gone for good. But that isn’t the case everywhere in the world.
It isn’t the case for the Moroccan journalist who began his dispatch with the words: “the European justice system, which Polisario and Algeria hoped to manipulate to serve their vile purposes, cut to the heart of the matter when it ruled on Tuesday that it does not recognise any role for the mercenary organisation and its accomplices” (MAP, 1 March; our translation). Our colleague goes on to welcome the fact that the Court of Justice remained unmoved by the “hubbub raised by the polisario (the capital ‘P’ consciously avoided) propaganda machine, blindly relayed by the scribblers of the Algerian press, who are past masters in swagger”.
This is a bit of a change from the more serious tone that regular readers of this bulletin will be used to, but it makes the point that for many countries that are not lucky enough to live inside the European Union, the reality is still one of disputes that may evolve into conflicts. This means that, in those countries, information is frequently under threat of having to deal with any amount of propaganda, so that the journalist’s main skill is to make it as unobtrusive and believable as possible.
This is exactly what our colleague did, by reporting simply and factually, and without dwelling too much on it, that the ambassador of Morocco to the EU, Ahmed Reda Chami, had welcomed the fact that the Court of Justice had not adhered to the “political analysis of its Advocate General”. This information becomes even less dubious by dint of having been relayed by French MEP Gilles Pargneaux, chair of the EU/Morocco group of friends, as well: the Court of Justice “has distanced itself from the political analysis of the Advocate General and declined to use entirely inappropriate vocabulary (...)”, he said (our translation). The fact that this time, the conclusions of an Advocate General (see EUROPE 11936), which the Court generally follows, have been revised may lead one to conclude that there is no smoke without fire.
And this is where we depart from the field of information in the strictest sense of the word and enter a world frequented by publicists and a healthy sprinkling of activists, some of them quite openly so, others skulking in the shadows, where (State?) secrecy is broken only to get others on board the defended cause, to the point of throwing mud if necessary. It is here, for instance, that there were murmurs that the Advocate General – and former Belgian minister – Melchior Wathelet could have allowed himself to be influenced, when putting together his conclusions, by a member of his cabinet who is ‘guilty’ of having spent a lot of time, in his previous professional capacity, with individuals with close ties to Algeria, and therefore hostile to Morocco over the question of the Western Sahara. And others may have also said a few words to suggest that this legal secretary may, by means of the expected (and ultimately largely rectified) judgment, have sought to serve Greece’s interests over those of Turkey in the Cypriot dossier. As popular wisdom would have it, mud sticks.
What is still perfectly tangible is the interest this dossier on European fisheries off the coast of the Western Sahara has raised in another country that isn’t exactly local: Israel! There, this seemingly marginal dossier has received impressive (and entirely partial) coverage. For instance, in Israel Hayom, Eran Bar-Tal recalls an observation of his editor-in-chief, Boaz Bismuth, who was once the Israeli ambassador to Mauritania: “the Western Sahara is important to Morocco almost like Jerusalem is important to Israel”. As somebody who was once posted to a country that adjoins the desert territory that is the key to the dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front and its Algerian backing, this former diplomat clearly knows what he’s talking about. The Moroccan leaders certainly treat the Western Sahara as the apple of their eyes. However, do they really need allies who are only getting behind their cause out of their own self-interest? And who act like bulls in a china shop when they do?
The economist Eran Bar-Tal observes that in the history of Europe, “the code term ‘human rights’ always outweighs the interests of the Europeans themselves” and that, in that context, “it is rather easy for human rights groups to find the one judge who will be sympathetic to their cause and file their suit in that judge’s court”. Who is the polemicist referring to? The High Court of Justice, which chose to ask the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling rather than say that the fisheries agreement between the EU and Morocco was invalid? Advocate General Wathelet, who strongly suggested it? It’s no doubt six and two threes, because in matters of faith, the temptation is certainly always to tell oneself that God will recognise his own.
In this case, it is indeed a question of (bad) faith. Proof of this is the Molotov cocktail of an article thrown by one Irina Tsukerman in the Jerusalem Post. According to this person, who styles herself a “human rights and national security attorney and analyst, who has written extensively about Morocco and related sovereignty, human rights and geopolitical issues”, the EU is entirely incorrect in considering the “disputed Judea and Samaria territories ‘occupied’. Hence, a Court verdict that is overly sympathetic to the Polisario position could have “legal implications” that would be extremely embarrassing to Israel. She no doubt feels that a verdict not in Morocco’s favour would have prompted the EU to “use the same tactics to help the Palestinian.”
This lady, who seems to be no stranger to putting two and two together to make five, hence considers that Polisario’s claims for sovereignty, like those of the Palestinians, are “historically dubious” and “originated from Soviet-backed liberation movements, aimed at destabilising and delegitimising pro-western countries”. Today, human rights activists are still, she says, “inspired by Communist and Islamist revolutionaries”, with Algeria pulling the strings in the case of the Western Sahara. This is why the complaint filed by the Western Sahara Campaign in the United Kingdom ran a very high risk, in her view, of leading to an “abuse of power by an activist judge” and could end up prompting the EU to apply the same boycott formula to Israel and the occupied territories.
This is the madness a Court of Justice ruling can lead to. Fortunately, in their wisdom, the European judges decided to set the record straight. But it is highly tempting to remind the Moroccan authorities that it is sometimes wise to ask God to protect us from our (false) friends, as the misplaced excesses of their supporters are likely to do their cause more harm than good.
Michel Theys