How surprising, or rather predictable, it is to see the dilapidated and threadbare discourse of the so-called government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and others emerge once again.
Their response to the royal speech of November 6 is just a rehash of the same indigestible soup that they have been serving for decades: unfounded accusations, grandiloquent diatribes and worn-out clichés. What’s new? An opportunistic recycling of the armed threat to thrill the audience.
The armed threat and the mirage of Mahbès
In a recent press release relayed by the Sahrawi Press Agency, the SADR did not fail to recall its intention to resort to armed struggle, as if this refrain could still galvanize its support. Last Saturday, in the region of Mahbès, this desert space renowned for being the scene of repeated and noisy maneuvers on the part of the Polisario separatist militias, the echo of the gesticulations resonated with no other effect than that of feeding the social networks of a few carefully maintained rumors.
But, deep down, who still believes in this specter resurrected on each occasion when the SADR feels its relevance melting like snow in the sun? There was a time when Algeria had press organs which embodied a true flame of independence and resistance. The time when newspapers like El Moudjahid this great duck of the voice of freedom formerly in Algeria, which has become a dirty rag these days.
These organs, if we can still dare to call them as such, proudly displayed their role as heralds of freedom and truth, which is unfortunately over. Today, these same newspapers are nothing more than dusty relics, bent to the wishes of the aging capos of Algiers, transformed into sad heralds of a dying power.
In a press release repeated endlessly, the SADR, through the voice of its makeshift speakers, attacks Morocco with an energy as noisy as it is sterile. “Illusion and deception”, “expansion” and “rebellion” : terms chosen to send shivers down the spines of the editors lined up behind the dusty offices of the Agency. But who, outside of this locked microcosm, still pays attention to it? The international community, this entity invoked as a last resort, is no longer fooled by this concert of grievances.
The Algerian press: drifting from a once revered pen
For their part, Algerian publications such as El Moudjahid, The Watan… once true spokespersons for the martyrs, have been reduced to servile echoes of this same rhetoric. Reduced today to the role of “dirty rags”, these newspapers caress a fossilized regime, without the slightest desire to dare the slightest deviation from the truth. Article after article, the Algerian press reiterates the same hymns, exalting the imaginary virtues of a power of capos which constantly repeats its empty promises and its illusionary commitments.
The most comical remains the martial posture that this pseudo-government prides itself on adopting, claiming to defend a “immutable reality” even though the only immutable evidence is Morocco’s desire to develop and stabilize its southern provinces. While the pens in exile strive to raise the specter of an armed struggle, the Saharan regions are seeing infrastructures, schools, consulates and cultural centers flourish, making this war rhetoric a little more anachronistic every day.
And what about other titles that populate the Algerian media scene? Horizons, The mass, Echourouk… each competing with platitudes and flatteries in a concert as monotonous as it is suffocating. In this landscape, dissidence is nothing more than a nostalgic memory, crushed by the iron fist of a system which feeds on the docility and silence of its media relays.
By insisting that the SADR is a “immutable reality”one comes to wonder to what extent this assertion serves more to reassure his own supporters than to convince a skeptical audience. Each page of what remains of the Algerian press is a paradoxical tribute to the defeat of critical spirit.
The gerontocrat regime, clinging to the remains of a wavering power, manipulates these supports with the delicacy of a proven puppeteer. From the cover to the editorials, everything is calculated, distorted, polished so that no voice rises higher than the whisper of submission.
The Algerian people, who have sacrificed so much for their freedom, deserve much more than a chorus of complacent newspapers, endlessly repeating elegies to the regime in place. The true press, the one that questions, that resists and that inspires, today seems buried under the rubble of what was once a bastion of courage and defiance.
It remains to be hoped that in the shadow of this apparent defeat, a new generation of journalists and thinkers dares to rise, breaking with collusion and reinventing a space in which speech and critical thinking will finally regain their letters of nobility .
