Maghreb Media Urged To Look Beyond Conflict to Help Revive Greater Maghreb (Conference)

During a national conference organized on Saturday in Oujda, Moroccan media professionals and intellectuals called on the Maghreb media to look beyond the prevailing conflict in the region to give hope for the Maghreb people and help revive the Greater Maghreb project.

Speakers at this meeting, organized by the Moroccan Federation of Newspaper Editors (FMEJ) under the theme “The role of the Greater Maghreb press in Maghreb integration”, stressed that the media “must be part of the solution and not the problem”, and promote the creation of a Greater Maghreb which can develop itself in a spirit of complementarity.

For Director General of MAP, Khalil Hachimi Idrissi, a paradigm shift is taking place in the region, capable of putting an end to a 60-year-old logic of conflict, fuelled by opponents of the territorial integrity of the Kingdom and responsible for freezing the Maghreb project.

Morocco’s return to the African Union, the Algerian Hirak, the operation to restore free movement in El Guerguarat, the American recognition of the Moroccanness of the Sahara and the resumption of contacts with Israel, are all heralding events of this paradigm shift, he said, regretting that a certain Algerian media outlets choose to deny these tangible facts instead of analyzing them and drawing the necessary conclusions.

“The transition is under way and the new paradigm is that of union, cooperation, economy, fraternity and coexistence”, noted Hachimi Idrissi, adding that, in this perspective, Maghreb media must play the role of factors of rapprochement rather than that of actors of division.

This starts with giving true, cross-checked information, and rejecting propaganda speeches and “Fake News” like those conveyed by the Algerian media about the situation in the Moroccan Sahara, he said.

For his part, the writer and journalist Seddik Maâninou, discussed inter-Maghreb media experiments which were successfully carried out in the 60s and 70s but which unfortunately could not last due to the blocking of the Maghreb idea, calling for the relaunch of such experiences in order to bring the peoples of the Maghreb closer.

For his part, the director of the newspaper Al Ittihad Al Ichtiraki, Abdelhamid Jmahri, indicated that the media have a responsibility to keep alive the Maghreb ideal, while remaining realistic in the face of the constraints of the present.

This conference, moderated by writer and media actor Mohamed Berrada, was followed by the launch of the “Oujda Call” in favor of inter-Maghreb rapprochement and the rejection of divisive speeches, as well as by a signing session of the latest publications of Hachimi Idrissi, Maâninou and Jmahri.