(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Minister of the Interior Ahmed Midaoui, RSF protested the intimidation tactics brought to bear against Ali Lmrabet, publication director of the weekly “Demain Magazine” and RSF correspondent in Morocco. Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general, asked the minister to launch an investigation in order to identify and punish those responsible […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Minister of the Interior Ahmed Midaoui, RSF protested the intimidation tactics brought to bear against Ali Lmrabet, publication director of the weekly “Demain Magazine” and RSF correspondent in Morocco. Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general, asked the minister to launch an investigation in order to identify and punish those responsible for the intimidation tactics. “It would be unacceptable if members of your services were found to be behind these threats,” he said. RSF recalled that the journalist’s former publication was banned in late 2000.
According to information collected by RSF, on 6 July 2001, at the end of the morning, in a Rabat suburb, an unmarked vehicle drove up next to Lmrabet’s car. “Demain Magazine”‘s publication director was travelling with a French journalist. One of the men inside the vehicle took pictures of the Moroccan journalist and told him in Arabic: “We have your picture. We will take care of you now.” The previous evening, two counter-espionage services (Direction de la surveillance du territoire, DST) officials visited the Safaprint printing works in Bouznika (twenty kilometres outside Rabat), where “Demain Magazine” is printed. They ordered that the printing of the newspaper be stopped and left with several copies of the publication. They returned at around 9:00 p.m. (local time) and authorised the newspaper’s publication. According to Lmrabet, “the DST’s directors feared that ‘Demain Magazine’ would make new revelations following Ahmed Boukhari’s statements on the Ben Barka affair.”
In early December, Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi banned “Demain”, “Le Journal” and “Assahifa” for having “threatened the state’s stability.” On 25 November and 1 December, respectively, “Le Journal” and “Assahifa” published a letter attributed to former opposition figure Mohamed Basri, which stated that the Moroccan Left was involved in the attempted coup d’état against King Hassan II in 1972. Lmrabet, editor of “Demain”, stated that he did not understand why his magazine was also targeted. “We simply reported on the disclosures of ‘Le Journal’, as had many other Moroccan newspapers,” he said (see IFEX alerts of 11 January 2001 and 4 December 2000). In January, Lmrabet’s newspaper was allowed to publish anew under the name “Demain Magazine”.
