Rachid M’Barki: “Morocco has never given me a single penny” and does not need “small telegraph operators to defend its interests”

Rachid M’Barki, ex-journalist of French BFM TV who has been fired for having uttered the expression “Moroccan Sahara” in a reporting on a Moroccan-Spanish economic forum in Dakhla, said during his hearing at the French National Assembly: “Morocco has never given me a single penny to say anything.”

The Kingdom “is a large, sovereign country that does not need anyone to defend its interests. And especially not small telegraphers,” the journalist told the members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry which is looking into suspicions of interference by foreign powers in French politics.

Rachid M’barki explained that the expression “Moroccan Sahara” for which he was dismissed by BFM TV on February 23, related to a news item. “It was the opening of the economic forum between Morocco and Spain in southern Morocco, in Dakhla, in the Sahara. That’s why it’s news to me. The second point is that it takes place in Dakhla which is a city in the Sahara,” said the journalist.

“I said that this forum between Morocco and Spain had been made possible thanks to the warming up of relations between the two countries, and I recalled that there was a diplomatic rupture and that even the borders were closed. Thanks to this warming, since Spain had recognized the Moroccan Sahara. This is my exact sentence,” explained M’Barki.

He recalled, by the way, that no later than “last week”, the Austrian Chancellor had also uttered the expression “Moroccan Sahara.”

The former BFM TV host then calmly delivered his “deep thought about Morocco.”

“As soon as the subject of Morocco and my expression of the Moroccan Sahara took on the magnitude that we have known, I suddenly became, as if by magic, a Franco-Moroccan journalist. Before that, no one had mentioned my origins in the press. Besides, there are even people who wondered where I came from. And I myself have never put forward my Moroccan origins,” Rachid M’Barki pointed out.

The journalist had been accused of relaying “misinformation” on BFM TV. It was allegedly produced by the Israeli agency Team Jorge and was the subject of a report by Radio France, taken up by Forbidden Stories and other international media, in particular on the sanctions aimed at the oligarchs in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war.