While waiting for Morocco and the Polisario to meet in the coming days, during informal negotiation, in the suburbs of New York, we come to learn from sources close to the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the recent affairs linking Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) to the Polisario Front worry the Algerian diplomacy leaders who wish that the Front “becomes stronger” at least vis à vis the media. Thus, many collaborators of Abdelkader Messahel, assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, co-managing the Polisario issue at the international level, with the DRS (the Algerian secret services) have held a meeting with the main lobbyists working on behalf of Algeria in Washington, among which the companies “Foley Hogg” and “Independent Diplomat”, so as to ask them to set “a media strategy allowing the Polisario to separate its image from that of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI)”.
The task does not seem to be easy for the lobbyists, the latter have asked for a reinforcement of their media capacity by providing them with a specialist in the relationship with the US media. The only problem, but very important, is that this specialist was obliged to abandon facing the reservations of the main US media regarding the Polisario, and it is Abdallah Baali, Algerian Ambassador in Washington, who was entrusted with the task of finding some media link ready to assert the version carried by Algiers. Baali had contacted an executive from the public channel PBS to ask him to interview the Polisario representative at the UN, Ahmed Boukhari. The scathing answer of the channel: “we don’t interview terrorists…”.
