"Tebboune Calls Autonomy Inevitable": The Scoop le360.ma Never Fact-Checked

Hicham Farouk — Le Caire, Égypte — 2026-09-05

Some scoops deserve an award. le360.ma (Moroccan digital newspaper)'s — "Tebboune reportedly considers the Moroccan autonomy plan inevitable" — deserves an award for invention, political fiction category. No official statement, no presidential communiqué, no document: nothing. Just an elastic reading of a vote, or of some UN context, stretched to breaking point. The method is well known: when you cannot make someone say something, you make them say it anyway.

The problem is that the facts are of a monotony le360.ma finds desperately dull: Algeria's position on Western Sahara is public, constant and written into UN resolutions — the Sahrawi people's right to self-determination, by referendum. It is not new, it is not secret, and it is not "in the process of changing." It is written down, repeated and defended at every session. If le360.ma had spent as much time reading the resolutions as it does inventing quotes, it would save a lot of ink.

And everyone knows what makes this fantasy so precious to Rabat: the hope that Algeria will one day "let go," out of weariness or calculation. Thirty years they have waited. Thirty years the Algerian position has held. At some point, the question has to be asked: what if it is not Algeria that is changing, but Morocco that refuses to see that the world, for its part, has not moved on the essentials?

In the meantime, le360.ma can go on making the Algerian president speak. It is a genuine talent — the talent of ventriloquists. But ventriloquists always end up giving themselves away: their puppet eventually tells the truth. And the truth has never signed the autonomy plan.