Javier Otazu’s Imaginary Morocco

A former correspondent in Rabat for the Spanish news agency EFE, Javier Otazu is an ambivalent man and a “frustrated” journalist.

Ignacio Cembrero, Otazu’s alter ego in paid anti-Maroccanism who penned the preface to his book on Morocco, reveals this double face that Otazu has been wearing for almost two decades when it comes to the Moroccan reality.

For a normal man, it must not be easy to live in duplicity for 16 long years, divided between two different periods corresponding to two separate mandates spent as a Morocco-based journalist for a foreign outlet.

Cembrero’s hypocrisy should have been hard to bear for his Moroccan friends and collaborators during his years as EFE’s Rabat bureau chief. The erratic Spanish journalist would warmly speak to his Moroccan associates in the morning of all the good things he thought of their country and how happy he was to live an excitingly humane and rewarding professional experience among them, in a captivating country.

And then, when evening came, he would write the exact opposite in his dispatches for EFE, a heavy duplicity to assume for a normal man and a journalist whose job should entail a certain disposition toward objectivity.

Upon leaving Morocco on August 6, 2020, Otazu would go on to undertake the quite expected task of “de-frustration” by venting all his “Euskerian” venom into a book on Morocco. The picture his slim volume of a book paints of the North African kingdom is a genuine anthology of resentment, animosity, and relentlessness against a country whose beauty he once celebrated and appeared to love.

The Morocco specialist

Few anti-Moroccan authors can claim such a performance, with the author claiming to have held his tongue in check for ten years before speaking out. Imagine ten years of frustration being swept away all at once! On the book cover, the publisher pompously presents Otazu as an honorable “specialist” of Morocco and the Arab world.

If so, Otazu was indeed a very special “specialist” of Morocco. His coverage of Moroccan news was made up of a series of unscrupulous tricks. In his reporting, he chose to foreground stories concerning virginity tests, a kiss on Facebook, the role of the Moqaddem, and conventional untruths about Morocco’s supposed culture of politicized trials and fabricated charges to silent dissidents.

While in Rabat, Otazu’s little leftist nerd glasses from the 70s and his before-time whitened “mane” easily made him come across as the nice next door neighbor that one would be more than willing to invite to tea or dinner. He talked about Morocco with considerate courtesy. He spoke with amazement about his walks in the Benslimane forest and his trekking in the Chefchaouen region or in the High Atlas.

As his book has revealed, however, all these years of adventures and performative magnanimity and gratitude toward Morocco and Moroccans did not succeed in softening his real attitude towards Morocco and its people.

Still, Otazu’s personal journey did not predestine him to wallowing and sinking into Morocco-bashing. Born in February 1966 in a small town near Pamplona in northern Spain, Otazu married a Moroccan woman with whom he had two children. He is therefore the father of two Moroccan-Spanish kids who live with their mother after a tumultuous divorce between their parents.

His Moroccan story started in 1990, when he was appointed as an EFE journalist in Rabat. He remained in this post until 1996. In 2011, he succeeded Enrique Rubio as head of the Spanish newspaper’s Rabat office after a journey that took him to Cairo and then to Lima.

Resentment, it is said, sometimes dies hard. And so it seems with Otazu.

The seven chapters of his book-reflux on Morocco are an indictment worthy of the inquisition courts. If anything at all, the book is helpful in revealing its author’s obsessions and real attitude when it comes to stories involving Morocco.

The slim volume offers, for instance, invaluable glimpses into Otazu’s obsession with the migration issue, his feigned astonishment concerning Morocco’s claims on the occupied cities of Ceuta and Melilla, his perplexity in the face of Moroccans’ unanimous take on the Western Sahara question, as well as his blinkered view on the supposed “decline” of democratic freedoms in Morocco.

Obsessions and untruths

But the culminating point in his relentlessness against the Kingdom surely is his unhealthy fixation on the subject of the Moroccan Sahara. Like an obsession, the Sahara question keeps popping up like a leitmotif in Otazu’s 104-page diatribe. He does not hesitate to speak with a learned air of the “Sahrawi republic” as an entity endowed with the attributes of a sovereign state, that his own country Spain, obviously does not recognize.

And without flinching, he designates Brahim Ghali, the leader of the separatist Polisario Front, who was hospitalized last April in Spain under a false identity, as the “Sahrawi president.” One is at times tempted to wonder whether Otazu has any clues about the history of, and recent developments in, the Sahara dispute.

But since the Spanish journalist does very well know that there is neither a republic nor a president in the Polisario-controlled Tindouf camps in Algeria, we are only left with the suggestion that, at bottom, Ortazu’s irascible rumblings on Western Sahara stem from conscious efforts to to twist reality in favor of his favored myth on the Sahara conflict.

And what is that myth? The answer, though serving the same thread, varies in accordance with the context or audience. “Moroccan occupation” and “Sahrawi Republic” are only some of the favorite expressions deployed in this semantic, political game of ignoring history and diplomatic facts to tell a mythical, affective story about “Sahrawi decolonization.” The myth, therefore, is that the territory is not Moroccan and that the Algerian-backed separatists of the Polisario Front are the “only legitimate representative” of the Sahrawis.

In a burst of self-imposed analytical blindness, Otazu does not hesitate one moment to speak of Morocco as a “rogue state” (Estado Gamberro). At this point, Ortazu’s petulantly composed slim volume about his hitherto repressed vindictiveness towards, and resentment of, Morocco brazenly crosses the border of decency and journalistic or scholarly objectivity to peddle half-truths and alternative history about the issues it deals with.

The day after November 13, 2020, Otazu was among the journalists Morocco invited to cover the reopening of the Guerguarat checkpoint by Morocco’s Royal Armed Forces (FAR). Ignoring the basic rules of security in a military zone, he insisted on going alone without anyone knowing how he would claw his way in a military zone without his life being endangered.

Faced with the refusal of the Moroccan authorities who could not guarantee his safety, he began to overact to divert attention from his ethical failure which was going to oblige him to recognize the fact that the FAR lifted Polisario’s blockade in Guerguerat without causing human or material losses.

By settling in EFE’s premises at the United Nations, Javier Otazu will continue his mission of undermining Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. He runs through the corridors of the UN like a hysterical specialist asking prepaid questions on the Sahara question. Whenever the Sahara conflict is mentioned in UN discussions, reports, or resolutions, Otazu misses no opportunity to distill his venom on the wire of the news agency he works for and in the UN corridors and press room.

Worse, he misinforms his colleagues who, when they are ethically weak, follow him in his outrageous manipulations. He made his Twitter account a parallel and personal news agency to vent his anti-Moroccan frustrations and bring his hatred of Morocco to a whole new level.

One example among others: after the adoption of the latest resolution on the Sahara by the Security Council, Javier Otazu regretted, with a heavy heart, that the text was “closer to Moroccan theses.”

By his own admission, albeit subtle, Otazu dreams of seeing Morocco collapse. The litany of lies he has told on the question of Western Sahara, his celebratory rumblings on the demonstrations in Morocco’s Rif region, his nationalistic monologues on Spain’s claims to the occupied city of Ceuta and Melilla, his activism-soaked discourse on the issues of migration and human rights, all constitue a case study of a certain stripe of anti-Moroccanism and Spanish condescension that very few Western correspondents, even the less scrupulous and the least objective, are able to display.

In one frenzied episode of anti-Moroccanism, on July 19, 2021, just days before leaving Morocco, Javier Otazu posted 8 tweets in a row on legal issues concerning journalists charged with sex offenses and convicted terrorists condemned by Moroccan courts.

This was a way of saying, before flying to his new posting in New York, that it is the fate of these people — self-styled human rights and freedom fighters in a supposedly repressive and backward third world country — that matters to him, before that of 36 million Moroccans. No word uttered for the country that opened its arms to him for 16 years.

At the height of “Ghaligate,” when diplomatic relations between Morocco and Spain took an unprecedented hit after news emerged in March 2021 of Spain’s welcoming Polisario leader Brahim Ghali under the fake name of Mohammed Benbattouche, Javier Otazu stopped being a journalist to turn into a frustrated judge with an agenda.

He bemoaned the fact that Morocco still had friends in Spain who criticized the Madrid government’s blunder in harboring the leader of the sparatist Polisario Front. This was a telling indication that, in a narrow mind like his, Morocco should not have friends in Spain. For him, Spanish people are supposed to be potential enemies of Morocco.

For a journalist, the fact of covering a country for 16 years is an almost unique opportunity to talk about with learned composure and nuance. To duly and proportionally celebrate its successes, achievements, people, nature, history and future, while — of course — shining a much-needed light on its failures and challenges, all in a way that respects the balance and nuance that journalistic ethics requires.

As far as Javier Otazu is concerned, however, his 16 years spent in Morocco boiled down to four resounding failures.

First, he continuously conveyed a distorted image about the Moroccan reality. Second, the collapse of his dream to see Morocco on its knees. Third, he missed the opportunity to contribute, through professional and unbiased work, to bringing together the two peoples who have a long common history. And fourth, his personal life was crushed down.

In this inglorious role, Javier Otazu would have been, in another life, one of King Alfonso VIII’s lieutenants on the eve of the Battle of Alarcos. Obsessed with the Almohad empire, Alfonso VIII’s advisers conveyed to him a reality that is only a figment of their own imagination. The ensuing debacle is recounted in detail by chroniclers of the era.