No joking matter

Less time to dig into this affair than I'd like, but trust me, it is absolutely baffling. For those interested in a fuller picture, a whole set of links can be found here, even if, unfortunately, they involve four different languages. But grab your dictionaries and get to it, because this story is amazing:

As I'm sure you recall, these last weeks, Western Sahara blogs and sites have been writing and posting about the re-edited UN report on the Western Sahara negotiations -- a minor scandal which eventually got some serious media. The Sahrawi site Western Sahara Online did so in the form of parody, posting a series of amusing excerpts from "Ban Ki-moon's diary".

However, the joke was lost on some, who also thought the report scandal worth mentioning despite or because of the official silence in Morocco. A weekly, El Ousboua, picked up Western Sahara Online's satire and printed it in Arabic, the journalist apparently thinking he had stumbled on a real scoop -- well, either that, or he's really tounge-in-cheek.

This sent heads spinning in the Makhzenite ruling class, who didn't really care what the truth was, because either way, it was most unsuitable reading for their loyal subjects. The semi-official Le Matin du Sahara et du Maghreb responded with a furious editorial condemning El Ousboua's publication of what the writer thought both slanderous and untrue (right on one count), without ever catching on to the obvious fact that the original text was a joke copied from a Sahrawi activist site. Virtually foaming at the mouth, the editorialist branded the guilty journalist "anti-Moroccan" for good measure -- and since Le Matin is a mouthpiece of the regime, legal action was not long in coming. The editor of El Ousboua, Mustafa Alaoui, has now been brought in for questioning, and the affair turned into a police matter.

No sense of humor, eh? Well, we knew that already.

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UPDATE: The Moroccan state news agency, MAP, now informs us on its French-language site that a police enquiry has been launched to try to determine the mysterious origins of "these absurdities, whose authors aim to harm the reputation of the country and that of the Moroccan delegation involved in negotiations concerning a sacred cause, which has the attention and unanimous support of every Moroccan." Clearly, the best minds of Moroccan law enforcement are on the case -- but will they go so far as to apply the latest in advanced US-supplied computerized investigation technology to solve the baffling riddle of the Ban Ki-moon letters? To be continued!