Death of our colleague Abdelali Boukhalef: A long-time journalist

He died with the birth of the new week. In the late afternoon in Meknès, the incurable illness that had been gnawing at our colleague Abdelali Boukhalef for several months finally struck him down. With him, a part of the collective memory of French-language Moroccan journalism has faded forever. With his wry smile and piercing gaze, he symbolised for all those who had the good fortune to rub shoulders with him, the suffering that many high-calibre professionals endure within certain press companies that favour the contribution of advertising over editorial content and the enrichment of their top management and the cronies of their middle management over the foot soldiers of history that we are.

Affable and eloquent, he endured without flinching, sacrificing his private life on the altar of a chimera created solely for the purpose of broadcasting a soothing and insipid discourse that served no other purpose than to coat advertising insertions and to devalue the real fight that every journalist must lead in the service of those essential ideals that can only be carried by militants of modernist and progressive parties and organisations. Like many professionals, he believed he was doing his duty as a watchdog of democracy, when in the end he was only guarding the mercantile interests of a nomenklatura backed by or belonging to the State's technostructure.

He ended up paying for it with his life since, at the root of his illness, many colleagues point to a simple work accident that was never formalised as such. Stressed to death by an unbearable workload coupled with a human resources organisation that only functions in the direction of suppressing any freedom of expression despite its apparent modernity, he ended up losing consciousness one day. Result: a cracked rib that never healed. He did not suffer much from it, leaving it to nature to heal it. Is this the cause of his cancer? God only knows. Be that as it may, neither his multiple hospitalisations nor the numerous chemotherapy sessions succeeded in restoring his health. A situation that his maintenance in a position of subjection in relation to many newcomers to the world of journalism could only make even more untenable as he had never been combative.

Nevertheless, Abdelali, now that you are no longer of this lower world, you will finally have the fullness of resting in peace and we will keep the memory of the dignified and devoted journalist that you have always been.

Provider / Source : A.S, Libération