The appearance of Ferhat Mehenni, the exiled president of the Movement for Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), as a guest in the CNEWS 8:30 PM newscast on October 2nd, was canceled last minute.
According to the MAK press release,“while everything was ready with the hosts of the program a few minutes before the appearance of the President, and bearing in mind that the first part of this program had begun with the announcement of his intervention in the second part, an envoy of the channel comes to announce to the President, in the dressing room at 8:18 PM, that he had received a call from the direction asking him to inform us of the pure and simple cancellation of the intervention of the President of Anavad, foreseen at 8:30 PM.”
The press release went on to add that “the host himself, Mr. Rioufol, learned of this at the end of the first part and did not understand the reasons for this sudden cancellation, stating that he had never seen this before.”
Video footage shows the exchange that took place between Ferhat Mehenni and Ivan Rioufol following the news. The French journalist was clearly in a state of shock as he kept repeating that the situation “is crazy” going on to add: “I was scheduled for a week now, the direction has known about it for a week. Then, I got a phone call from the direction saying no, and I was not given any explanation.”
Seeing as the interview was supposed to be live, the journalist expressed that “they are putting us in a tricky situation. I do not know how we will manage.” He also went on to add that “Paris will need to take care of it.”
The President of MAK stated with certainty that “Algeria had to intervene at the level of the Elysée.” More precisely, he said that the influence was “Algeria on the Elysée, Elysée on the channel.”
The claims of the President of MAK are not unfounded. It is worth noting that the 24-hour news channel owned by the Bolloré group, is considered to be very close to the Elysée. According to Maghreb intelligence sources, it was Yannick Bolloré himself who picked up the phone on the orders of Emmanuel Macron to cancel the interview with Ferhat Mehenni.
The same sources say that it is President Tebboune, alerted by his advisers, who called Emmanuel Macron threatening to cancel the visit to Algiers of the French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne if the interview went on as scheduled.
The MAK-ANAVAD press release added that the interview could have also called into question future and even current contracts and agreements between Paris and Algiers.