What is the status of the shipwreck of the patera that set sail from Sidi Ifni on Thursday, 13 December, and sank off the Canary Islands, leaving two dead and six missing? Saâdeddine El Othmani, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, went to Parliament the day before yesterday for a hearing on this matter before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, National Defence, Islamic Affairs, and Moroccans Residing Abroad, to explain the latest developments in this tragedy and the various measures taken by the State to defend its nationals.

For the head of Moroccan diplomacy, it is too early to comment on this affair as it is still before the Spanish courts. According to him, we must wait for the appeal judgment to take a position. In the meantime, he indicated that the State was present from the first days of the tragedy and that it had appointed three lawyers to assist the victims in court.

The minister also stated that the consular services in the Canary Islands had visited the survivors several times and had repatriated the body of one of the shipwreck victims.

However, one question arises: why did he wait so long to go to the Chamber, he who shone by his absence by not making any statement on the issue? Worse still, it was Abdellatif Maâzouz, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of the Moroccan Community Residing Abroad, who was tasked with responding to the nation's elected officials a month after the shipwreck of the patera in question. An intervention that had nothing special about it, since he found nothing better to do than to tell the story of this tragedy, which everyone had already learned about through the press.

"We contacted the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation several times, starting in December 2012. But the latter did not see fit to respond to our request," Roukia Derham, USFP MP and member of the said committee, told us. For her, the minister's position is a revealing element of the government's poor communication on this issue. "The Executive communicated poorly on this tragedy from the beginning. An approach fraught with consequences. By avoiding such a posture, many problems could have been avoided," she confided to us.

These remarks are shared by many observers who believe that the government's communication was disastrous. Indeed, the Executive opted for a strategy of silence and refused to communicate on the subject, betting that media pressure would be short-lived. For some communication experts, the government's approach could be explained by the fact that it considered the information held by Moroccan diplomacy as elements that might appear provocative and contribute to fuelling a spiral of public controversy that should have been defused from the start.

This strategy proved to be of little benefit given the evolution of this affair. Especially after the dissemination via the Internet of the video from the Integrated External Surveillance System (SIVE), showing the Guardia Civil ship hitting the Moroccan migrants' boat head-on.

However, the head of Moroccan diplomacy may be obliged to provide more explanations to parliamentarians during the coming week, as they will not fail to ask him the unavoidable questions that hurt. "We are going to question the minister on the compensation for the victims' families and on the measures he has envisaged so that this kind of tragedy does not happen again," Nouzha Skalli, PPS representative on the said parliamentary committee, told us.