It’s summer. Vacation time, sun, beach, sea, swimming. Men, women and children take advantage of these few weeks when time seems to stand still. The rhythm finally slows down, far from the daily routine. Not for everyone, however. On July 15, the president of the MR (Reform Movement, French-speaking liberals) Georges-Louis Bouchez created a surprise by appointing Hadja Lahbib as Sophie Wilmès’s replacement as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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Hadja Lahbib is not unknown to the general Belgian public, far from it, since she presented the television news for twenty years on the French-speaking public television channel RTBF. On the other hand, she has no political experience. But what has earned her the most critical spotlight, barely two weeks after her swearing in, is a reporting project for which she traveled to Crimea in July 2021, at the invitation of the cultural association Les saisons russes, which partially financed his trip. However, this event sponsored by Gazprom, and in the organization of which the daughter of Vladimir Putin also participates, is above all a matter of Russian propaganda. And to make matters worse, Hadja Lahbib went to Crimea with a visa issued by Russia.
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The report was ultimately never made. On the other hand, it gave rise to a radio subject which ends with the announcement of its next broadcast, a sign that it was indeed planned, including after the return of Hadja Lahbib, that this report be produced and broadcast. The radio subject matter, meanwhile, can easily be described as Russian-indulgent, and the issue of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is completely glossed over.
Casting error
However, the international community has never recognized this annexation and continues to consider Crimea as Ukrainian territory. And for its part, Ukrainian legislation provides for a three-year penalty ban on access to Ukrainian territory for those who transit through Russia to go to Crimea.
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In short, the diplomatic crisis is not far away, and if it can finally be avoided, it will be thanks to the commitment of the very fresh Minister Lahbib to “ further support Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s military aggression “. She also took advantage of Ukrainian State Day to tell her Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba “ our unwavering solidarity, our firm positions on the situation and our commitment to maintain our support “. For now, the ball is therefore in kyiv’s court, whose official position is awaited.
But while some obviously have a fair chance to criticize what they consider to be a “parachuting” or even a distressing casting error, certain questions seem to have to be clarified as to the role of RTBF in what is obviously everyone’s minus one big clumsiness.
Responsibility of RTBF
Because it is hardly conceivable that a journalist working for the public channel acts alone, without consultation with its editorial staff, all the more so if it is a report intended to be broadcast on the said public channel. The documentary in question never saw the light of day, for lack of sufficient guarantees of independence, RTBF tells us laconically. But why ? What happened behind the scenes, which justifies that RTBF was able to send or let one of its journalists go to Crimea in such conditions? Shouldn’t the journalist’s trip have been conditional on the prior obtaining of these guarantees of independence?
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It was to obtain more information on this aborted reporting project that the Flemish nationalist deputy Peter De Roover, leader of the N-VA group (Flemish nationalists) in the Chamber, sent an email to the general administrator of the RTBF , Jean-Paul Philippot: “ It is essential that we are able to determine who invited whom, under what conditions, including financially, how contacts took place and what other relevant contacts, if any, were made. »
The answer looks very much like a pirouette, since RTBF replied that ” RTBF is an autonomous public company of the French Community and does not come under the Federal State “. Certainly. But Hadja Lahbib, meanwhile, is a federal minister, and it is in this capacity that the MP is concerned about his past journalistic activities. Rather than giving up, the public channel would therefore gain credibility by providing the required clarifications on what goes far beyond the individual responsibility of a journalist to engage, in reality, the RTBF itself.
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