Remnant of the Cold War and Obstacle to a Political Solution in the Western Sahara?" Le Journal charged that the paper was so one-sided in favor of the official Moroccan line that it gives the impression of having been ordered and paid for by the Moroccan government or its lobbyists. Le Journal, which sells about 16,000 copies,never actually alleged that the ESISC received money or directives from Moroccan authorities or from intermediaries acting on their behalf. But its coverage, based on an analysis of the paper's content, was full of innuendo. It used terms like "remote-controlled" and "directed" to describe the report, but took pains to put quotation marks around them. For example, the headline on the cover read, "Is the Polisario Finished? The Bad Arguments of a Report 'Remote-controlled' by Rabat." ESISC president Claude Moniquet filed a libel suit against Le Journal in Morocco, saying the allegations of accepting Moroccan money to produce the paper had harmed the ESISC's reputation. "We refuse to accept financ[ing] from any party concerned in our research," he said at a press conference on December 20.7 Moniquet demanded 5 million DH in damages and the publication by Le Journal of a"correction" at its own expense in newspapers in Morocco, Europe and the United States. The state prosecutor also sought 5 million DH in damages for the plaintiff. The libel trial of Le Journal director Aboubakr Jamaï and reporter Fahd Iraqi opened on January 16 before the Correctional Court of Rabat. The defendants asked the judge to summon as witnesses two scholars of the Western Sahara conflict who were based, respectively, in Spain and in France. These expert witnesses, the defense hoped, would endorse Le Journal's assessment that the ESISC paper seemed suspiciously close to the Moroccan official line, showing thereby the "good faith" of Le Journal'sharsh judgment of that paper. Truth is generally a defense in libel cases under Moroccan law. The Press Code's Article 73 states that the party accused of libel "must prove the truth of the libelous facts" by providing the prosecutor's office with "a copy of the documents; [and] the names, professions, and addresses of the witnesses through whom he intends to prove his case." However, the judge trying Le Journal, Mohamed Alaoui,8 rejected the magazine's motion to summon the two expert witnesses. In his written judgment he based this refusal not on the relevance of the witnesses, but rather on an unorthodox and counter-intuitive reading of Article 73, by which the exculpatory evidence submitted by the defendant must be composed of both documents and oral witnesses, but not one or the other alone. This procedural ruling prompted Le Journal's lawyers to withdraw from the trial in protest, arguing that Judge Alaoui had denied them the means to defend their clients. On February 16, Judge Alaoui announced the conviction of Le Journal for defaming the plaintiff, fining Jamaï and Iraqi 50,000 DH each, the maximum allowable fine for libel under Article 47 of the Press Code. He also ordered Le Journal to pay Moniquet 3 million DH in damages, and to pay for publication of the judgment in three Moroccan newspapers. While Moroccan law specifies the maximum fines that can be levied for libel, it leaves to the judge's discretion the amount of damages to award to the libeled party, based on the judge's