Why Spain’s change of position on Western Sahara – Morocco, Algeria, Ceuta, Melilla, Pedro Sanchez, Mohammed VI,
What is behind Spain’s change of position on Western Sahara? -Morocco will never give up its claims on Ceuta and Melilla.
The President of the Spanish Government Pedro Sánchez flew to Morocco on Thursday April 7 to have a ftour ( iftar Moroccan) with King Mohamed VI, and thus seal a reconciliation with its southern neighbour. It is more than likely that the harira the traditional soup that Moroccans eat to break their fast, must have tasted bitter for the Spanish leader.
Hours before he flew to Rabat, Spain’s Congress of Deputies passed a “Proposición no de ley”, a non-binding, non-legislative Spanish parliamentary motion, harshly blaming the president for his U-turn on the Western Sahara conflict. .
Only 118 MPs from Sánchez’s PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) voted against the motion. The rest, a total of 168 deputies, some of whom are part of the government coalition or support the government without participating, and right-wing conservative deputies from the People’s Party voted in favor of the motion. Sixty-one other deputies abstained, representing the extreme right Vox and the centrliberal Ciudadanos (Citizens).
With the exception of the socialists, everyone wanted to express their disagreement, even their anger, towards the president for having broken a 46-year-old consensus, respected by all Spanish cadres – right, center and left – since the death of the president. General Franco. .
As a former colonial power still considered by the UN as the administrative power of Western Sahara (Morocco being a de facto power), Spain was bound to a certain so-called active neutrality. He was supposed to lean neither towards Morocco nor towards the separatists of the Polisario Front. However, in a letter to the King of Morocco, Sánchez declared that he was in favor of the Moroccan autonomy proposal offered to the Sahrawis in 2007, calling it “the most serious, realistic and credible”, thus shattering this old and very sensitive.
Especially since the decision in favor of Morocco was taken by the president alone, without consulting his government allies from the left-wing Podemos party, and without warning, as is customary, the right-wing opposition Popular Party.
In Spain, the Western Sahara conflict is a sensitive and almost demotic subject. While careful not to anger their Moroccan neighbor to the south, which often threatens to open its borders to allow an influx of Moroccan and sub-Saharan migrants into Spain, various parties that have governed Spain have felt sympathy for their former colonial subjects, the Sahrawis.
Between 1958 and 1976, the territory of the Saharawi people was known as the “Spanish province in Africa”. When Morocco captured the Sahara after the Green March launched by King Hassan II in 1975, the Spaniards felt bitter at having to abandon the Sahrawis.
This is why Sánchez’s recent diplomatic and political update regarding Western Sahara is seen as a “treason” by many Spaniards. We now know that Spain obtained nothing in exchange for the recovery of the Sahara, except for the return of the Moroccan ambassador to Madrid, recalled for consultation last year, and the reopening of land borders and maritime.
Sánchez explained to the Spanish Congress of Deputies that the serious crisis with Spain’s southern neighbor, which began after Madrid allowed Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front independence movement, to be treated in Spain after having contracted COVID19, was “untenable”, but other authoritative voices, such as that of Miquel Iceta, Minister of Culture and close friend of Sánchez, exposed another version of this reversal.
In a widely read tweet, Iceta shared an article from the daily The Newspaper of Spain in which he explained that there had been a barter between Spain and Morocco. In exchange for Madrid’s acceptance of Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara, Rabat reportedly pledged to stop claiming the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands. “The agreement obliges Morocco to give up Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands”, writes the newspaper peremptorily.
And that’s where everything becomes cloudy and incomprehensible. By negotiating its renunciation of Sahrawi self-determination, in violation of international law since it is the UN that is managing this conflict, did Madrid obtain written assurances from Moroccans? Nothing is more uncertain.
Morocco will never give up its claims to Ceuta and Melilla, which it has suffocated economically by closing its borders and putting an end to smuggling, which is one of the sources of the prosperity of these two free ports.
It is not for nothing that Morocco has built a huge port on the Strait of Gibraltar, Tanger-Med, in one of the most important maritime crossing points in the world. Tangier-Med, considered today as one of the largest ports in Africa, competes directly with the port of Algeciras, located on the other side of the strait, but also the port of Ceuta.
As for Melilla, the unilateral closure in 2018 of the only land customs crossing between Spain and Morocco, that of Beni Ensar, opened after the Treaty of Fez in 1912 and ratified after Morocco’s independence in 1956, is another manifestation of the Moroccan will to strangle the economy of this city.
On the other hand, although Morocco does not formally claim the Canary Islands, in 2020 the House of Representatives (lower house of parliament) passed two bills extending Moroccan territorial waters to a point overlapping those of the islands. .
It is therefore difficult to see Rabat giving up its historic claims to landlocked territories in Africa only to thank the Spanish government for declaring that it considers Morocco’s plan for the autonomy of Western Sahara to be “the most serious, the most realistic and the most believable.
Moreover, in the Spanish-Moroccan joint statement following the meeting with Sánchez in Rabat, there is no mention of Ceuta and Melilla. On the other hand, article 3 of the document refers to the “full normalization of the movement of people and goods”, which “will be restored in an orderly manner, including appropriate arrangements for land and sea customs and control. people “. “Does this mean that Morocco will reopen the former land customs of Beni Ensar, which had been brutally closed in 2018? It’s possible, but not sure yet.
What is certain, however, and enshrined in article 6 of this declaration, is that Morocco seems to be backing down on its claims to the territorial waters of the Canary Islands, since it speaks of the reactivation of a “working group on the delimitation of the maritime areas of the Atlantic seaboard (…) in order to make concrete progress. This seems to indicate that Morocco will review the two laws that allow Moroccan territorial waters to overlap with those of Spain.
If there is a winner in this reconciliation, it is Morocco. Before his departure for Rabat, sources from the Moncloa Palace, the official residence of the Spanish Prime Minister, suggested that Sánchez could return to Madrid with the famous document written and signed by the Moroccan authorities certifying the abandonment of claims to Ceuta and Melilla.
It didn’t happen and it shows a very strange misunderstanding of the Moroccan mentality on the part of Madrid. Despite the geographical proximity, Spain does not seem to understand the spirit and temperament of Moroccans. He seems not to understand that the next Moroccan objective is indeed the recovery of Ceuta, Melilla, and all those islands, islets and rocks scattered on the Moroccan Mediterranean coast.
So some may ask: why did the Spaniards give in so easily? The answer is that the Americans encouraged them to do so in accordance with the American policy of recognizing Western Sahara as part of Morocco. Unless the Spaniards bathe in a pool of unconsciousness and incomprehension, Madrid has not only broken the old consensus on Western Sahara but has also taken the risk of irritating Algeria, the main support of the Sahrawi separatists and above all the main gas supplier to the Iberian Peninsula.
After the Spanish volte-face on the Sahara, Algeria recalled its ambassador to Madrid for consultation. The gesture was described by the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, as the expression of a “little passing rage”.
It is not the case at all. Since this “little rant”, Algeria has suspended all repatriations of illegal immigrants from Spain. He told Spain’s national airline Iberia that he would not allow him to resume flights to Algeria. Then, a few days ago, the president of the Algerian public hydrocarbon company Sonatrach, Toufik Hakkar, announced that in this period of serious global gas crisis, his country would not increase the price of its fuel to its customers, with the exception of Spain.
Madrid, which was Algeria’s main strategic partner in energy, is losing this privilege to the Italians. Since the recall of the Algerian ambassador to Spain, the visits of Italian politicians and businessmen to Algiers follow one another at a frantic pace. On February 28, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio visited Algeria accompanied by a delegation of senior officials from the energy giant ENI ( National Hydrocarbons Authority ). On April 11, the President of the Council of Ministers Mario Draghi also traveled to Algiers, where he met Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
Apparently, at the Moncloa Palace and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they still do not understand what is happening.
Ali Lmrabet is a Moroccan journalist and former diplomat. He is the founder and director of several media in Morocco, in Arabic and French, all of which have been banned. He is the recipient of several international press awards and was one of the main reporters for the Spanish daily El Mundo. He is currently a researcher in history and continues to collaborate with several international media.
Politics today14/04/2022
#Morocco #Spain #Western Sahara#Algeria