A look back at Ceuta by Ilaria Salis

During the debate on the Ceuta crisis in the European Parliament, Ilaria Salis of The Left group took the floor: “Ceuta is not Spain. Ceuta is not Europe. Geographically, it is Africa; historically, it is a remnant of European colonialism”. One wonders whether Salis’s Spanish comrades in the European Parliament had glanced at the papers the Italian MP had brought to the podium, because the narratives on Ceuta and Melilla do not align. The two Spanish exclaves in Africa have never been included on the United Nations’ list of colonies. There was therefore never any question of decolonisation for a people who do not demand it, in a land where cultures and religions coexist and where Moroccans seek to enter precisely because it is not Morocco. It has, on the contrary, been Spanish territory for centuries and is referred to as such in the 1978 Constitution. The two cities have never been part of a state such as modern-day Morocco, which did not exist at the time the Europeans occupied them (Melilla in 1497, after the Sultan of Fez had razed it to the ground).

A fundamental principle established by the African Union (not at the Berlin Conference) is that the Pandora’s box of borders inherited from the colonial era must not be opened, and Morocco’s expansionist ambitions are a source of irritation first and foremost to its African neighbours, particularly Algeria, its true strategic regional enemy. Those ambitions have already prompted Rabat to occupy Western Sahara in 1975, whose aspirations for self-determination have always been a key cause for the Spanish left, which is campaigning – in particular Tesh Sidi, a Sahrawi MP from Sumar (a party which, in Europe, is part of The Left group, alongside Salis) – for a law granting Spanish citizenship to Sahrawis born under Madrid’s administration (approved a week ago in Congress, it now passes to the Senate). “The border at Ceuta is a European border, because Ceuta is Spain,” the Spanish comrades must have told Salis, at least under their breath. It was Ursula von der Leyen who made sure to state this loud and clear from that podium.