Sánchez says: ‘Everything’s fine with Morocco.’ Rabat doesn’t see it that way

Lisbon. “Relations with Morocco are at an all-time high,” according to the strategic foreign policy objectives drawn up by the Spanish government last year. The sentence is quoted in a Monday article in the daily newspaper El País, which explains that Madrid has no intention of revising any aspect of its policy towards Rabat. The Ceuta crisis is the fault of organised crime groups; there is no evidence of complicity on the part of the Moroccan authorities, whilst it is clear that their cooperation was invaluable in resolving the crisis within a few hours. This, in essence, is the government’s official line. But it stands alone, and not only because of the obvious criticism from the opposition on both the right and the left (many of Pedro Sánchez’s allies are not keen on friendship with Morocco at the expense of the Sahrawi people). El País quotes diplomatic sources and independent analysts who are calling for at least a change of tone, if not an outright U-turn. “Perejil has given us twenty years of peace,” says Jorge Dezcallar, former ambassador to Rabat and former head of the Spanish secret services. He is referring to the surreal dispute over an uninhabited islet in the Strait of Gibraltar.

In 2002, Moroccan troops occupied it and the People’s Party government (with Aznar as Prime Minister) sent in soldiers. The Moroccans withdrew. In recent years, however, Madrid has suffered nothing but humiliations. The crisis of May 2021 has returned with a vengeance to newspapers across half the world: Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front for the independence of Western Sahara – a territory occupied by Morocco in 1975, during the final days of Franco and his regime – to one of its hospitals. Rabat’s response was an avalanche of migrants heading for Ceuta. Even today, the figures fluctuate between 8,000 and 12,000, but compared to the 80,000 on 30 July last year, it was a mere appetiser. Morocco’s move proved an immediate success. As early as July 2021, Arancha González Laya, the Foreign Secretary who had welcomed Ghali and defended the move on humanitarian grounds, was dismissed and replaced by the current Foreign Secretary, José Manuel Albares, a former ambassador to Paris and notoriously closer to the Franco-Moroccan line on Western Sahara. According to Ignacio Cembrero, a journalist specialising in Moroccan affairs, it was Morocco itself that called for the minister’s dismissal; the Zaragoza Public Prosecutor’s Office even went so far as to investigate her for having allowed the Sahrawi leader to enter the country illegally. Furthermore, in 2022, Madrid abandoned its historic neutrality on Western Sahara to officially support Moroccan sovereignty. The move triggered a crisis with neighbouring Algeria, Morocco’s rival, and the new attack on Ceuta came just a few days after Sánchez’s trip to Algiers, where Spanish diplomats had painstakingly mended relations with the country that supplies one-third of Spain’s gas needs.

Admittedly, each reason, in itself, seems insufficient to establish a cause-and-effect relationship with the events of 30 July. However, last weekend Morocco demonstrated its ability to control its borders by turning back hundreds of migrants. In Spain, some say it was merely a staged event involving sub-Saharan migrants who have been camped out on the hills around Ceuta, waiting for better times. The expulsion of journalists from Spanish state television and the EFE news agency does not bode well for the transparency of the mid-August operation. Ignacio Cembrero, in a recent interview on a YouTube channel dedicated to geopolitical and military analysis (‘Cosas Militares’), points out that Rabat is expecting further significant gestures from Madrid, such as the establishment of consular services in the occupied Sahara (Paris is already doing so), or control of civil airspace over the region (still managed by the Spanish from the Canary Islands). The interview dates from before the latest crisis, and even an expert like Cembrero gets his predictions wrong when he says that Spain has, in any case, bought itself four years of peace with Morocco by including it in the organisation of the 2030 FIFA World Cup. Today we know that none of this was enough to secure peace. Perhaps King Mohammed VI feels he can extract more from this outgoing government, whilst the next one will be of a different calibre, given that the polls predict victory for the party that sent the army to Perejil, aided, moreover, by the nationalists of Vox. In the hope that even the dire prophecies will prove to be wrong, there are reasons to expect far more confrontational clashes in the region of the Pillars of Hercules.