Moroccan military vessels in Spanish waters and Sánchez’s silence

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the King and Queen of Spain, Felipe VI and Letizia, visited Ceuta and Melilla, where they were greeted by cheering crowds. The visit to Sidi Embarek, the Muslim cemetery in Ceuta where 90 of the 140 people who died whilst attempting to swim across the border last summer are buried, carried great symbolic significance. Rabat had refused to accept the return of their remains. It was the first time this king had visited the two Spanish exclaves in Morocco. His father, Juan Carlos, visited them in 2007, which led to a diplomatic crisis. Mohammed VI, in fact, lodged a protest.

Today, the authorities of the two countries (as reported by the online publication The Objective) appear to be focusing more on an agreement for the voluntary repatriation of the 10,000 to 15,000 Moroccans still remaining in Ceuta following the wave of migration on 30 and 31 July. In recent days, they have been removed from the beaches and are said to have finally been accommodated in temporary reception centres or on the outskirts of the city. In short, the King’s visit and the snap elections scheduled for 29 November appear to have accelerated the return to a semblance of normality. Should the agreement on voluntary repatriation also go ahead, it will be possible to say with a greater degree of certainty that the King of Morocco votes for the PSOE. Indeed, Mohammed VI should not have too much cause for complaint about the treatment meted out to him by the Spanish Socialist Party and its leader, Pedro Sánchez. After an initial, rather impulsive statement (although ‘impulsive’ is not the adjective that best describes the very cool-headed Spanish Prime Minister), in which he denounced the entry of some 80,000 people into Ceuta in the space of a few hours as an attack on national sovereignty, the government has otherwise consistently chosen to praise Rabat’s cooperation and divert any controversy towards Russia, Israel, the interference of the far right and internal conflict within the EU, particularly with Rome, given the mutual suspension of the Schengen Agreement and the summoning of the Italian ambassador in Madrid.

It was only on 3 September, when Sánchez, having returned from his summer holidays, reported to Parliament, that it emerged that the Moroccan ambassador had also been summoned on 21 August, but for a private meeting to which she, being temporarily absent, sent a representative. In recent days, two further news stories would have caused a sensation amongst the public had public attention not been focused on other pre-election issues. The first, reported by several newspapers, concerns Moroccan soldiers who had infiltrated the crowd of migrants and were responsible for at least one of the ambushes targeting Spanish soldiers. The other is even more surprising because, having started as an exclusive by El País, it has already been confirmed by Sánchez. During the days of the human exodus, whilst politicians and scrupulous commentators were debating the improper use of the word ‘invasion’, several Moroccan warships were encroaching on Spanish territorial waters. El País reports that a frigate and several patrol boats arrived not by chance (which might happen whilst pursuing a drug-traffickers’ speedboat), but as part of an “intentional and repeated violation of Ceuta’s territorial waters”. And that is not all. These operations continued until the first few days of August, to the extent that the Spanish Navy was forced to respond with a deterrent manoeuvre during which a Spanish patrol boat and a Moroccan one narrowly avoided a collision. In short, a full-blown military confrontation about which no one had so far informed either the Spanish authorities or their European partners (though the leader of the opposition, Núñez Feijóo, has already announced that he will raise the issue at this Thursday’s meeting in Brussels with the other leaders of the European People’s Party).

Silence from Margarita Robles, the Defence Minister who appeared before the Senate Committee; silence from the other ministers. Sánchez gave this far less thought when addressing Parliament in September, when he announced that he would declassify all internal reports on the Ceuta case. Nothing of the sort can be found in any of the published reports. However, she was unable to deny the news. During an informal conversation with journalists on the occasion of the national holiday on 12 October (Día de la Hispanidad), Sánchez acknowledged the incident but played it down, describing it as an isolated event, the sort of thing that happens. To those who asked him why there had been such silence, the Prime Minister—who even finds time on X to reply to Luciana Littizzetto’s “little letter”—responded with the usual air of a husband who is always a bit short of plausible explanations: “It’s been a hectic few days”.