The Two Enclaves

Nobody likes to lose a bit of country under their watch. It’s bad for their reputation, their future in public life and their place in the history books. The citizens won’t like it either.

Apart from any other consideration, the Spanish Government was not going to let go an empty and useless uninhabited island which is a tenth of a square kilometre in size and located 250m off the coast of another continent. Perejil (Wiki) was not to be lost as we saw in 2002 when a few Moroccan cops tried to establish themselves on the island, to be quickly removed by Spanish army units.

So Catalonia… (at 32,000km2, or 6.3% of Spain and 16.3% of the population). ’Nuff said.

But, let us return to North Africa.

The Cairo-based Arab Parliament (Wiki), no doubt goosed by King Mohammed VI, has ruled that Melilla and Ceuta are now officially ‘Moroccan Cities’. We read from RTVE that ‘…The body highlighted "the Arabism of the Moroccan cities of Ceuta and Melilla and the occupied Moroccan islands, and the need to open this issue as a relic of the colonial era"…’.

This will understandably not fly with the Spaniards (or indeed the European Union).

We see this in the light of, on the one hand close economic ties between Morocco and Spain, and on the other, the issue of the Western Sahara, (was Spanish, is now either Moroccan or independent – the fault of poor politics going back to 1985). The ambivalence of the USA is not helping much here…

The Spanish have an (obscure) argument to justify the two outposts – that they were there before Morocco was invented. A bit like making the point that Louisiana predates the United States of America (although the French have been most understanding). A better defence is that Melilla and Ceuta have, in residence, 180,000 people who like things just the way they are now.

For the Moroccan point of view, Spain controlling those two enclaves (plus the notorious Isla de Perejil and a couple of other tidbits) is a provocation of sorts.

A bit like Gibraltar, perhaps. Indeed, from Morocco World News (June 9th) we read ‘As the Spanish demands for the return of Gibraltar under their territorial control grow louder, so should the Moroccan calls for the liberation of Ceuta and Melilla’.

From BBC News here ‘…"Sebtah and Melilah" (as they are known beyond the frontier) are the only piece of European territory on mainland Africa - a political and legal reality that has never been recognised by Morocco…’. It quotes an unidentified publication as saying: ‘…"It's a Muslim land no matter for how long the occupation lasts, an old wound that some think has healed, but it continues to bleed and there is no other cure than the re-conquest" is how one Arabic publication describes the sentiment…’.

Right now, worried by the recent brief ‘invasion’ of Ceuta by almost 10,000 people, including a number of bewildered schoolchildren, Spain is beefing up its supplies to the two city-states, or, as El País (partial paywall) says ‘The urgent plan to avoid the economic asphyxiation of Ceuta and Melilla’, including tourism and special tax regimes etc… Hell, maybe a few extra squaddies…

Open wounds like this rarely heal, however, and while Moroccan claims blow cold or hot according to other diplomatic concerns, the issue will remain on the books until a resolution is found.