Ceuta and Melilla, the bone of contention between Morocco and Spain

Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles recently visited Spain’s island possessions located just a few kilometers off the Moroccan Mediterranean coast, which have been the subject of a latent dispute between the two neighboring kingdoms since Morocco’s independence in the 1950s. Margarita Robles visited the Vélez de la Gomera and Alhucemas rocks, and then the Chafarinas Islands.

The Defense Minister first traveled to the city of Melilla, from where she flew in a military helicopter, first to the Vélez de la Gomera rock and then to the Alhucemas islet, accompanied by the head of the Canary Islands Command, Lieutenant General Julio Salom, the Government Delegate in the autonomous city, Sabrina Moh Abdelkader, and the General Commander of Melilla, Major General Luis Cortés.

In Vélez de la Gomera, located halfway between Ceuta and Melilla, the minister spoke with the 25 members of a garrison from the Melilla Regulars Group who guard the rock. On the Alhucemas islet, located opposite the Moroccan city of the same name, she met with the group of 38 soldiers from the ‘Gran Capitán’ 1st Tercio of the Legion, who stand guard there.

It is no coincidence that this unexpected visit by the Defense Minister occurred just days after the statements of a well-known intelligence analyst, Fernando Cocho, who warned of a hypothetical agreement reached between Spain and Morocco, with the approval of the European Union and particularly France, to establish joint sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla between 2030 and 2032. According to Fernando Cocho, Morocco’s tactic to pressure the Spanish government has been to economically isolate these cities and reinforce its military presence in the region; a tactic to which the Spanish government has remained inactive and silent.

The statements of Fernando Cocho are not shared by other strategy and intelligence experts, such as Carlos Echeverría Jesús, a professor of International Relations at a public university, a member of the Academic Council of the Security and Culture Institute, and the Director of the Ceuta and Melilla Observatory, who sought to downplay the new assertions of the intelligence analyst regarding the supposed agreement already reached or in the process of being reached between Spain and Morocco for joint sovereignty over the two autonomous cities around 2030. Carlos Echeverría considers it “unlikely that any political authority, whoever they may be, but even minimally responsible and serious, would have accepted such a scenario.” For the Director of the Ceuta and Melilla Observatory, the idea of joint sovereignty is merely “another hypothesis,” which he describes as “unacceptable.”

This legal-territorial dispute over the Spanish cities and islands in North Africa, which Morocco considers “colonies and occupied presidios,” dates back at least to the dawn of the Maghreb country’s independence. Since then, the Alawite kingdom has consistently reminded its northern neighbor that “sooner or later, they will have to sit down at the table” to discuss their future, for which it has put forward various formulas of joint sovereignty, inspired by the examples of Hong Kong, San Marino, Puerto Rico, or Andorra.

The former Spanish ambassador to NATO, Sweden, and France, Máximo Cajal López, a prominent member of the Socialist Party (PSOE), once advocated for directly handing over the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco. The former Spanish Housing Minister, María Antonia Trujillo, also publicly stated that “Morocco’s claims are fully justified.” In the late 1980s, the then Secretary General of the Communist Party, Gerardo Iglesias, and that of the Workers’ Commissions union, Marcelino Camacho, called for the “retrocession” of both cities within twenty to twenty-five years.

The former Moroccan head of state, King Hassan II, in his numerous meetings with Spanish Presidents, especially with Felipe González Márquez, never failed to evoke the need to reach future agreements, even going so far as to propose in January 1987 the creation of a bilateral “Reflection Cell” to address the future of the two cities. Years later, in 1996, President Felipe González and King Hassan II decided to establish the Averroes Committee, a Spanish-Moroccan reflection group to address all pending bilateral issues.

Pedro Canales ✍🏼