Tous les articles correspondant à #Melilla

A serious incident, a hostile Morocco: that is what readers of El País are being led to believe, although neither claim has been established. The newspaper’s October 12 report relies on anonymous sources and treats descriptions such as “deliberate” and “repeated” as established facts. An opinion piece by political analyst Samir Bennis.

At a time when the Moroccan-Spanish partnership has never shown such resilience, the announcement that King Felipe VI will visit Ceuta and Melilla on October 13 and 14 strikes a jarring note—and looks like a thinly disguised capitulation to the escalating demands of Spain’s right and radical right. The trip, the Spanish monarch’s first since ascending the throne, drags relations between the two countries back into a colonial anachronism and runs counter to every logic of de-escalation.

Spanish MEP Juan Ignacio Zoido has asked the European Commission to intervene with Google over the dotted lines it uses to mark off Ceuta and Melilla from Morocco. The PP is now reviving the controversy, but it is late to the fight. The two cities’ borders have been shown this way since at least 2020, and Google already faced an official complaint in 2023—without a single dot on the map being moved.

The Junts leader describes the two cities as “colonies” located “inside Morocco” and calls for their future to be decided through a referendum, adding to a debate that has recently spread from the European Parliament to Spain’s political scene.

In 1987, King Hassan II applied for Morocco to join the European Economic Community. The application was rejected: Morocco was not a European country. The answer seemed obvious. It is much less so today. For the same Europe that told Morocco it could not join the Community because it was African now tells us that two cities located in Africa constitute its borders.

Spanish broadcaster COPE gave more than 20 minutes of airtime to historian and Popular Party councilor Margarita Torres, who claimed that the Kingdom of Morocco did not exist before 1957. This claim contradicts historical records showing Spain had signed treaties with Moroccan sultans centuries earlier.

The Moroccan Organization for Human Rights says migrants were beaten and deliberately deprived of food and water during July’s crisis, while also reporting discriminatory treatment of unidentified bodies. The group is demanding an independent Spanish investigation and says international institutions could be its next step.

In a masterful analysis published by the prestigious American magazine Foreign Policy, Howard W. French, a professor at Columbia University, dismantles Spain’s colonial illusions over Ceuta. Examining the current migration crisis in depth, the former longtime New York Times correspondent demonstrates why Madrid will ultimately have no choice but to embrace pragmatism and return the territory to Morocco, settling the accounts of history—and helping build a better future.

Moroccan security forces prevented collective attempts to cross irregularly into Ceuta and Melilla on Saturday morning, following days of heightened security prompted by viral online calls for mass crossings on Aug. 15. Authorities intercepted 111 would-be migrants near Fnideq, while 61 people have been arrested in recent days on suspicion of promoting irregular migration online.