Rabat – Abdelilah Benkirane, Morocco’s appointed Head of Government, will fly to Mauritania on December 27 following Chabat’s controversial statement regarding the country, which claimed that Mauritania lays on Moroccan soil.
Morocco’s appointed Head of Government Abdelilah Benkirane will be on an official visit to Mauritania to meet the Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Tuesday, December 27 as an envoy of Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.
In a statement given to French-language news source Le360, Benkirane confirmed his visit to Mauritania tomorrow without giving any further details. He added that after this mission, he will “continue the deliberations with the political parties in order to form the government.”
Hamid Chabat, the Secretary-General of the Independent Party (PI), said in a speech he gave earlier last week in front of his fellow partisans that, “Mauritania is a land that is purely Moroccan.”
The statements created controversy in Morocco and prompted Morocco’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation to release a communiqué on Monday, December 26 denouncing Chabat’s “dangerous and irresponsible” statements.
The communiqué points out that the ministry “has followed the controversy created because of the dangerous and irresponsible of the Secretary-General of the Independence Party related to the borders of Islamic Republic of Mauritania and its territorial integrity.”
The controversy reached Mauritania and its ruling party, the Union for the Republic (UPR), also condemned Chabat’s proclamation that it considered as emanating from an “absence of wisdom” aiming to make the relations between the two neighboring countries “more tense.”
