Marrakech – “Ceuta and Melilla will remain a subject of dialogue between us and Spain, and we will hold to our historical right and our geographical right.” With that flat declaration, delivered Friday on the public channel 2M, Morocco’s Justice Minister Abdellatif Ouahbi hauled the two occupied cities back to the heart of a dispute Madrid has long affected to consider closed.
The minister refused to soften the edges. He pressed for “means of dialogue” with Madrid, chief among them a standing “dialogue commission” devoted to the enclaves, framing the file as one that “must be kept present, because it is a subject on which one cannot remain silent.”
He demanded, too, a “definitive solution to the current situation” – one whose only conceivable terminus, by his account, is the “return of Ceuta and Melilla to the bosom of the homeland.”
The remarks came almost obliquely. The 2M sit-down had been arranged to mark the entry into force of Morocco’s new statute on the legal profession, yet Ouahbi steered it toward Madrid, renewing Rabat’s demand that Spain surrender every unaccompanied Moroccan minor who crossed into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July. Morocco, he offered, stands ready to receive them once their identities are verified.
This was no solitary outburst. On 12 August, in an interview with Asharq Bloomberg, the same minister had already placed the enclaves “on the table” of his exchanges with Spain, situating the claim within a patient strategy of dialogue while insisting that Madrid shoulder its responsibility for the minors. Friday’s salvo took that line and hardened it.
The timing is not innocent. Ouahbi spoke amid the still-raw crisis of late July, when nearly 80,000 people surged toward Ceuta’s frontier over two days, overwhelming the garrison-city and leaving dozens dead. Rabat’s adversaries read design into the sequencing; its defenders read a state wielding the leverage that geography has always lent it.
Madrid’s riposte was immediate and testy. Hours after the broadcast, the Foreign Ministry conveyed to Rabat its “categorical rejection” of any such overture.
“Ceuta and Melilla are two Spanish cities, a frontier of Spain and of the EU,” the note ran; they “form part of the internationally recognized territorial integrity and sovereignty of Spain and are equally an integral part of EU territory.”
The ministry of José Manuel Albares pushed further: “We reject and will categorically reject any different approach.” The Spanish press rendered the posture in blunter coin – the status of the cities “has not been discussed and never will be.”
The obduracy is of a piece with a fortnight of Spanish fulmination. Defense Minister Margarita Robles had warned that “any attack on Ceuta or Melilla is an attack on all of Spain,” and, in a flourish of pique, pronounced the cities “Spanish – no, most Spanish of all.”
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska affected indifference, granting Ouahbi’s words “no importance,” while Ceuta’s local president, Juan Vivas, dismissed the claim as bereft of “any foundation.”
From within Sánchez’s own coalition, Izquierda Unida pressed for a firmer hand: its spokesman Enrique Santiago, remarking that Morocco “does not stitch without thread” and that voices in Washington had floated mediation, snapped that there was “nothing to mediate.”
Beneath the bluster lies Madrid’s threadbare refrain: that Morocco has coveted the cities only since its 1956 independence.
The conceit buckles under chronology. The Moroccan state traces an unbroken existence to 788 and the Idrisid founding; suzerainty passed from dynasty to dynasty without rupture, for the changing of a ruling house no more dissolves a state than 1978 conjured Spain from the void. By that impoverished arithmetic, modern Spain would be a stripling of its post-Franco constitution.
Nor is the Spanish title the seamless artifact its custodians profess. The enclaves are remnants of conquest, their perimeters swollen after the War of Tetouan and the Treaty of Wad-Ras, wrung from a Morocco in duress. For three centuries Madrid itself weighed ceding, bartering, or internationalizing these presidios – Ceuta the presidio mayor, Melilla the menor – from Godoy’s schemes to Castiella’s overtures to Juan Carlos’s own musings about relinquishing Melilla.
Their absence from the UN roster of Non-Self-Governing Territories owes nothing to a solemn verdict of decolonization and everything to the “Spirit of Barajas,” when Hassan II eased his pressure as a courtesy Franco never repaid.
The demand is no novelty of Ouahbi’s making – Hassan II once urged Madrid to convene a “reflection cell” on the enclaves’ future and was answered with silence, the very silence Spain now dresses as principle.
Geography, though, is stubborn. Madrid may bolt the door and mistake volume for argument, yet the two cities remain African soil girdled by Morocco, anachronisms of an imperial century. Ouahbi’s wager is that patience, not muteness, will one day compel the conversation Spain swears will never come.
Read also: Why Morocco is Pushing Back Against Spain’s Political Exploitation of Ceuta Crisis
