Rabat – Spain brought the highest symbols of the state to occupied Ceuta and Melilla in an attempt to legitimize their continued occupation and conceal abuses behind a display of national solidarity. The visit by King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia on October 13 and 14, accompanied by a media campaign and appeals for European solidarity, enlisted the throne in defending a colonial presence on Moroccan soil that Madrid seeks to entrench through declarations of a supposedly non-negotiable “sovereignty.”
Yet magnifying the event brought the two cities back before the world as a question over which Spain must mobilize its institutions to justify its continued control. The contrast between portraying the visit as an expression of the state’s “normal functioning” and celebrating it as an exceptional event after nineteen years without a royal visit exposed the contradiction Madrid seeks to hide.
When King Felipe declares that any threat to the two cities is a threat to the European Union, he seeks to make Europe responsible for protecting the gains of a Spanish occupation in northern Morocco and to recast Morocco’s demand to end that occupation as a security issue requiring solidarity with Madrid.
Royal visits cannot erase colonial occupation
The Spanish monarch cannot settle through declarations the fate of two cities that Morocco has never relinquished its right to recover. Portugal occupied Ceuta in 1415, during the Marinid era, and Spanish forces occupied Melilla in 1497, during the Wattasid era, as part of the Iberian military conquest of Morocco’s coast. Ceuta’s transfer between two European powers gives neither the right to dispose of Moroccan land. Nor can prolonging the occupation or changing its administrative arrangements erase its origins in conquest and military settlement, or turn what force imposed into a legitimate right.
Morocco brought this demand before the United Nations in 1975, the same year the Organization of African Unity called on Spain to decolonize the territories it occupied and open negotiations with Rabat. When King Mohammed VI rejected Juan Carlos’s visit in 2007, he associated it with nostalgia for a dark colonial era that belonged to the past. This record confirms that Morocco’s cause predates the latest crisis and Spain’s political disputes, and that changing monarchs and repeated visits give Madrid no authority to close a question on which Morocco has never surrendered its rights.
Military abuses behind the display of royal solidarity
More serious still were the findings of Amnesty International’s September 30 report on torture and cruel treatment inflicted on migrants, including Moroccans, women, and minors, by Spanish soldiers, particularly members of the “Regulares” and “Legión” units.
The organization gathered 22 direct testimonies describing beatings, humiliation, theft of money, and destruction of phones. Witnesses described people being beaten while restrained, Muslims forced to kneel and kiss a cross, and a young man pushed from a height who remained unable to walk for 25 days. Amnesty also documented testimonies and footage of nighttime assaults by masked soldiers and expulsions over the fence, establishing a recurring pattern of abuses.
Two days before the visit, on October 11, the National Police cleared the El Guano camp with the participation of the Civil Guard and the army, in an operation involving more than 350 personnel. Press reports documented migrants fleeing toward the mountains and others returning to Morocco. Clearing the camps created a setting more suited to a royal reception, while migrants’ conditions and safeguards for their protection remained outside the celebratory picture, and questions persisted over penalties for those responsible for abuses.
The Spanish king then declared that migrants must be treated with dignity, humanity, and legal safeguards, while thanking the military and security forces, in stark contradiction with the facts documented by Amnesty. His constitutional position as supreme commander of the armed forces heightens the monarchy’s political and moral responsibility for this gap. Invoking the throne’s prestige to celebrate the forces and consolidate the occupation, while human rights reports accuse members of those forces of torture and religious humiliation, is incompatible with merely proclaiming respect for dignity without presenting a record of accountability that gives it concrete meaning.
These practices recall the colonial repression that the “Army of Africa” carried into Spain and that contributed to Franco’s rise, as well as the Rif War, during which Spain used chemical weapons against civilians, as documented by British historian Sebastian Balfour. Such practices have been described as colonial genocide, and renewed attacks on Moroccan people and their beliefs revive the methods of that past. Religious humiliation is especially grave because it combines violence with an attempt to subjugate victims through their identity and dignity, recalling a colonial view of Moroccans whose traces persist in some military practices.
Spain’s qnti-occupation rhetoric meets its own colonial reality
As for the slogans Madrid has recently raised against Israel and in the name of supporting Palestine, the reality of occupation and settler colonialism in Ceuta and Melilla exposes their selectivity. What credibility can a discourse claiming to defend peoples’ rights and reject imposed faits accomplis retain when the same state uses the symbolism of its throne to affirm its continued control of Moroccan land and place its recovery beyond discussion?
Invoking Palestine in Spanish political discourse does not exempt Madrid from confronting its own occupation, nor does it make dignity a principle fit for foreign consumption that can be suspended when Moroccans are concerned.
Spain sought to turn the visit into a certificate of legitimacy, only to expose once again its need to mobilize support to protect a colonial legacy and polish the image of forces implicated in reports of torture and humiliation. Ceuta and Melilla remain occupied Moroccan land whose identity no royal presence can change and over which no campaign of solidarity can extinguish Morocco’s rights, however lavish the celebrations or strident the threats.
