Morocco, a century and a half of turmoil in Spain's lower belly

Barcelona[This article was first published in July 2022. We are republishing it in light of the humanitarian crisis in Ceuta]The two lions guarding the main entrance of the Congress of Deputies were made with the melted cannons of the Moroccans defeated in the battle of Wad Ras. This confrontation, along with the battles of Tetuan and Los Castillejos, brought victory to Spain in the first declared war against the Rif tribes from 1859 to 1860. The Sultanate of Morocco, the Riffian tribes, and later, the Alawite kingdom have been a constant source of conflict for the Spanish State for more than a century and a half. All in all, the armed contingents from this area of the Maghreb have constituted, by far, the foreign forces that have fought the longest against the Spanish army since the Peninsular War.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is credited with the assertion that the Mediterranean was in his time the "belly" of Europe. Probably, it still is for other reasons. If we are to believe the history of Spanish-Moroccan relations, the Maghreb has represented a constant stomach ache for the governments of Madrid since the mid-19th century.

Since the First Moroccan War, the tempestuous and often tragic relations with the leaders of those territories have exerted a profound influence on Spanish politics and society. And Catalan ones. The Tragic Week, for example, began in 1909 due to protests from the families of the conscript soldiers who were mobilized to fight the Riffian rebels who had attacked iron mines owned by some of the wealthiest fortunes in the Peninsula, such as the Count of Romanones.

From Annual to Perejil

The different wars in North Africa have swept away entire Spanish governments. In the 1920s, four administrations of Alfonso XIII fell. They were presided over by Allendesalazar, Maura, Sánchez Guerra, and García Prieto. And they paved the way for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Above all, after the disaster of Annual, a series of confrontations that took place in the Rif in 1921, during the Second Moroccan War. Between 7,000 and 8,000 Spanish and indigenous soldiers died defending the surroundings of Melilla and the bay of Alhucemas. "There were so many dead soldiers on the battlefield that the vultures only looked for commanders upwards," a Madrid newspaper published. Eighty years later, Aznar revived patriotism with the "reconquest" by the Spanish Navy of the uninhabited islet of Perejil, after eight Moroccan gendarmes had occupied those rocks northwest of Ceuta for a week.

Some biographers of Francisco Franco attribute his lack of compassion to prolonged stays in North Africa. The military campaigns in the protectorate served the young Franquito and other ambitious officers to advance more quickly. Coup-plotting generals of July 18, 1936, such as Emilio Mola, Manuel Goded, Queipo de Llano, Yagüe, and Camilo Alonso Vega, were veterans of the Moroccan wars. They were known as the Africanists. And it was in Ceuta that the first barracks of the Spanish Legion was created, with the initial name of Terç d'Estrangers and later Terç del Marroc. During the Civil War and the first decades of the dictatorship, Franco always paraded surrounded by the Guardia Mora, a group of combatants originally from Morocco whom the general had enlisted when he commanded the "African Army Corps" upon giving the coup d'état. The leader of the Crusade, escorted by Muslims.

Franco and Hassan II

After Morocco's independence, the Caudillo's relations with the despotic King Hassan II were tense and cold, despite what the controlled media on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar might have disguised. From the first years of his reign, Hassan II was determined to conquer Western Sahara and its rich phosphate mines, exploited by Spain since the late 19th century. Madrid's restitution of the Ifni colony in 1969 did not satisfy the Alaouite monarch's ambition, who did not even attend the retrocession ceremony in Sidi Ifni, where 12 years earlier there had been another war (1957-58) with dozens of Spanish victims. Hassan wanted the Sahara. Franco resisted until his death. Rabat took advantage of the dictator's long agony and the acquiescence of the United States to prevent the Sahrawi separatists (Polisario Front), allied with Algeria – within the Soviet orbit – from holding a self-determination referendum in 1975. Furthermore, Hassan II organized a massive protest, the Green March, on the Sahrawi-Moroccan borders. He gathered nearly 350,000 subjects there. The Spanish government, worried by internal and foreign pressures demanding the democratization of an authoritarianism in intensive care, opted to abandon the last Spanish colony, with the exception of the cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

The Sahara conflict has claimed at least the positions of two Spanish Foreign Ministers in the last half-century. José María Castiella, head of Francoist diplomacy, had to resign in 1969, due to his stance on the self-determination right of that territory, considered "pusillanimous" by the hardest factions of the regime, led by the all-powerful Luis Carrero Blanco. Fifty-three years later, another Foreign Minister, Arancha González Laya, was dismissed following the scandal caused by the authorization given to a Polisario leader to be treated in a hospital in La Rioja.

 This medical attention originated a new diplomatic crisis that would lead to the withdrawal for almost a year of the ambassador of Rabat in Madrid and the assault –tolerated by the Moroccan gendarmerie– of 8,000 immigrants on the fences of Ceuta. Mohamed VI’s ambassador returned to Madrid after Pedro Sánchez, in an unexpected historic triple somersault, recognized Morocco's autonomous plan for the Sahara and caused Algeria to become indignant and withdraw its ambassador to Spain. The head of the Spanish government thus satisfied Moroccan (and United States) pretensions. In return, he obtained Rabat’s commitment to better control the sub-Saharan migratory pressure on the borders of Ceuta and Melilla. A tighter control than on the past Saint John's Day ended in a massacre in Nador. And the umpteenth Spanish political crisis with the Maghreb as the sender.