Spain approves the reception of 3,000 children from the Tindouf camps
Launched in the mid-1990s, the program aims to temporarily host Sahrawi children from the Tindouf camps. Between 2014 and 2024, approximately 34,500 Sahrawi minors benefited from the initiative, according to the same source.
The program is coordinated by several associations supporting the Sahrawi people, the National Sahrawi Delegation, and the Sahrawi delegations of various autonomous communities. The Ministries of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration; Foreign Affairs, the European Union, and Cooperation; Interior; Territorial Policy; and Democratic Memory, along with the autonomous communities hosting the children, all participate in this effort.
Over the past decade, regions such as Andalusia, Catalonia, Castilla-La Mancha, the Basque Country, and Galicia have been the main hosts for Sahrawi minors under the program.
Initially launched in 1979 by Spanish communists, «Holidays in Peace» has since been used by the Polisario to promote its position in Spain.
Last year, the Forum of Support for Tindouf Autonomists (FORSATIN) criticized the program, warning about the «uprooting of peace ambassadors».
Ten days ago, sources from Spanish intelligence services reported that «dozens of Sahrawis born in the Tindouf camps (Algeria), who had participated in the 'Holidays in Peace' program», were found to be involved with terrorist groups operating in the Sahel, according to the daily La Vanguardia.
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Morocco World
5 hours ago
- Morocco World
Beyond the Armada: Ahmad al-Mansur, Elizabeth I, and the Forgotten Plan to Colonize the New World Together
In the spring of 1600, the streets of London witnessed an arrival without precedent in the city's long history of embassies. Abd el-Wahid ben Messaoud, ambassador of Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco, landed at the head of a sixteen-strong delegation. Their mission was at once pragmatic and grandiose: to propose an alliance between Protestant England and Muslim Morocco against their common nemesis — Habsburg Spain — and to imagine the re-ordering of Atlantic geopolitics. As Jerry Brotton recounts in This Orient Isle, and as the Guardian's review summarises, the proposals placed before Queen Elizabeth I were without precedent: first, a joint reconquest of Iberia; second, an even more audacious suggestion that the two realms could 'wrest the East and West Indies from the Spanish.'¹ The image is almost cinematic — a richly robed Muslim ambassador in the court of the Virgin Queen, speaking of fleets that would cross oceans together, of the fall of Spain's American empire, of a Protestant–Muslim condominium over the New World. Yet, for all its colour, this episode demands to be treated not as an exotic curiosity but as a key point of entry into the historiography of early modern diplomacy, global trade, and the unfulfilled contingencies of the Atlantic world. Historiographic Grounding: Sources, Silences, and Contexts The principal sources for this encounter are the surviving letters between al-Mansur and Elizabeth, now held in the British Library, and the ambassadorial records in Moroccan repositories. Brotton weaves these into the fabric of Elizabethan foreign policy, highlighting the intense pragmatism that overrode confessional boundaries when the geopolitical calculus demanded it.² The Guardian distils one of Brotton's most striking revelations: that al-Mansur's proposals went beyond the reconquest of Iberia to envision a transoceanic offensive aimed at the Spanish Americas.³ Historiographically, the temptation is to read this through a 19th- or 20th-century lens, seeing in it a precursor to modern 'South–South' alliances or multipolar Atlantic visions. Yet, in the late 16th century, such a proposal was rooted in the logic of Habsburg geopolitics: Spain's control of Portugal after 1580 had fused the Iberian crowns into a single global empire, encircling the Atlantic from Seville to Mexico to Manila. To attack Spain anywhere was, in effect, to attack it everywhere. Elizabeth's England, still a middling power by continental standards but increasingly daring at sea, had already probed the edges of this empire through the semi-piratical ventures of Francis Drake and others. Morocco, flush with prestige after the victory at the Battle of the Three Kings (1578)⁴ and enriched by the gold of the Songhai campaign, was equally aware of its Atlantic potential. What Brotton emphasized is the ideological permeability of this moment: Protestant and Muslim could talk openly of cooperation not in spite of their confessional differences, but because both had pragmatic reasons to confront a Catholic superpower.⁵ The Proposal in its Own Time The proposition to 'wrest the East and West Indies' is remarkable for several reasons. First, it suggests that al-Mansur did not view Morocco's strategic horizon as confined to the Maghreb or even to Mediterranean commerce; he was thinking in Atlantic terms, aware of the wealth flowing from the Americas into Seville's treasure fleets.⁶ Second, it presupposes that England and Morocco could project force across the ocean, coordinate supply chains, and — most ambitiously — hold and administer conquered territory in a hemisphere dominated by Spain and Portugal for nearly a century. The geopolitical logic of al-Mansur's overture becomes even clearer when viewed against the backdrop of the Iberian Union. Morocco had already eliminated Portugal as an independent threat in the wake of the Battle of the Three Kings in 1578, a crushing victory that killed King Sebastian and shattered Portuguese military capacity.⁷ The ensuing succession crisis led, in 1580, to Philip II of Spain seizing the Portuguese crown, bringing Brazil, the African forts, and the Asian spice ports under Habsburg control.⁸ For the first time, one monarch ruled an integrated Spanish–Portuguese empire that spanned both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. This consolidation magnified Spain's power but also simplified the strategic picture for England and Morocco: there was now a single Iberian adversary whose defeat — whether in Europe, the Caribbean, or the Americas — could reverberate across half the globe. Al-Mansur's suggestion of joint action in the New World was therefore not a flight of fancy, but a calculated response to a rare historical moment when Spain's overextended imperial structure presented both a threat and an opportunity. From a strictly operational standpoint, the proposal bordered on the fantastical. England in 1600 lacked secure Atlantic bases and was stretched by the Irish wars; Morocco had no tradition of transoceanic navigation on that scale. But in the imaginative space of diplomacy, such impracticalities could be suspended. What mattered was the signalling: Morocco was a sovereign actor, not a peripheral player, and was willing to think on a planetary scale. For Elizabeth, listening to such overtures reinforced the image of England as a node in a global network of anti-Spanish alliances, from the Dutch rebels to the Muslim courts of the Maghreb.⁹ Historiographic Themes: Beyond Exoticism Historians have long been prone to treating such episodes as colourful footnotes — a Moorish envoy in Whitehall, a momentary flirtation with cross-cultural alliance. Brotton pushes against this by embedding it in the longer story of Anglo–Islamic diplomacy, showing that these exchanges were neither one-off nor merely symbolic.¹⁰ The embassy of 1600 was the high-water mark of a twenty-year relationship. From a historiographic perspective, this also forces us to revisit the Eurocentric narrative of Atlantic expansion. The standard story pivots from Iberian pioneers to Northern European challengers, with little space for African or Muslim agency except as obstacles or intermediaries. Al-Mansur's proposal disrupts that: here is an African monarch not only participating in, but actively shaping, a conversation about the redistribution of the Americas. The 'What If' Lens Counterfactuals are perilous in historical writing, but they can illuminate the structural constraints and opportunities of a moment. So, what if Elizabeth had embraced al-Mansur's proposal wholeheartedly? In one scenario, an Anglo–Moroccan fleet might have targeted the Caribbean, striking at lightly defended islands or intercepting treasure convoys. If successful, this could have opened enclaves jointly administered or exploited — introducing an early precedent for cross-confessional colonial governance. This, in turn, might have reconfigured racial and religious hierarchies in the Atlantic, complicating the binary of Christian Europe versus the non-Christian 'other.' Yet the practicalities loom large. Morocco's maritime infrastructure was oriented toward the Mediterranean and short-haul Atlantic trade; England's navy was still evolving its logistical capacity for sustained overseas warfare. The Spanish response would have been formidable. Moreover, the death of both monarchs in 1603 eliminated the personal rapport that had sustained the relationship. James I's peace with Spain in 1604 ended the prospect.¹¹ Symbolism and Political Theatre Even stripped of feasibility, the proposal retains significance as political theatre. In Elizabeth's court, receiving such an offer from a Muslim sovereign was a statement to domestic and foreign audiences: England was not isolated, and its alliances could cross religious boundaries. For al-Mansur, sending his ambassador to make such a proposal in person was a performance of parity with Christian Europe's greatest monarchs. The articulation of joint colonization placed Morocco within the same strategic frame as England, France, and the Netherlands — not as an object of European expansion, but as a co-architect of imperial ambition.¹² Orientalism Before Orientalism In Edward Said's formulation, 'Orientalism' describes a later, more codified mode of European representation of the East.¹³ The early modern encounter between Morocco and England resists that schema. Al-Mansur was not being studied, classified, and subordinated; he was negotiating from a position of strength, in a relationship that — for a moment — inverted later colonial hierarchies. Still, the seeds of later asymmetries are present: the English imagination of the 'Moor' was shaped by both diplomatic reality and literary representation — Shakespeare's Othello among them — oscillating between fascination and suspicion.¹⁴ The Road Not Taken The embassy of Abd el-Wahid and the proposal to 'wrest the East and West Indies' remain a tantalising fragment of early modern diplomatic history. Historiographically, it invites us to place Morocco not at the periphery but at the centre of Atlantic strategic thinking at the turn of the 17th century. It challenges the neat periodisation that sees the Muslim world as locked in Mediterranean confines while the Atlantic became a purely European space. From the 'what if' perspective, the episode underscores the contingency of global history. A handful of different decisions — an earlier English embrace of Atlantic strategy, a longer reign for al-Mansur, a delay in Anglo–Spanish rapprochement — could have produced a very different colonial map. Brotton's achievement is to recover the plausibility, if not the practicality, of that moment, and to remind us that the early modern world was more connected, and more imaginatively porous, than later histories have often allowed. The Moroccan dream of an Anglo–Muslim Atlantic empire died in the antechambers of mortality and diplomacy, but in the realm of historical analysis, it continues to illuminate the alternative pathways that history might have taken — and the actors who, however briefly, saw them as open.¹⁵ Notes Jerry Brotton, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 214–218; 'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600,' The Guardian, March 19, 2016. Brotton, This Orient Isle, 198–201. 'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600,' The Guardian. Brotton, This Orient Isle, 105–110. Ibid., 200–203. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 105–110. Ibid., 111–114. Ibid., 215–218. Ibid., 180–185. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 223–225. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Brotton, This Orient Isle, 230; Michael Neill, Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Brotton, This Orient Isle, 227–230. Sources Brotton, Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Neill, Michael. Othello. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. 'The Moroccan Ambassador in London in 1600.' The Guardian, March 19, 2016. Tags: Ahmad al MansurcolonialismElizabeth Ihistory
Morocco World
a day ago
- Morocco World
Spanish Politician Raises Large Spanish Flags on Disputed Island Off Morocco's Coast
Rabat — Spanish politician Álvaro Pérez, leader of the The Party is Over (SALF) organization, has sparked controversy by displaying three massive 4-meter Spanish flags on a Spanish-occupied island near Al Hoceima, Morocco. The provocative act reignites tensions over territories that Rabat considers to be occupied Moroccan lands. Pérez, whose far-right group won three European Parliament seats in recent elections, reportedly smuggled the flags into Morocco in a suitcase undetected, despite his known hardline stance against Morocco. The incident has renewed discussions over these disputed coastal territories. However, Pérez's reckless move comes at a particularly sensitive time and can potentially significantly escalate tensions between Spain and Morocco. This comes mere days after Spanish fact-checking platform Newtral denied recent reports that Spain had removed its national flag from two small islets near the Moroccan coast, describing them as 'not accurate.' Yet Newtral's denial was in response to converging media reports from Spain suggesting that Spanish authorities had removed their flag from uninhabited islands known as 'El Bar' and 'El Bahar,' which is located off the Mediterranean coast of Morocco near Al Hoceima. Pérez's gesture is particularly inflammatory given the historical context of Spain-Morocco tensions over these territories. Previous incidents include the 2002 Perejil Island crisis, when Moroccan forces occupied an uninhabited island. This led to Spanish military intervention, showing how quickly such symbolic acts can escalate into serious diplomatic or military confrontations. Pérez's unilateral flag-raising, done without government authorization and amid already strained bilateral relations, risks undermining delicate diplomatic efforts and could provoke Morocco into retaliatory measures. Morocco has expressed political aspirations over these territories since its independence in 1956, making any provocative gestures particularly destabilizing to regional peace. Tags: Al HoceimaMoroccan islets
Morocco World
a day ago
- Morocco World
Oued Eddahab Recovery: Why August 14 Is Morocco's Most Candid Day of Sovereignty
Marrakech – On August 14, 1979, notables, ulema and tribal elders from Oued Eddahab filed into the Royal Palace in Rabat and recited the bay'ah to King Hassan II, a ceremony that fused law, history and political will into one moment of national consolidation, and when the King responded that he had received their pledge and would 'preserve it as the most precious trust,' he fixed the date in the public memory as the day Morocco turned an impasse into a commitment, a promise from people to throne and from throne to people. That ceremony is now marked every year as an official public holiday in Morocco. But it matters less for the menu of paid days off than for what it says about the constitutional grammar of the state, because in the Moroccan tradition, sovereignty is not just a cartographic assertion; it is a living contract renewed by communities that declare who they are and where they belong. It was also, in strategic terms, a decisive counter to an Algerian-backed plan to turn the southern tip of the Sahara into the Polisario Front's first permanent territory with deep-water Atlantic access – a move Morocco pre-empted before it could take shape. What happened on August 14 did not occur in a vacuum. It was preceded by the November 1975 Green March, when 350,000 unarmed Moroccan citizens crossed into the Sahara to assert the kingdom's claim and compel Spain to negotiate. Days later came the Madrid Accords, which ended Spanish administration and apportioned interim responsibilities to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco took the northern two-thirds of the territory, while Nouakchott administered the southern third, including Oued Eddahab. Hassan II had anticipated this division as a tactical necessity – he told UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in early 1975 that sharing the territory with Mauritania was the only way to block Algeria's separatist designs. The arrangement came under immediate Algerian attack. Algiers viewed a Morocco–Mauritania axis as an existential threat to its regional leverage, funnelling arms to the Polisario and escalating guerrilla warfare. The decisive break came in July 1979, when a military coup in Mauritania shifted the country's alignment toward Algiers. Within weeks, Nouakchott signed the 'Algiers Agreement' with the Polisario, pledging to withdraw from Oued Eddahab and hand it over to the separatists. The deal, set to take effect in seven months, could have transformed the war by giving the guerrillas deep-water access and an international staging point. Morocco moved before the ink dried. In early August, the Royal Armed Forces advanced to secure the territory, and on August 14, in an unmistakable rejection of the Algiers plan, the region's tribal leaders traveled to Rabat to renew their bay'a to the Moroccan monarch – a legal and political snub to both Mauritania's new rulers and Algeria's military establishment. Hassan II's position was unapologetically blunt: 'If Mauritania chooses a path, we shall stand beside her – on the condition it does not touch a single inch of Moroccan soil nor place a foreign frontier between Morocco and Mauritania.' Between Madrid and Algiers: law, gunfire, and the long arc of UN diplomacy The legal scaffolding is clear for anyone who cares to read the record rather than the slogans, beginning with the text of the Madrid declaration of principles, continuing through the Morocco–Mauritania border treaty that described a straight southern line from the 24th parallel to the intersection of the 23rd parallel north and the 13th meridian west, and culminating in the Mauritania-Polisario agreement of August 5, 1979, which removed Nouakchott from the dispute and left two principal antagonists facing each other across the desert. That withdrawal could have been a game-changer – handing the separatists a coastline, a port in Dakhla, and a launchpad for international recognition. But Morocco's August 14 move shut that door permanently. From 1991 onward, the UN mission MINURSO has frozen the front while the political file moved from the referendum formulas of the 1990s to the language adopted by the Security Council in recent years that stresses a realistic, pragmatic, enduring political solution based on compromise. Indeed, when the Council again renewed MINURSO's mandate in October 2024, it once again pressed for refugee registration in the Tindouf camps, again affirmed the centrality of the Personal Envoy's process, and again reflected what seasoned diplomats already know: that the referendum project is not coming back and the field has shifted to autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty. When the Polisario tried to force a crisis at Guerguerat in late 2020 by blocking the vital road link to Mauritania, Morocco moved to secure the corridor and restore traffic while partners publicly emphasized the need to keep the passage open, a small incident in kilometers yet a large one in meaning because it showed where the region's commercial arteries actually run and who has the capacity and legitimacy to keep them flowing. The desert wall that pins the ceasefire line across more than two thousand kilometers remains the lived geography of this standoff, a long earthwork that turned raiding warfare into sporadic potshots. And for all the heated rhetoric about a return to war since 2020, the facts on the ground point to a low-intensity pattern that never alters the strategic balance and never dislodges the basic UN framing of a negotiated political settlement. The new diplomatic geometry The cartography of recognition and support has been redrawn in the last five years, and anyone pretending otherwise is reading from yesterday's briefings. Because, for one thing, the United States recognized Morocco's sovereignty over the Sahara in December 2020, and subsequent administrations have not reversed that proclamation. For another thing, the official US line has hardened around the Moroccan Autonomy Plan as the sole viable basis under the UN process. More importantly, perhaps, Spain, the former administering power, pivoted in March 2022 by embracing and describing the 2007 Moroccan plan as the most serious, credible, and realistic proposal. In fact, Madrid's phrasing of its newfound support for the Moroccan plan has become the European template for discarding Polisario's statehood dream as untenable and far-fetched. Take, for instance, France's decision in July 2024 to forgo decades of ambivalence by publicly declaring autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty as the only workable path. As if that was not distressing enough for dreamers of Sahrawi nationalism and their handlers in Algiers, London echoed this shift just last June, when the UK government endorsed autonomy as the credible and pragmatic solution. And so, four decades after Oued Eddahab's recovery, Morocco's Autonomy Plan has become the only realistic framework on the table. Proposed in 2007, the autonomy plan has since won explicit or tacit support from over 120 countries across every region, making it one of the most internationally endorsed conflict-resolution frameworks in Africa. It lays out a system in which the Saharan population would elect its own legislative and executive bodies, manage local resources, and preserve cultural identity, while foreign affairs, defense, and currency remain under Moroccan sovereignty. This structure has been repeatedly described by UN envoys as 'serious and credible,' and its durability lies in the fact that no alternative proposal has drawn comparable backing or survived as long in active diplomacy. Even the UN's diplomatic language has evolved; the 'self-determination referendum' is no longer treated as a practical option. Algeria and the Polisario cling to it rhetorically, but behind closed doors, many of their former sympathizers admit the referendum is dead. As Hassan II predicted in the 1970s, a separatist micro-state dependent on foreign arms is unviable, and in today's security climate, it would also be a direct threat to regional stability. The map on the ground tells an even more visible story, since a cascade of African and Arab partners have opened consulates in Laayoune and Dakhla. There were roughly twenty-nine consular missions in the two cities by mid-2024, and this new momentum expanded still further with new openings like Chad's. And while it is often dismissed by critics as mere symbolism, this consular reality actually channels students, traders, and investors, in short, the quiet, boring traffic that makes sovereignty tangible. At the multilateral level, the Security Council continues to carry forward a vocabulary that privileges realism and compromise. And that vocabulary dovetails with a wider Atlantic-Sahel security architecture in which Morocco functions as a stable southern anchor through the US-Morocco Defense Cooperation Roadmap to 2030 and the annual African Lion exercises, an operational rhythm that is not theater for cameras but genuine interoperability tested year after year. The coastline is also part of NATO-adjacent maritime monitoring, valued by the Pentagon as a secure flank in the Atlantic defense line. Development as statecraft in the South The southern provinces are not a press release; they are engineering works and public accounts and contracts you can read, beginning with the 2015 New Development Model for the Southern Provinces, a multi-year, multi-sector program that tied infrastructure to jobs and social services, then radiating into specific projects that have moved from artist's impression to poured concrete. This stellar vision's flagship is the Dakhla Atlantic Port, a deep-water complex under construction on the Atlantic with a price tag measured in the tens of billions of dirhams. It is conceived as a logistics hinge between Morocco and West Africa and is designed to pull private capital into fisheries, agro-industry, and transshipment. And alongside this crown jewel of Morocco's increasingly vibrant southern provinces are ongoing auxiliary works on roads, power, and hinterland zoning – innovative projects whose raison d'être is to make sure that the port does not sit on a dead shore. Running north-south is the Tiznit-Laayoune-Dakhla expressway, one thousand and fifty-five kilometers of dual carriageway now operational end-to-end. This project took a decade and unlocked the geography, cutting travel times, knitting local markets to national ones, and making the idea of an impoverished periphery increasingly obsolete. Energy is the second pillar, from the 300-megawatt Boujdour wind farm entering service to the Dakhla desalination complex and its dedicated wind supply, to an emerging portfolio of grid reinforcement and green-hydrogen proposals that, if sequenced sensibly, can turn the reliably windy coastline into a power and water platform for agriculture and industry rather than a talking point for conferences. And there is a continental dimension in the works, with France signalling readiness to finance a three-gigawatt HV link between Casablanca and Dakhla that would knit the south more tightly into the national grid. Here is a project that makes no geopolitical statement on its own, yet, taken together with the consular map, the highway, and the port, demonstrates how development policy becomes strategy without ever needing to say so. A hard truth for Tindouf and a clear horizon for autonomy In the political marketplace of 2025, the Polisario is not a government in waiting; it is an armed front headquartered on Algerian soil with a diplomatic network and a media machine, yet without the basic attributes of a viable state. Whatever story Algeria and its dwindling army of separatism cheerleaders may want to believe and sell, the incontrovertible fact remains that the UN's repeated, unfulfilled calls for a proper census and registration in the Tindouf camps tell a different story about governance and accountability that no slogan can drown out. Algeria's posture has moved from proxy diplomacy to strategic fixation, a choice that has cost it flexibility just as European energy priorities and Atlantic security concerns have shifted south and west. And while Algiers can keep financing a stalemate, it cannot reverse the slow, cumulative consolidation of Moroccan sovereignty that shows up in council votes, bilateral statements, port cranes, and road signs rather than on Twitter timelines. Control of the southern port of Dakhla effectively blocked the Polisario from ever establishing a viable state. The separatists were left landlocked in the desert interior, wholly dependent on Algerian safe havens and supply routes. For Algeria, this was a strategic defeat. Its investment – military, financial, and diplomatic – in creating a 'Sahrawi republic' with a coastline collapsed overnight. Internationally, the Moroccan move reframed the conflict: the narrative shifted from 'decolonization' to one of territorial integrity and counter-separatism in a continent where dozens of borders are artificial and fragile. By contrast, Morocco's offer is on the table and has been since 2007. The heart of this initiative is a detailed autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty that Parliament can debate, that the Palace can guarantee, that the UN can situate within its process, and that partners now explicitly name as the credible basis for a solution. And it is precisely because it is specific and administrable that this offer is gaining ground while maximalist banners gather dust. So when August 14 returns each year it is not nostalgia for a single day in 1979, it is a reminder that the Sahara file has always rewarded those who do the quiet work of building facts that endure, that the oath of Oued Eddahab was not theater but a constitutional act, that the development model is not cosmetics but a budget, and that autonomy under sovereignty is not a slogan but a governance architecture ready to be filled with schools, ports, courts and councils. And this, ultimately, is the only language the region and the world still take seriously. It is also a reminder of Morocco's core doctrine: act decisively, deny adversaries the initiative, and turn legal vulnerabilities into lasting geopolitical assets. Read also: Omar Hilale: 50th Green March Anniversary Set for Definitive Western Sahara Closure
