SPAIN/MOROCCO: The row over a rocky outcrop seemed silly. But, reports Jane Walker from Madrid, the spat hid serious motives
Nations have gone to war for many strange reasons, but the Parsley Island war will go down in history as one of the strangest.
Perejil (the name means parsley in Spanish, and it is known as Leila Island in Arabic) is a tiny rocky islet, not much larger than a football field, which lies only 300 metres off the Moroccan coast and 5 km from the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta.
Until last week few people had even heard of the island, whose only inhabitants are a few hardy goats or occasionally a smuggler or scuba diver or two.
The island hit the headlines at the end of last week when a Spanish Civil Guard vessel on a routine patrol in the Straits of Gibraltar on July 11th noticed it was inhabited by half-a-dozen Moroccan troops who had raised their flags and erected a small tent.
Spain claims sovereignty over Perejil, and its pride was dented by the invasion which soon created a major diplomatic incident. Spain's immediate reaction was to seek international support in its row with Morocco, to put its military on full alert and to send in the gunboats. The EU and NATO all called on the Moroccans to leave the island. But the government in Rabat, Morocco's capital, refused to budge and replaced the six original gendarmes with a similar number of marines who set up a more permanent camp. On Wednesday morning, the island was "liberated" by Spanish troops in a dramatic pre-dawn raid.
Some believe the operation was using a sledge hammer to crack a nut, but it took 28 Spanish elite commandos, six helicopters, two frigates, and amphibious landing craft and dozens of smaller vessels to recover Perejil. Mr Federico Trillo, the Spanish Defence Minister, said the operation was "not without danger, but our priority was to recover the island". He described how three helicopters landed on the peak and special forces troops abseiled down the rock face to where three Moroccan marines were sleeping in their tent while the other three were on guard.
The sleepy soldiers gave up without resistance and were later handed back to Moroccan authorities at the frontier with Ceuta.Spain and Morocco have been at loggerheads for months. They cannot agree on fishing rights in waters which have been traditional Spanish fishing grounds for generations. Rabat reacted angrily when Madrid accused it of failing to prevent people smuggling from Moroccan shores and was furious when Spain sided with the Polisario Front in the disputed western Sahara which Morocco would like to own for its valuable mineral deposits.
The row came to a head when the Moroccan ambassador to Madrid was recalled "for consultations" last October - although Spain's ambassador to Rabat remained in his post until hours before the liberation of Perejil this week. Whether Spain's sovereignty claim would stand up in a court of international law is questionable.
Spain and France ruled Morocco as a protectorate for centuries, until it became an independent kingdom in 1956.
Spain retained its sovereignty over western Sahara, the enclaves of Sidi Ifni, Ceuta and Melilla and half-a-dozen tiny islands similar to Perejil. Sidi Ifni, on the Atlantic coast, was handed back to Morocco in the early sixties and in 1975 King Hassan, father of the current King Mohammed, marched in with some 200,000 of his subjects in the Green March to seize the mineral-rich western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara) at a time when General Franco was on his deathbed and Spain was in a virtual vacuum and in no position to retaliate.
Ceuta, and Melilla on the Mediterranean coast of north Africa, remain Spanish. Like the British colony of Gibraltar, some 30 km away across the Straits of Gibraltar, the 123,000 inhabitants are a mix of races and creeds, with Catholics, Jews, Hindus and Muslims living in apparent harmony.
They are both garrison cities and a base for the Spanish Foreign Legion, but the fact that they enjoy tax free status makes them popular with tourists from Morocco and Spain. But more recently the arrival of hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants trying to cross to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa has broken the peace and harmony and created tension and occasional outbreaks of violence.
Spain sees no similarities between Morocco's claims over Ceuta and Melilla and its own claim to recover sovereignty over Gibraltar. While it looks on Gibraltar as a colony, it considers Ceuta and Melilla to be Spanish territory which it acquired from Portugal in the 15th century.
Last week, after almost 300 years of wrangling Spain reached a preliminary agreement with the UK to work towards a form of shared sovereignty over Gibraltar, although any agreement must first be approved by the Gibraltarians in a referendum - highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.
It is unclear why Morocco decided on their invasion last week. It could have been a spontaneous gesture which went wrong, by a group of gendarmes who wanted to give an original wedding present to King Mohammed who celebrated his marriage last weekend. But it could also have been an ominous warning that the Moroccans were serious in their claim to recover the enclaves on their own coastline.