José Manuel García-Margallo: "Spain has to follow the current reality on the Sahara issue"
José Manuel García-Margallo, Member of the European Parliament and former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of the Partido Popular, spoke on Capital Radio's Atalayar programme about the crisis between Spain and Morocco following the reception by the Government of the Polisario Front leader, Brahim Ghali, for humanitarian reasons under a false identity in a hospital in Logroño. García-Margallo also spoke about the war between Israel and Palestine in the Middle East.
How do you see the Minsk chapter in Belarus? Because President Lukashenko has been flouting the international community and his own people for several months now
Lukashenko is very directly dependent on Putin. What is happening at the moment is that Russia is pushing Russia, I don't know why, but in the European Union it is becoming increasingly difficult to have a common foreign policy. Now that we are at this Conference on the Future of Europe, I believe that the first thing to note is that enlargement, before having put the house in order, was the wrong choice. It was with the United Kingdom, which never wanted to join and that is why they were in the Free Trade Association, they did not want to have an external tariff and a common trade policy, they wanted to be able to set differential tariffs for the Commonwealth. Moreover, they never wanted to cede competences to common institutions and that is why they created a Free Trade Association in which the barriers between the partners disappear. The second enlargement, very understandable from the point of view of justice, to include those countries that had been under the tutelage of the Soviet Union, was based on an initial misunderstanding that is hindering and will continue to hinder the progress of the European Union, but we must insist on this. Those of us who were inside wanted to make progress in the European integration project and this can only be achieved by ceding or sharing competences with the central institutions, ceding sovereignty. The Eastern European countries came in to reaffirm their national sovereignty, which had been threatened by the Soviet Union, and that explains why we have had this in each and every one of the chapters in immigration, in internal justice, with the infidelities of Poland and Hungary, and now with what is happening in foreign policy in Gaza. The only advantage we have is that Poland and Hungary are the estranged or fractious brothers, who have opposing interests, because Poland is very anti-Russian and Hungary is very pro-Russian. All of that is weighing and in the Middle East it is going to weigh more. Syria, which is the immediate antecedent, was not resolved because what Russia was going to do was not taken into account. I have always been in favour of negotiating with Bashar al-Assad and my argument in the EU Foreign Affairs Council is that you negotiate with the enemy, not with your ally. Moreover, Bashar al-Assad was not going to leave, not least because Russia would not let him fall. Since Russia is not going to leave and we are not going to enter into a conflict with Russia over Syria, the best thing we can do is negotiate. So there was a moment when that was lost, and it has a lot to do with what is happening with Morocco. You cannot threaten if you are not able to honour your word when you threaten. Obama told Bashar al-Assad that, if he used chemical weapons against his people, it would be a red line that would have consequences, and he didn't have them. From then on they won the war, so we have found that Syria is being dominated by Turkey, Russia and Iran, and neither the European Union nor the United States of America has any role to play. Now in Palestine we are at an impasse that has a lot to do with what is happening in Morocco, because Trump's declaration recognising Morocco's sovereignty over the Sahara is linked to Morocco's closer relations with Israel. That's why I don't think Biden is going to change his position.
So far he has not moved a millimetre
He is not going to do so, and Sánchez's hope that Biden would compensate him for Trump's snubs - recognising Morocco's sovereignty over the Sahara without notifying Spain, which is the priority strategic partner, was a huge offence - but Biden has already spoken to thirty-five prime ministers, not including ours.
To what does he attribute this?
Foreign policy in the United States is a very continuist policy. It is one of those long-standing trends. Therefore, they are very predictable and difficult to change. And it is normally a bipartisan policy; since Sánchez arrived, we have distanced ourselves from the major axes of the United States, we have distanced ourselves in Latin America with our continued support for Maduro, and we have distanced ourselves from our positions in the Maghreb; it was obvious that the United States was going to end up recognising Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara, because they do not want to have a state opposite them in the Atlantic, the viability of which is more than debatable.
That Algeria should have such an outlet to the Atlantic, and therefore Russia...
Algeria's weight in the Sahara issue has been overestimated for some time now, and for Algerian politics, in my opinion, the Sahara is a minor issue. Morocco is once again within the African Union. There are 40 countries that are considering establishing consulates in the Sahara, many of them African and Arab, and the Arab countries that are on the western side Emirates or Bahrain. Therefore, Saudi Arabia has given permission for these countries to turn and that is what Sánchez did not understand, that the geopolitical scenario had changed here and Morocco was going to put pressure from that moment on. That is why there was a conflict with Germany so that the European Union would follow in the footsteps of the United States.
Apart from the fact that Trump has hyper-hormonalised the Moroccans, what is the situation with respect to the United States, Spain and Morocco?
In the first interview I had with Hilary Clinton, a long interview that the King gave me, because the United States received us badly, we were heirs to the foreign policy of Zapatero, who had abandoned Iraq without notifying his allies and had gone to Tunisia to say that this was the conduct to be followed by all our allies. I am told that they are seriously considering taking Rota and Morón to Morocco, which would have completely altered the balance in the Strait of Gibraltar. Bearing in mind, moreover, that our welcome in Rabat was not the warmest in the world, because they remembered Perejil, we had to do a lot of jiggery-pokery on both sides. The Defence Cooperation Partnership Agreement with the United States was amended to make what was a temporary presence permanent and to allow more troops than there were at the time, and thank God that move was aborted. But it is true that the United States has a temptation with Morocco, among other things because Morocco was the first country to recognise the United States of America, which may seem like a joke to us, but to them. When the world was divided in two, the great ally of the United States was Morocco, while Algeria was on the side of the Soviet Union, which is why Algeria's support for the Sahara at that time was significant.
That is what I was referring to as Russia's or the Soviet Union's eventual ambition for an outlet to the Atlantic, something the United States and the European Union have always flatly refused to do
Russia has always felt disrespected in the West, and especially in the United States. Russia is an empire that has not been through the mourning and all they demand is respect. It is true that it has a population of no more than 300 million and a GDP the size of that of the Netherlands, but it still has a tremendous external capacity and continues to act like an empire, especially Putin. What they maintain, and there is an underlying issue here, is that when the CAME countries collapsed and the Soviet Union was dissolved, there was a promise that the West would not advance its borders, neither economically nor militarily, and both have been broken. The first thing that was done was to bring the satellite countries of the Soviet Union into the European Union and above all to bring them into the Atlantic Alliance. When Putin arrived, they believed that the situation remained the same and they entered Georgia, and that is when Russia reacted with the Ukrainian movement. Ukraine was invited to sign the association agreement with the European Union and Putin called them and said OK, if you want to enter into an association with the European Union you become a country like all the others in Russia's eyes, that is, you are going to pay for the energy you have from Russia at the market price, Ukraine panicked and didn't sign. Ukraine was part of the Russian Federation in the Soviet Union and it was a gift from Khrushchev to Ukraine, it didn't matter because, in the Soviet Union, it was like changing the street sign, but whoever was in charge there remained the same. The principle, the nationalities, was imposed by Lenin, but it was administered by Stalin, who was the nationalities committee. And those who made a mistake and thought they were serious, they were put into the Red Army, and now we don't know how to get out because we must have relations with Russia. The European Union must have relations with Russia if it wants to gain geographical dimension and population. And we are the union. In 40 years' time it will stagnate, while the rest will grow. In terms of economic growth, the real forecasts, not those made by Sánchez, are that the world will grow by 3.1 per cent and we will grow by 1.4 per cent.
As someone who knows Lavrov, do you think he humiliated Josep Borrell at that famous press conference a couple of months ago?
Personally, I advised Borrell not to go because Lavrov is a professional as the top of a pine tree and it was obvious that he wanted to humiliate the European Union.
Above all, bringing up the Navalny issue at a press conference in the presence of Lavrov was putting the ball in his court
The whole core group was deciding for four hours while Lavrov and Kerry were in the next room. Lavrov is a tough negotiator and he never broke a word to me. When they got me into the mess with Evo Morales' plane, he told me no, so I told him that we had to let Evo Morales through, otherwise we'd ruin the Ibero-American Summit. He never fooled me.
So, Minister, is Morocco's attitude now to be blamed solely on the Polisario Front leader, what is behind all this?
It is Morocco that is responsible here, which has used its children as a weapon of war, just as it did during the Green March a few years ago. But the Spanish government has been clumsy. It has failed to read the signals of displeasure it was sending out in Morocco and has ignored the change in the international context. These three things are what happened. The Spanish government's blunders are firstly that Pedro Sánchez did not make his first visit outside Rabat, and knowing the King of Morocco and the Moroccan government, that is a snub that cannot be forgiven. The second is a statement by Pablo Iglesias, vice-president of the government, demanding a referendum on the Sahara, which is an expression that disappeared from the United Nations resolutions in 2003, talking about a fair, lasting, mutually acceptable solution that includes the determination of the Sahrawi people, which is a neutral form, because Algeria understands that this is a referendum including independence and Morocco understands that it is a referendum recognising autonomy, which incidentally was passed on to the socialist government in 2007, this autonomy plan. Going back to the referendum, these things are not done, when we are on friendly terms with Morocco, we do not talk about it. Finally, bringing Ghali, who is the president of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, who also has cases pending before the courts, would have made it extraordinarily easy to tell Algiers that we cannot bring him because we are going to create a mess with the Polisario and Algeria. At a lunch that González Laya invited all the ministers to some time ago, I told him that you are going to achieve something that none of your predecessors have achieved, to make Algeria, Morocco and the Polisario angry at the same time. None of us had achieved that, because we have already achieved it. Rabat sends a sign of its displeasure by suspending the high-level meeting scheduled for 2020. From then on, the communiqués we have referred to come and immigration increases. The thermometer for relations with Morocco is immigration. And since Pedro Sánchez has been in power, immigration has increased. Data from 2020 over 2019, immigration from Morocco increased by 74.5% to the Canary Islands by 477% and this year it is going to get even worse. At this time last year there were 40 boats, now there are 72 in the Canary Islands. And they are claiming waters, waters that we consider to be Spanish waters because they are Canary Islands, which are not being talked about either. They have not read the international context, after Trump's statement it was obvious that they were going to put pressure on all the European states and they already have an incident with Germany.
Why is it important to talk about this?
Because this is not over. We are going to see how they solve the Ghali issue, because if he comes out with a false passport, this is a crime, it will get worse. If he goes to the hearing, it will get worse, and then there is something else, which is a ruling by the Court of Luxembourg on the territorial scope of the agreements on agricultural and fishing products with Morocco. If the Court says that the Sahara does not apply because it is not Moroccan territory, the pressure on the European Union will increase again and it will be the weakest link in the chain. I have never seen one foreign minister contradict another; in diplomacy, you just don't do that. In my time we had very serious conflicts. One August 2014 I came across a Guardia Civil patrol boat standing on a sports boat in the waters off Ceuta and a man who was the King of Morocco came out and called me Jorge Fernández and told me that the King of Morocco had been arrested. I didn't even have time to speak to the president, I called the King, and I told him: "Sir, we have a problem, we have to sort it out". I immediately spoke to the Foreign Minister because they did what they are doing now, the Gendarmerie started whistling and looking the other way and we had 10,000 or 15,000 migrants in Tarifa. Look, there was another one one morning when I came across the island of land of the Rock of Al Hoceima, which is 50 metres from the coast 81 emigrants, a military zone, there was no problem of repatriation, but if you brought them to Ceuta, Melilla or the mainland we would have found ourselves like in America when they say they set foot in the United States and there is no way to send them back. Well, I called the minister and I said hey, look, I have this problem in Perejil. And he told me very seriously that I don't know what nationality they are or how they got to the island. So I told him that they were not because of the colour of Bilbao and he said to me very seriously, "What about sovereignty? Don't worry, take them away tonight and tomorrow we will recover sovereignty and they will do it for you, but they could not have done it for you.
The information I have is that King Mohamed VI has no sympathy for Pedro Sánchez because in 2011 he signed a devastating Democratic Party report. So, when Pedro Sánchez does not make his first trip to Morocco, it is because the King does not receive him. And it takes six months because a lot of people intervene so that the King of Morocco receives Pedro Sánchez. And then Trump appeared and solved the problem and the COVID justified everything.
Sánchez's popularity in Morocco is like his popularity in the Salamanca neighbourhood and Madrid, more or less.
If you were a minister now, because Macron, for example, has opened a headquarters in Dakhla. The great port of Dakhla, the logistical port of Tangiers on the Atlantic, is going to be built by a French company, so we can already sense the steps that France is going to take, and the United Kingdom also seems to be following in the wake of the American decision. But Spain, if you were a minister, what would you have to do?
In order not to compromise anyone, I represent myself, and sometimes I don't even take decisions unanimously. I think Spain needs to consider its position on the Sahara in the new geopolitical context, after the United States' declaration and the foreseeable moves by European countries. The traditional thesis, I insist, until 2012, was a referendum on self-determination. Now, there is talk of a just, lasting and mutually accepted solution that includes self-determination for the Sahrawi people, all of that together. Every time we saw that resolution in the United Nations, I went to Rabat and Algiers and said this is what Spain is going to maintain. Morocco is never going to accept a referendum that includes independence, and if it did, we would have an additional problem, which is who votes, the famous problem of the census. The only neutral census that exists is a Spanish census from 1975, which spoke of 70,000 Saharawis. Various calculations have been made on that basis, and there are many problems. Do the Moroccan settlers who arrived in the Sahara after 1975 vote or not? Baker said yes, as long as they arrived before 1996. Secondly, the Saharawis in Tindouf, Algerian territory, number 170,000, according to CIA estimates. How do you know who really comes from Western Sahara or whether they come from Mauritania, Algiers or whether they are nomadic peoples? Such a census is very complicated. Thirdly, is a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic viable, independent, economically, politically, or does it run the risk of becoming a failed state with many problems? Because I suffered a terrorist attack, two Spanish aid workers and an Italian aid worker were kidnapped. The official version is that it was in the Polisario camps and they were sold two or three times to different organisations in Mali. What we need to do is to get the United Nations to think about a political solution. Maybe they have to vote for something, but maybe it has to be an internationally guaranteed political autonomy, guaranteeing the right of return, which is what is really important for them. And they win by guaranteeing them a share in the territory's wealth. I have been to Tindouf twice. The sacrifice that the Sahrawi people are being subjected to is tremendous. Does it make sense to make a sacrifice that has no chance of materialising? When Algeria's support will always be less.
What is wanted in Dakhla is reunification with families in Tindouf. The pandemic has put the two countries in a difficult economic situation. In Algeria, moreover, the popular movement has achieved a new constitution, there are elections, so the old generations of the military are disappearing and negotiations can take place. The Polisario Front has been left out of the game, because when I am accused of defending the cause of Morocco, what I am defending is the cause of the Saharawis, not the Polisario Front, which seems to me to be a clearly improvable organisation, whose leaders are abroad and are not in Tindouf. The issue there is with those human beings who live in subhuman conditions.
I don't think anyone who has been on the outside is going to recognise that. But no one would say that they believe that the solution of an independent state is viable.
But within the socialist government, under pressure from Podemos, because Podemos is looking the other way on the issue of the hot returns
Well, there is this crisis, I insist on not seeing the positive gestures, the lack of understanding of the signals that were coming from Morocco, that they were irritated, the lack of knowledge that the international context has changed. When circumstances change, I change my mind. We have to adapt to the new context. This is an issue that we have to start thinking about resolving, otherwise it will become entrenched and we already have it. The conflict in Palestine has been going on since 1948 and there is no solution in sight. So, when these problems become entrenched, the population suffers.
Would the emeritus king have contributed to resolving this situation?
And the current one. When I had the incident in Ceuta, the person I called was the current king, Felipe VI.
Perhaps I have not phrased the question correctly. Do you miss that possible mediation that King Juan Carlos could have been carrying out?
Of course, it is missed. But you can't attribute that to the King not doing it, if the Government doesn't ask the King to do it. If you have an ace up your sleeve, such as the Spanish crown's relations with the Alawi crown, and you decide not to play it, then it is the government's decision, but I don't think it is the smartest thing to do if you are trying to solve the problem. If you have it at your disposal, use it, of course. There are 800,000 Moroccans in Spain. But Spain has assets that we cannot ignore. Spain is the first client of Morocco's first supplier. It is the third largest investor after France and Luxembourg. Luxembourg does not really count because it is not known where these investments come from. The European Union is Morocco's largest development partner, and in the fight against terrorism, we have troops in Mali, so that the Sahel does not destabilise. But there is more: there is a group in Morocco and in Spain called Justice and Charity, which denies the sacredness of the monarch and is clearly republican, and we are collaborating with them to ensure that this does not get out of hand. Morocco cannot and should not exaggerate on this issue either.
That is why you are demanding, all we are asking for is an explanation as to why you have received the leader of the Polisario Front here
It is because of Algeria. Look, it is explained to Algeria that we can't bring Ghali here because if we bring him here he might be forced to answer to the audience. So we are going to have a problem with the Polisario and a problem with you. And Algeria understands this perfectly well.
Won't someone have to answer to that?
That's what I think. We were talking about whether the PP's proposal was good or not. I would ask for a Foreign Affairs Committee behind closed doors, if the information is to raise awareness and for all the telegrams to be seen, because the ambassadors send you a telegram every morning about what is happening, the telegrams that have come from Rabat, the ambassador is magnificent, Ricardo Diaz José, who has been out of the race for a year, and from Algiers and see who has taken the decision to bring Ghali knowing that he has accounts with the courts, not warning Rabat in an incendiary atmosphere that this could be the explosion because it had happened with Germany.
I will go a little further. Someone from the government or someone from the Spanish customs can be prosecuted because this man has entered under a false name
I think that at the entrance the policeman can say that he did not know. The first step is that he didn't know, but now they know. Then we have to see how to get out. The Polisario Front's number two, who was in the San Pedro Hospital in Logroño, told journalists that Brahim Ghali is not willing to give himself up.
